Lucie Taquin – Sexuality and Leadership How to Use Sexuality As a Leadership

This article presents the findings of the ‘Sexuality and Leadership’ seminar organised by Professor Pierre Casse at the University Paul Cezanne Aix-Marseilles on 16 June 2009. The event was a Cezanne Seminar on Change and Innovation in Perspective, part of the MBA programme on Change and Innovation. Professor Casse invited the authors, sexologists by training and trade1, to design and run it. The objectives of this seminar had been established as follows:

– To review some current concepts and practices of sexuality today (based on research)

– To identify and debate connections between sexuality and leadership

– To highlight the importance of differences regarding beliefs and cultural values (both the seminar and this article are quite typical of a western way of looking at both sexuality and leadership).

The workshop began with a brief theoretical presentation of ‘the most current issues in sexuality today’. We explained the understanding that we have, as sexologists, of concepts such as seduction, desire, performance and pleasure. We then asked the seminar participants to find connections between the concepts just presented and leadership. In other words, we challenged them to use sexuality as a metaphor. The main idea was to see if the approach could lead to new ways of, or ideas for, looking at leadership.

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