[Vwoolf] Sore thumb?

[Stuart N. Clarke]

I did an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies at UNSW, but actually it was in Women’s Studies.  I was, of course, the only male in the programme.  I didn’t experience any overt hostility, but I was told by one of the academics that there had been a certain amount of shouting in the corridor about my being allowed to do the course.

Stuart

From: Matthew Cheney 
Sent: Saturday, April 22, 2017 5:35 PM
To: vwoolf at lists.osu.edu 
Subject: [Vwoolf] Jean Kennard

Hello Woolfians,

[snip]

I was the only male in the course, which perplexed and even angered some of the students, at least one of whom saw me as an interloper, but it only got commented on openly toward the end of the course, when for some reason we were discussing how and why certain writers get seen as "for" certain readers -- why, Prof. Kennard asked, might it be that only one man signed up for the course? We talked about other writers (I remember Alice Walker's name coming up, and I said I also loved a lot of her work, which just proved to the other students, I suppose, what a gender anomaly I was!) and about how we as readers find our way into different types of texts. Why are we attracted to certain writers and not others? How do our gender expectations affect our reading? How are we situated within our experiences as people and readers? The ideas from that conversation stuck with me and affected a lot of my later academic work.
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