THE GRAMMAR OF VIOLENCE AND THE ETHICS OF INVENTION IN WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP TRAJECTORIES

Abstract

Institutional violence directed at women in leadership positions does not appear as an exceptional event, but rather as an ordinary grammar that shapes behaviors, regulates affect, and delimits who is permitted to exercise authority in public and organizational contexts. Moral harassment, symbolic microaggressions, and persistent practices of disqualification operate as normalization devices that sustain patriarchal rationality even in environments that proclaim neutrality, meritocracy, or gender equality. This article examines how such a grammar functions and how women develop responses that exceed disciplinary expectations by elaborating an ethics of invention: subtle, relational, and ethical micropolitical practices that transform vulnerability into strength, care into method, and alliances into strategies of resistance. Drawing on thinkers such as Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and Angela Davis, the article argues that the transformation of injury into language, the creation of networks of solidarity, and the persistence in occupying positions of authority constitute inventive practices capable of unsettling the institutional regime of symbolic violence. This approach clarifies how institutions produce gendered subjectivities and why particular forms of women’s authority remain subject to intensified scrutiny and distrust. The article therefore contends that women’s leadership trajectories not only reveal the contradictions embedded in contemporary institutions but also illuminate insurgent forms of power capable of reshaping modes of coexistence, decision-making, and meaning within organizational life.