Chapter 14: The Margin as a Space of Resistance: Transforming Gendered Leadership Through Popular Film

This chapter uses popular films from the last 30 years to explore how executive women—outliers in the organizational hierarchy—are portrayed in organizational spaces. Starting from the premise that popular culture is a powerful tool for management and leadership learning, the chapter explores protagonists’ spatial practices as these are used to subvert, intentionally or unintentionally, patriarchal structures. Findings show that, although on the surface organizational spaces marginalize women, certain practices can hybridize the workspace and transform the margin into a space of radical openness, thus offering new potential for how leadership is practiced by women in organizations. In this sense, popular film itself can also serve as a site for resistance and subversion.