Gendering English Studies: Masculinity and Women’s Writing

This essay 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 which has been ‘professionalised’ 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 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’