This thesis examines how women perform as leaders within male-dominated professions, including law, business, politics, the military, and the academy. In studying women's performances in terms of the corporeal and spectacular, the investigation seeks to understand how particular women enact leadership through their materiality within specific times and places. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's (1988) theorising of the processes of 'becoming', woman-as-leader is studied as an entity that passes from one incomplete and multiple assemblage to another, rather than as a singular 'developing' identity. The research is located within and between the paradoxes that complicate the performances of leadership for women. One key paradox serving as a rationale for this investigation is that, while 'equity' has become a truism of contemporary leadership, it is clear from formal reports (for example, the 2002 Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA) report), that many women continue to be marginalised and under-represented as leaders and senior managers. Moreover, those few women who have achieved success often acknowledge themselves as both legitimately and differently - and sometimes awkwardly, located as leaders in the everyday enactments of their work. The investigation of leadership within and between such paradoxes is problematic for a neo-liberal order of thinking, and even for socially critical theory, because of the assumptions that modernist literature makes about women's struggle for political legitimacy (ie, a narrative of progress, emancipation, and/or linear cumulative historical development). It is for this reason that the conceptual tools used in this study are drawn from post-feminist and post-structuralist theory. Such theorising refuses literal categories in favour of 'ironic categories' (Rorty, 1989) where two apparently oppositional ideas are understood to be both necessary and true. To explore women 'becoming' leaders (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988), 'woman-as-leader' is interrogated using Jean François Lyotard's (1984) notion of 'performativity,' Mary Russo's (1994) theorising of the embodied spectacle of 'the female grotesque', and Richard Rorty (1989) and Donna Haraway's (1991) insistence on partiality, doubt, and the importance of 'undoing' the fixity of modernist categories - in this instance, for women. One ironic category of importance to the study is Haraway's theorising of a 'cyborgian identity', a technological assemblage that is part-human/part-machine. This allows acknowledgement that women leaders inhabit realms beyond the boundaries imposed by the same/difference, human/machine, present/past, and real/virtue binaries. Using these tools, the performances of a number of women leaders is examined in an empirical study that focuses on a few individual women located in male-defined and male dominated settings. The empirical work has two key components. First, it provides a reading of three moments in time where a female individual dys-appears (Leder, 1990) in the public gaze, erupting as a unique spectacle in spaces that are both enabling and constraining. It foregrounds the unique complexities of three public performances in which women made a spectacle of themselves, while the analysis refuses to either celebrate the individuals involved, or to bemoan the conditions under which they did so. The analysis demonstrates the value of re-thinking leadership in terms of its complexity for the female as embodied public 'performer'. It then moves on to focus specifically on the (embodied, spectacular) tactics being deployed by women leaders in contemporary professional work. This analysis is located in the professions of law, business, politics, the military, and the academy. The data-as-evidence emerging from the analysis show women leaders to be both and neither enacting and troubling 'proper' (ie, traditional and/or known) leadership conventions. The analysis provides a reading of how, through certain tactical shifts, women work to 'de-territorialise' both the 'forms of content' and 'forms of expression' (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988) constituting leadership performances. It makes visible the tactical assemblages these women deploy, and the ways in which such tactics separate, combine, and compound the same/difference, equality/inequality, either/or binaries. The specific tactical manoeuvres for achieving legitimacy in the public gaze cluster around four identifiable ironic categories: (i) legitimate cross-dressing (ii) assertive defence (iii) proper blasphemy, and (iv) humanly-machinic. When taken together, the two components of the empirical study compel a re-theorising of 'woman-as-leader' as both insider and outsider, an entity engaging in the on-going work of diss-assembling and re-assembling a leaderly self. Woman is shown 'to be not one, not multiple, but multiplicities', simultaneously (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988). This re-theorising provides a more nuanced account of women leaders working to maintain legitimacy, credibility, and propriety as leaders than mainstream theorising of leadership and management currently allows.

There appears to be little doubt about the nature of the relationship between the fashion model and the young girl in contemporary Western culture. Dominant literature, emerging from medico-psychological and feminist research, situates the model as a disorderly influence, imbued with the capacity to infect and, hence, distort the healthy minds and bodies of 'suggestible' young girls. Opposing these perspectives is a smaller, more recent body of literature, emerging from post-feminist work that argues that the model-girl relationship is a delightful influence. Thus, the contemporary field of scholarship reveals an increasingly dichotomous way of thinking about fashion model influence: the model influences young girls in ways that are disorderly or delightful, never both. This thesis argues that to assume that the model-girl encounter is 'neatly' disorderly or delightful is shifty at best. It suggests that, in their rush to judge the fashion model as either pernicious or pleasurable, existing literature fails to account for the precision with which young girls know the fashion model. Using poststructuralist theory, the thesis argues that 'influence' may be more usefully thought of as a discursive effect, which may produce a range of effects for better and worse. Following Foucault (1972), fashion model influence is interrogated as a regime of truth about the model-girl encounter, constituted discursively under specific social, cultural and historical conditions. In so doing, the thesis makes different sense of fashion model influence, and questions influence as an independently-existing 'force' that bears down on vulnerable young girls. Drawing on a poststructural conceptual architecture, this thesis re-conceptualises the model-girl encounter as a pedagogical relationship focused on the (ideal) female body. It suggests that the fashion model, as an authoritative embodied pedagogue, transmits knowledge about 'ideal' feminine bodily conduct to the young girl, as attentive gazing apprentice. Fashion model influence is re-interrogated as the product of certain forms of disciplinary training (Foucault, 1977a), with young girls learning a discursive knowledge about how to discipline the body in ways that are properly feminine. Such a perspective departs from the notion that fashion model influence is necessarily disorderly or delightful, and makes possible a re-reading of influence in terms of learning outcomes. A problematic arises conceptualising the fashion model in this way. To consider the model as a 'good' teacher breaches a number of discursive rules for best pedagogical practice in postmodern times: She is not a pedagogue of the mind; she is not student-centred, facilitative, asexual, interpersonally engaged, relational, or authentic. To create a space for thinking differently about the model as a teacher, then, the thesis looks to ancient historical times and places in which female-to-female and body-to-body pedagogies were practised and understood. The first phase of the research project embedded in this thesis defamiliarises pedagogical work using historical texts from ancient Greece. It examines in particular the erotically embodied pedagogical relationships conducted between older, authoritative elite prostitutes known as hetairae, and their younger female apprentices. The discursive rules governing these pedagogical relationships are examined with a view to diagnosing the model-girl encounter in terms of these rules. These rules are then used to interrogate ethnographic data generated through observation of the model-girl encounter in situ in a modelling course, and through focus group interviews with groups of young girls. Working through notions of corporeal embodiment, self as art, desire, discipline, stillness, spectacle, the gaze and the conduct of conduct, the study interrogates the model-girl encounter as a contemporary pedagogical encounter. To avoid reaffirming more traditional binaries, the reading of data is ironic, working within and between binaries such as disorder/delight. Three ironic categories of femininity are produced out of the analysis: unnaturally natural, stompy grace and beautifully grotesque. These categories 'speak' the fragmentation, fissure, contradiction, inconsistency and absurdity that permeate the talk of young girls and model-girl pedagogy in the modelling classroom. Thus, the thesis offers up an analysis of the model-girl encounter that refuses the neatness and uni-dimensionality that characterises existing literature.