It’s a family business!: Leadership texts as technologies of heteronormativity

This article contributes to the recent scholarship in Critical Leadership Studies by tracing several heteronormative logics entangled within contemporary leadership discourse. As a popular and profitable industry, mainstream leadership studies utilize the fields of psychology and business management to support their claims of successful practices. This situates leadership discourse as a natural, objective, and value-neutral science, rendering its inherently biased and exclusionary assumptions and applications largely unexamined from a critical lens. In response, this analysis illustrates how leadership serves as a technology of heteronormativity by describing prominent and interconnected themes in several of the bestselling leadership books in the United States. Using queer and poststructural theoretical frames in conjunction with critical discourse analysis, three themes are analyzed which illuminate how leadership discourses: rely on heteronormative familial logics, use generational paradigms that position leadership within heteronormative time and space, and promote and privilege (hetero)reproduction through ideas of legacy and role modeling. These themes within leadership coalesce to form decidedly heterosexist/heteronormative discursive practices, disrupting the notion of leadership as an ideologically neutral discourse