Teaching Women's Studies to Engineers: Male-Bashing Feminist or Concerned Mother?

The STEM disciplines (sciences, technology, engineering, mathematics) remain male-dominated fields of study and professional careers. Teaching at a university that specializes in these fields means to teach at a white male-dominated institution which did not add women’s and gender studies courses to its curriculum until the arrival of the author, a feminist anthropologist. Following the advice of Paulo Freire to construct teaching as a political process and to introduce knowledge meaningful to the student, the male-dominated women’s and gender studies classroom becomes an extraordinary space where it is not the oppressed majority which might collaborate with the instructor to access and create knowledge, but those (unwitting?) representatives of the powerful sex/gender and racial group.