Women and transgression in the halls of academe

Abstract

The controlling strategies of neo‐liberalism, designed to constitute academics as economic units supporting the designs of government, are contrasted here with the creative and transgressive elements of a more Deleuzian approach to writing that opens things up, that brings thought to life, that makes the familiar, predictable order tremble. The article suggests that neo‐liberalism can never fully capture the creative and joyful subject that it thinks it is creating and controlling. The article is disruptive of the neo‐liberal order—and a refusal of it. It plays with multiple layers of meaning making, using metaphor, images and imagined sounds from opera, a story from collective biography, and interviews with academics to create an engagement with women’s place in academe that is at once intellectual and emotional. At its centre is a synopsis for an opera set in the halls of academe. The article does not negate emotion and embodiment, but rather opens the possibility of decomposing some aspects of our embodied history of inhabiting the male–female binary, as it is lodged in the structures and practices of the academy.

It is impossible to predict what will become of sexual difference—in another time (in two or three hundred years?). But we must make no mistake: men and women are caught up in a web of age‐old cultural determinations that are almost unanalyzable in their complexity. One can no more speak of ‘woman’ than of ‘man’ without being trapped within an ideological theatre where the proliferation of representations, images, reflections, myths, identifications transform, deform … let us imagine a real liberation of sexuality, that is to say, a transformation of each one’s relationship to her body (and to the other body), an approximation of the vast, material, organic, sensuous universe that we are. This cannot be accomplished, of course, without political transformations that are equally radical … What today appears to be ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ would no longer amount to the same thing … But we are still floundering—with few exceptions—in Ancient History. (Cixous, 1986, p. 83)

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Kellie Burns, Peter Bansel and Michael Gottsche for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.