There is little scholarship on how gender impacts the construction of leadership in supposedly leaderless, horizontal social movements. In this study, I expand the concept of leading tasks, to get at the ways in which gender intersects with the critical organizing work of maintaining horizontal movements. Drawing on comparative data from 7 months of fieldwork conducted with two grassroots groups in the French Yellow Vest movement, I argue that horizontal organizing in the Yellow Vests (YVM) functions as a gendered structure which opens possibilities for women to take on important leading tasks: caring management, attentive listening, and superintendence. These analytically constructed, gendered leading tasks point to a tension inherent in horizontality: It creates leeway for women’s participation, while also functioning as a smokescreen for a process where group members reproduce traditional gendered expectations of women to do a “third shift” in organizing, characterized by nurturing and caring for participants and activist spaces. The study documents how women can be disadvantaged by this mode of organization. Thus, the concept of gendered leading tasks contributes to investigating how leadership is a gendered construct shaped by those who enact it, and the social structure that surrounds it.

中文翻译：

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水平烟幕下：黄背心运动中的性别主导任务


关于性别如何影响所谓无领导的横向社会运动中领导力建设的学术研究很少。在这项研究中，我扩展了领导任务的概念，以了解性别与维持水平运动的关键组织工作的交叉方式。根据对法国黄背心运动中两个基层团体进行的 7 个月实地考察的比较数据，我认为黄背心（YVM）中的横向组织起到了性别结构的作用，为女性承担重要的领导任务提供了可能性：关怀管理、细心聆听、监督。这些经过分析构建的、性别化的主导任务指出了水平性中固有的张力：它为妇女的参与创造了余地，同时也充当了一个过程的烟幕弹，在这个过程中，团体成员再现了对妇女的传统性别期望，以在组织、其特点是培育和照顾参与者和活动家空间。该研究记录了女性如何因这种组织模式而处于不利地位。因此，性别领导任务的概念有助于研究领导力如何成为由领导者及其周围的社会结构塑造的性别结构。