Futures and Failures in Feminist Leadership

This chapter is about feminist approaches to academic leadership, as occupying senior positions can be understood as a strategy for institutional transformation. We attend to repetitions in how feminists inhabit and conceptualize leadership. Firstly exploring how both feminism and leadership are positioned in terms of a deferral by which the (potential) feminist leader is encouraged to wait. The future feminist leader is readily denigrated in terms of excess, with feminism as something to be saved-for-later in the career course. Secondly, we consider how leadership is practiced in mentoring as well as formalized in ‘women’s leadership development’ programmes. The former depends upon vital yet devalued feminist labour and can involve sharing feminist strategies for both playing the game and changing the rules; the latter can repeat a deficit model offering women the leadership skills they supposedly lack. Thirdly we look to how feminist leadership is made institutionally recognisable in equality initiatives such as Athena SWAN, asking how feminist leadership is made to count. Throughout we are concerned with the contradictory expectations placed on the feminist leader; as fixer and problem solver responsible for remediating the un-feminist institution? Should the feminist leader embrace the ‘failure’ and contradiction inherent in the role, as subversive and radical potential, or will this simply leave her out of a job and ill-thought of, failing her feminist colleagues?