Gender Roomours I

by Mark Schreiber, Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany

1      Both, conceptions of gender and of space have become prominent categories for critical analysis in almost all of the fields of the humanities and social sciences. From the political impetus of the feminist movements into the academic circles - first through Women's Studies and later broadened by Gender and Queer Studies - the analysis of the intricate and complex relationships between the sexes, be it in on the level of economic, social and political discourses or in literary texts and other forms of cultural production and expression has become one of the cornerstones of critical scholarship today.

2      Notions of space and place, too, have been lifted from the mere passiveness of the given fact as a priori areas where human beings simply happen to exist. Since the 1950s, scholars such as Erving Goffman, Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Edward Said and others have time and again elucidated the fact that space and place are social and cultural products. Human beings - through interpersonal and intercultural contact, communication and miscommunication, battling over or supporting certain political, economic, cultural and social forces - actively contribute to the shaping and production of the very spaces and places they inhabit.

3      The ways and the extent to which we are able to partake in these processes, however, are dependent on the dynamics and relations of power. The fundamental question is: Who am I and how am I positioned in relation to the spaces and places, people and forces around me?

4      Drawing from Fredric Jameson's theory of "cognitive mapping",[1]The concept of "cognitive mapping" was first introduced by Jameson in his seminal essay "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" (1984) and later expanded in "Cognitive Mapping" (1988). The concept is intended to enable individuals as well as groups to make better sense of themselves as subjects in the increasingly complex political, social and cultural spaces they inhabit in the postmodern world. With regard to the experience of postmodern city life, Jameson's concept suggests a "dialectic between the here and now of immediate perception and the imaginative or imaginary sense of the city as an absent totality." (Jameson, "Mapping" 353). In other words and more generally, an individual's self understanding depends on a combination of his or her immediate corporeal experience in the life world as well as the imaginative invocation and reconstruction of all other aspects of this life world, even if they are not part of the subject's immediate corporeal experience. Gerry Smyth starts his exploration of Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination (2001) with a sense that "early twenty-first century Ireland interacts with the imaginative or imaginary sense of a range of spaces that continue to be widely invoked throughout Irish culture" (19). The challenge, Smyth puts forward, would be:

to produce cognitive maps which enable Irish people to locate themselves in relation to both their own local environments and to the series of increasingly larger networks of power which bear upon those environments. (19)

I argue that with Martin McDonagh and Enda Walsh we have two contemporary Irish playwrights who are attempting to do just that.

5      In my paper, I mainly focus on "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" (1996) and "bedbound" (2000). Although set in two entirely different locales, both plays have a number of striking similarities. Apart from a critical assessment of gender and traditional gender expectations,[2]By "traditional gender expectations" I mean the roles and functions usually ascribed to woman and man in a patriarchal system of signification. Challenging these roles (the woman as childbearer and housekeeper taking a subordinate function to the man as head of the household and the family) is a particularly necessary endeavour within the Irish context where these roles and hierarchies and the conflicts evolving from this setup are far from being resolved. they problematise violence, familial and generational conflicts between daughters and their mothers/fathers, placing the characters in inescapable spaces (the country cottage and the walled-in bed respectively), creatively mixing past and present. Both plays center on the question of personal identity and availability of choice that is evidently linked to questions of gender and space. What room is there to move, to break free from the prison of history, to be a 'new' or 'different' woman or man in a 'new' or 'different' country? Furthermore, both plays highlight the importance of a critical re-definition and re-positioning of contemporary Ireland, both urban and rural, and thereby contribute to more far reaching discussions of Irishness and Irish identity at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century.