"I Have the Deck": Power and Style in the Discursive Production of Leadership by Individuals of Marginalized Gender and Sexual Identities in the U.S. Navy

Abstract

In 2011, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was repealed and gay and lesbian service members were allowed to serve openly. In 2016, all occupational specialties throughout the military became open to women. As gender and sexual minorities become more visible throughout the military, specifically leadership roles, how do these individuals perform leadership within a masculine gendered institution? This thesis analyzes leadership practices of gender and sexual minorities in the U.S. Navy through narratives. Extensive research exists in the analysis of leadership and its intersection with gender identity, specifically women. However, research across different fields of inquiry that explores both leadership style and sexual identity are nearly non-existent. The military, considered an arbiter of American masculinity (Disler, 2008), serves as an interesting context to explore leadership styles of people with gender and sexual minority identities. The data consist of fourteen interviews of Naval Officers of diverse gender and sexual identities who attended the U.S. Naval Academy and served as Surface Warfare Officers. I focus on six narratives elicited in the interviews about standing watch as the Officer of the Deck that I refer to as “sea-stories”. Applying a discourse analysis approach and incorporating the theoretical frameworks of intertextuality (Kristeva, 1986), positioning (Davies and Harré, 1990) and social stances and acts (Ochs, 1993),I examine the construction of a leader identity that is necessary to “do leadership”, identifying the creation of intertextual links as a key part of this construction. I then introduce two leadership styles, relationally-oriented and self-oriented, for analyzing leadership performance in narratives. I argue that within the context of the sea story, the participants all maintain the same objective, to ensure the safe navigation of the ship. The manner in which they do so determines their leadership style. The findings suggest that the participants who identify as LGBT convey a relationally- oriented leadership style by depicting achievement as a cooperative effort, most notably by using “constructed dialogue” (Tannen, 2007), in contrast to the heterosexual men who demonstrated self- oriented leadership styles.