ABSTRACT
When I told her the title of this essay, a friend said, ‘You mean when you put lots of ribbons and bows in your hair before you go out and lecture.’ She was, as usual, quite right, as I want to discuss practices of teaching, and to argue against some of the ways in which feminism seems to be appearing in film and media studies classrooms. It is the lurking opposition between the ‘ribbons and bows’ of femininity, and what is entailed in feminist teaching, which structures both this essay and the academic field which I discuss.
