Beyond hegemonic orders and 'happy objects': reimagining women's empowerment and intersectional leadership in the global south

Women's empowerment and leadership scholarship has documented women's exclusion from political, economic, organisational and knowledge institutions in considerable detail. Yet dominant empowerment approaches often treat inclusion as the principal remedy. Women's advancement is consequently positioned as an individual achievement within structures whose underlying relations of power remain largely unchanged. This conceptual analysis asks: How can structural, affective and epistemic accounts of gendered power be integrated to explain how, and under what conditions, women's leadership moves from institutional access towards collective and durable institutional transformation in Global South contexts? Through a theory-synthesis design, the article brings into dialogue Connell and Messerschmidt's multi-scalar account of hegemonic masculinity, Ahmed's critique of the affective politics of happiness and the 'happy object', and Collins's Black feminist standpoint epistemology, particularly the 'outsider within'. Intersectionality operates across these traditions as a cross-cutting analytic. The synthesis identifies three generative relational capacities. Structural diagnosis identifies the institutional mechanisms through which inequality is produced and reproduced. Affective refusal contests emotional expectations that protect unequal arrangements. Situated knowledge mobilisation enables socially positioned experience to become collectively interpreted and institutionally actionable knowledge. Their transformative potential is translated through collective capacity into the institutional reconfiguration of authority, resources, recognition, knowledge standards, accountability and work organisation. Six propositions specify the framework's explanatory pathway. Structural diagnosis redirects action from individual deficits towards institutional mechanisms. Affective sanctions condition whether critique can be expressed and sustained. Situated knowledge gains influence through collective interpretation and institutional connection, while collective capacity enables movement towards institutional reconfiguration. Intersectional distribution determines whether reforms produce structural transformation or selective inclusion. Finally, institutional embedding, durability and recursive feedback determine whether change persists. The South Caucasus is used as a comparative post-socialist boundary illustration to demonstrate the analytical questions the framework generates for gender-just green transitions rather than as a representative Global South case or an empirical test of the framework. The article contributes an integrated, relational and multi-level account of transformative women's leadership. It explains not merely how women enter institutions, but how leadership may alter the conditions through which institutional power is reproduced.