On Bodies,Rhinestones,and Pleasures

Abstract

In this article I review what kinds of emotions might be felt by women who are teaching managers. I counterpoise arguments that women’s bodies are over-determined as motherly or lacking in masculinity, and therefore lack embodied authority, so leading to feelings of inadequacy, fear, and anxiety with the view that there are spaces, modes and moments when women can exceed, or interrupt these interpolations to produce most pleasurable relations. As a way into the debates, I examine ideas drawn from women’s studies on the emotions associated with pleasure—pleasure specifically based on women’s embodied erotics. Arguing that pleasure is not necessarily political resistance, or indeed, unproblematic, I argue that these ideas on pleasure and erotics can be applied to our understanding of women teaching in the management classroom. I conclude that an acknowledgement of some of these pleasures may provide us with a better platform for conceptualizing teaching than simply notions of nurturance, learner-centredness or disembodied rationality.