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".