Not until the late 1990s did the rational/emotional binary embedded in mainstream literature on leadership and management come under challenge. But the early dissolution of the binary drew not from feminist social theory where it had been dismissed since the 1970s, but on the adoption of organisational theory: Hochschild’s (1983) notion of emotional labour and Goleman’s (1995) notion of emotional intelligence. The emotional dimensions of organisational change and leadership are now widely recognised in the leadership and organisational change literature e,g. Leithwood 2006, Hargreaves 2001 and Gronn 2000. The question is how the emotional dimension of leadership is understood through its ‘translation’ into education, and the absence of feminist and sociological theorisations of leadership, pedagogy and emotions that disrupt assumptions e.g. Boler 1999, Nussbaum 2003. This paper will, drawing from a range of empirical studies of leadership and feminist theory, analyse three texts from organisational (Goleman 2002), educational (Beatty 2000) and feminist theory (Zorn, D. and Boler, M. 2007) to analyse the ways emotion and leadership is theorised and mobilised, the gaps and silences, appropriations and marginalisations.