This article addresses the silences and anxieties provoked by the gendering of English Studies as a subject taught by men to women. I reflect on my own experience as a female student and lecturer within a subject that has been ‘professionalized’ by males. The geographical and social context within which I teach — the South Wales Valleys, a post-industrial, post-Devolution area with high male unemployment — offers particular challenges in relation to the teaching of women’s writing. The few male students who take such modules often find their gender made ‘visible’ in ways which can provoke a range of behaviours suggesting anxieties about gender and class in relation to ‘English’.
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