Leading from the Inside Out: An Introduction to Embodied Intersectional Leadership by Michelle Lopez

"Necesitamos teorías (We need theories) that will rewrite history using race, class, gender, and ethnicity as categories of analysis, theories that cross borders, that blur boundaries—new kinds of theories with new theorizing methods. And we need to find practical application for those theories. We need to de-academize theory and to connect the community to the academy… We need to give up the notion that there is a 'correct' way to write theory." — Gloria Anzaldúa, 1990, p. xxv

The Leadership We Were Not Supposed to Have

Let me start by speaking honestly: most leadership theories were not written for us, women of color, or queer, non-affluent people. They were not written for the Chicana who leads her community organization while navigating immigration paperwork, grief, and generational trauma. They were not written for the queer student who walks into a classroom carrying the invisible weight of oppression and still manages to lift everyone around them. They were not written for the Muxerista who refuses to choose between her culture and her queer identity and, in that refusal, creates something entirely new.

The dominant leadership canon, the great man theory, transformational leadership, and even servant leadership emerged from traditions rooted in whiteness, individualism, patriarchy, and capitalism. These frameworks have their uses, but they were not built from our stories, our bodies, or our ways of knowing. They ask us to adapt ourselves to the framework, not the other way around.

What would it look like to build a leadership theory that begins with us?

That question is at the heart of Embodied Intersectional Leadership (EIL), a developing liberatory theory I have been building at the intersection of my scholarship, my community work, and my own life. This essay is an introduction to that theory: what it is, why it matters, and what it asks of those of us who lead from the margins.

Breaking Down the Name

The name Embodied Intersectional Leadership is intentional. Each word carries weight.

Embodied means that leadership begins in the body, not in a boardroom, not in a graduate degree, not in a title. The body holds memory, pain, joy, intuition, and wisdom. Chicana feminist scholar Dolores Delgado Bernal (1998) introduced the concept of cultural intuition: a way of knowing that emerges from lived experience, community memory, and ancestral wisdom. Cultural intuition is the knowing in your gut when something is wrong in a room. It is the way your ancestors move through your instincts. It is the intelligence that lives in places institutions do not know how to measure. Embodied knowing means trusting that our intelligence is legitimate, because it is.

Intersectional draws from Kimberlé Crenshaw's (1989) foundational framework, which revealed that the experiences of those who hold multiply marginalized identities such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability cannot be understood by examining each identity in isolation. Intersectionality is not just an academic concept. For those of us who are Chicanx, Muxerista, Jotería, it is the daily reality of navigating systems that see us in fragments when, in fact, we are whole. EIL insists that leadership must account for the full complexity of who we are and be built on frameworks that already understand that complexity, not ones that must be retrofitted to include us as an afterthought.

Leadership, as EIL defines it, is not a title. It is not power over others. It is a practice: relational, reciprocal, and rooted in community. Uhl-Bien (2006) has theorized that relational leadership emerges in the space between people, not residing in a single individual. EIL takes that further: leadership is not just relational; it is transformational in the deepest sense. It transforms the self, the community, and the conditions that produce harm. It asks: How do you show up each day with authenticity? How do you use your leadership to build people up rather than tear them down? How do you honor the fullness of your own story and the stories of others?

Together, Embodied Intersectional Leadership is a liberatory theory that reclaims and reimagines what leadership can be when it is centered in the lived realities of those who have always led from the margins, from the body, and from the spirit.

The Principles

EIL is built on seven interconnected principles that are a way of being. Embodied Knowing. Leadership begins with the body. This means honoring ways of knowing that are emotional, spiritual, and felt, what Anzaldúa (1987) called conocimiento, the deep knowing that comes from moving through pain and transformation into clarity. Traditional leadership models treat emotion as a liability; EIL treats it as strength. When we feel the weight of our community's grief in our chest and when our intuition speaks before our analysis does, that is leadership intelligence.

Centering Marginalized Epistemologies. The intellectual traditions of Ethnic Studies, Chicanx and Latinx thought, Queer and Jotería Studies, Chicana feminist praxis, Black feminist theory, and Indigenous knowledge systems are not supplements to leadership theory. They are its foundation. EIL does not ask us to add our stories to someone else's framework. The framework is built from our stories.

Resistance as Praxis. Resistance is not only protest. It is healing. It is rest. It is the radical act of refusing to burn out in systems that were not built for our thriving. Our daily acts of self-preservation and community care are not retreats from leadership. They are the practice of it.

Accountability as Transformation. Inspired by Anzaldúa's (1987) teaching that "if I change myself, I change the world," EIL frames accountability not as punishment but as possibility. It demands self-reflection, integrity, and the courage to transform our inner world so that we can transform our communities. This is not self-help individualism. This is the understanding that our inner work is political work.

Ancestral Knowledge. Our leadership is shaped by those who came before us, grandmothers who held families together under impossible circumstances, community elders who carried knowledge in ceremony, and intellectual ancestors who named what we were living before we had language for it. EIL honors ancestors as active participants in our leadership, not historical footnotes.

Community as a Leadership Practice. Leadership is not a solo act. EIL is relational and reciprocal; it insists on leading with people, not over them. Community is not a backdrop for our leadership. It is the heart of it. In Chicanx feminist organizing traditions, the circle is more powerful than the hierarchy. Decision-making is rooted in honesty, embodiment, and collectively held conversation.

Radical Authenticity. EIL calls us to show up as our whole selves. For those of us who have lived in the margins, this is a political act. We have been taught to split ourselves, to leave our Spanglish at the door, and to code-switch until we no longer remember which code is ours. Radical authenticity means reclaiming those fragmented parts. It means leading from the fullness of who we are, not a version of ourselves legible only to dominant systems.

Embodied Intersectional Leadership in Practice

Theory without practice is just another framework sitting on a shelf. So what does Embodied Intersectional Leadership actually look like? It looks like the community organizer who opens every meeting with a check-in, not as a formality but because she understands that people cannot think clearly when their bodies are carrying unprocessed weight, is practicing embodied knowing. It looks like the Chicana department chair who insists that her team's rest and boundaries are non-negotiable and who refuses to model martyrdom as leadership. She is practicing resistance as praxis. It looks like the Jotería educator who brings their whole self into the classroom with their queerness, their language, and their contradictions and, in doing so, gives students permission to do the same. They are practicing radical authenticity. It looks like the nonprofit director who, before making a major decision, asks, "What would my grandmother say?" “What do I know in my body about this?” She is practicing ancestral knowledge. None of these leaders holds a fancy title, yet all of them are transforming their communities from the inside out. EIL asks us to recognize that as leadership and to be intentional about deepening it.

For those ready to begin, here are three entry points: 

• Start with your body. Before your next meeting or difficult conversation, pause. Notice what you are carrying. Name it. That awareness is the beginning of embodied leadership.

• Audit your circles. Who are you leading with? Whose voices are centered in your decision-making? EIL insists that we acknowledge our community as co-creators.

• Name your ancestors. Identify three people, familial, community, or intellectual, whose wisdom shapes how you lead. Write their names down. Call on them. You are not leading alone.

Coyolxauhqui: Leadership as Reassembly

No figure captures the spirit of EIL more completely than Coyolxauhqui. In Mexica cosmology, Coyolxauhqui, the moon goddess, was dismembered by her brother Huitzilopochtli and cast from the sky, her body shattered, her pieces scattered. Yet she remains luminous and present, whole in her fragmentation. Anzaldúa (2015) reclaimed Coyolxauhqui not as a symbol of defeat but as a metaphor for the creative, courageous work of making meaning out of rupture, which she called the Coyolxauhqui imperative: the necessity of reassembling ourselves after being broken by systems, relationships, and histories that did not hold us. EIL draws on this same interpretation. Leadership from the margins is not leadership despite our brokenness, it is leadership through it. When we have been fragmented by racism, misogyny, homophobia, poverty, and colonial systems that told us we did not belong, the act of reassembling ourselves toward wholeness is itself a leadership act; it is sacred, it is courageous, and it makes us capable of creating spaces where others can do the same.

Coyolxauhqui also holds an important truth about the nature of EIL: it is not a theory of arrival; it is a theory of practice. We are always in process, always gathering pieces, always becoming. Leadership, in this framework, is not a destination. It is the ongoing, daily commitment to showing up whole enough to move forward and humble enough to know we are not done.

Why This Theory, Why Now

We are in a moment of profound rupture. Old leadership models are failing, and in this moment, the communities who have always led from the margins, Chicanx, Black, Indigenous, Queer communities of color, are being asked to do even more with even less. Dominant leadership development does not serve these communities well. It asks people who have survived systems of harm to perform leadership in the style of those who built those systems. It centers resilience as an individual trait rather than a structural demand. It mistakes endurance for strength and silence for professionalism.

EIL offers something different, it says: your body is not a liability, your community is not a crutch. Your ancestors are not a distraction; your healing is not a detour from leadership, it is leadership, and our communities need you to lead from all of it.

An Invitation

This theory is not finished. True to Anzaldúa's charge, EIL refuses to calcify into something that must be applied correctly. It is a living framework, one that grows as I do, that makes room for contradiction and complexity, for joy and grief, for the sacred and the political.

I offer it here as an invitation to Chicanx scholars and community leaders, to Muxerista practitioners and Jotería educators, and to everyone who has ever led without being recognized as a leader, to try it on, to push it, and to add to it from your own experience and your own ancestors.

Because this work is not just theoretical. For me, it is deeply personal; it is for my ancestors, for the generations of my family who could not fully breathe, who were just trying to survive. It is for those of us now in positions to do more than survive to lead toward wholeness.

That is the invitation of Embodied Intersectional Leadership. Lead from the inside out. Reassemble yourself toward wholeness and create space for others to do the same.

References

Anzaldúa, G. (Ed.). (1990). Making face, making soul/Haciendo caras: Creative and critical perspectives by feminists of color. Aunt Lute Books.

Anzaldúa, G. (2007). Borderlands/La frontera: The new mestiza (3rd ed.). Aunt Lute Books.

Anzaldúa, G. (2015). Light in the dark/Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting identity, spirituality, reality (A.L. Keating, Ed.). Duke University Press.

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167.

Delgado Bernal, D. (1998). Using a Chicana feminist epistemology in educational research. Harvard Educational Review, 68(4), 555–582.

Uhl-Bien, M. (2006). Relational leadership theory: Exploring the social processes of leadership and organizing. The Leadership Quarterly, 17(6), 654–676.