ABSTRACT
This chapter offers queer reparative readings of the impetus to encourage more women to enter higher education leadership. It interrogates heteronormativity as the unmarked norm and primary mode of citation embedded in much of the gender and leadership scholarship. The authors discuss how leadership is an ideological project, amplifying difference, invariably associated with gendered intelligibility, classed aesthetics, and embodied subjectivities and markers. Leadership has become a project of desired order and normality, marking individual and professional success and masking privilege by invoking meritocratic narratives of exceptionality. However, its potent affective and values contract; high visibility, and performance of authority and conformity, means that it is not always an object of desire for many members of socially excluded groups. Drawing on empirical data from South Asia and Finland to inquire which norms are invoked in the identification of potential and in the desire for or experiences of higher education leadership, this chapter includes consideration of concepts such as chronormativity and neuroliberalism, and the binary logics that have emerged in the pandemic crisis leadership, for example essentialised and socio-politically decontextualised discourses about the effectiveness of women leaders. The chapter concludes that queerness is about not settling for the present toxicities and ossifications, but can include looking beyond the political impasse of the here and now to a different set of futurities.
