Resistance Is Not Futile: Liberating Captain Janeway from the Masculine‐Feminine Dualism of Leadership

. . . the boundary between science‐fiction and social reality is an optical illusion’ (Haraway, 1990, p. 191) My underlying purpose in this article is to uncover the way in which research on leadership has been constrained by a reliance on the categories male‐female and/or masculine‐feminine for theorizing and for empirical work. I argue that both gender and leadership are caught within what Judith Butler calls the heterosexual matrix and that this has significant repercussions on leaders and leadership discourse. I use the character of Captain Kathryn Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager as a case study. I begin by analysing her leadership on the television series. I then perform a similar analysis of Janeway as she is represented in a text that subverts her gender by queering her character. I compare the two Janeways and the effect that the construction of each one's gender has on her leadership. In the conclusion I discuss ways in which we can use this analysis to move towards fluidity in the theorizing and practice of both gender and leadership.