This essay is about resistance, mine and my students', and about the angered and impassioned writing that arises when texts challenge the ideologies of readers. It's been two years now since I taught the particular section of freshman English that gives rise to my story and my writing. course was the second semester of Northern Illinois University's two semester freshman sequence, a course that emphasizes documented writing, the sort that baptizes students into academic discourse. My course was thematically organized and designed to sensitize students to some of the larger problems in our culture; in fact, we were looking at institutions of all sorts-education, religion, politics, and so on. I should say that this sort of ideological consciousness-raising is very much part of our faculty's concern; ours is a largely blue-collar student body where white suburban students meet inner-urban ethnic diversity, sometimes for the first time. And so I felt that having a thematic section on The Status of Women was a good and strong part of my syllabus. class had read three essays in this unit, and after minimal discussion and minimal direction, they adjourned to the computer lab to write their readings of one of the essays. I asked them to react in writing for several pedagogical reasons, the first of which is purely pragmatic-I wanted the class to begin to compose at the computer terminal rather than to transfer handwritten text to disk. Second, I wanted them to interact with the text, to cite it, to struggle with it, to read in another way than they may have been accustomed to reading. Third, I wanted their writing to produce reading that would subvert their assumptions about gender roles, that would allow them to sort out what is biological from what is gendered.

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