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’. (shrink)