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Troubling Intersectionality for Visible Leadership

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The Palgrave Handbook of Educational Leadership and Management Discourse

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Abstract

Foucault’s archaeological framework helps establish certain historical conditions of leadership that challenge intersectional leadership possibilities. Historically, a leadership that follows a “one size fits all” epistemology grounded in White male criteria has led to glaring problematics with leadership that marginalizes various minority groups. This chapter highlights a troubling situation that compromises leadership theory’s evolution to fit a globalized world in the twenty-first century – a status quo within leadership discourse that highlights gender neutrality and thus disregards the experiences of women in the margins. Intersectionality theory is grounded in a post-structural, feminist critique that challenges the epistemology of leadership theory and addresses areas that merit theoretical expansion. Views framed from a feminist intersectional perspective serve as an intellectual counter to combat the marginalized representation of women of color within the canon of leadership. By tracing the intellectual history of intersectionality theory using Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge framework, a dialectic discourse between intersectionality and educational leadership epistemologies begin to identify the space where the two bodies of knowledge intersect and the conditions that make this possible.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Port Moody, BC, Canada

    Michèle Schmidt

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  1. Michèle Schmidt
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Correspondence to Michèle Schmidt .

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Schmidt, M. (2022). Troubling Intersectionality for Visible Leadership. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Educational Leadership and Management Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39666-4_118-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39666-4_118-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-39666-4

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