Insubordinate
12 New Archetypes for Women Who Lead
Insubordinate is an optimistic self-help book for modern women who want to bridge the gap between literary examples of women’s power and the needs of their own working lives.
Drawing on global leadership knowledge, Jocelyn Davis’s self-help book Insubordinate encourages feminist leadership and addresses international myths about women.
Using the elemental wheel and twelve archetypes as its metric, Davis explores the values of women’s archetypes within leadership roles: Mama Bears are loving; Jesteresses utilize joking manners; Master Maids can wield the qualities of differing archetypes at will. The book encourages women leaders to play to their strengths to succeed.
Throughout, the book reengages centuries-old myths and legends with feminist criticisms and viewpoints. For example, it reclaims the story of Medea and Jason to show how Medea fulfills the classic Witch archetype but also to say that she is blunt and ruthless in the best ways. The book also reshapes the story of Scheherazade in The Thousand and One Nights, showing how she used shrewd storytelling to avoid her own beheading while changing the mind and heart of a powerful man. Such familiar stories act as encouraging reminders throughout the book, suggesting that not all stories are patriarchal and that earnest feminist messages wait to be unearthed in stories that all people know well but that can be better understood in a new light.
To make its concepts actionable, the book reads its retold myths and legends against the stories of real women who have succeeded in spaces once dominated by men. Thus, a story about a daughter who gouges out her eyes and cuts off her hands for a father who didn’t respect her is juxtaposed to the story of a nurse in the psychiatric ward whose empathy knows no bounds.
Still, despite the book’s encouraging framework, it is itself limited by the strictures of gender binaries. The book addresses problems that are prevalent in corporate America, but it does so in a way that reifies gendered dynamics—that men are in power and women are their subordinates. Indeed, it takes for granted the very power struggles that it seeks to confront, even as it encourages women to break beyond their preassigned roles, as when it celebrates the Empress as being “the most manlike” of all of the archetypes. The conviction with which it works to help women be true to themselves is thus limited.
Insubordinate is an optimistic self-help book for modern women who want to bridge the gap between literary examples of women’s power and the needs of their own working lives.
Reviewed by
Addissyn House
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
