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.