Playfulness; Pleasure

In the formal settings of universities, all academics regulate themselves constantly, including how and when they laugh. This paper considers the matter of pleasure and women's scholastic and pedagogical work, and how it has come to be understood. The paper explores the idea that pleasure is taken "within reason, " drawing on Michel Foucault's (1985) work to examine the relationship between feelings such as pleasure and modes of rationality. It then moves to situate pleasure within a western historical tradition, noting how pleasure-as-fun has been framed outside bourgeois traditions of conduct, including subversive traditions. Carnival is examined more precisely as a site of fun whose remembering could be productive for women in the academy. Mary Russo's "The Female Grotesque " (1994) is used to elaborate this point. The fact that fun so often eludes feminism as an academic performance is then explored more fully using two exemplars from feminist writing. Also the author comments on Camille Paglia's (1995) ide