Gender Roomours I

Detailed Table of Contents

Editorial

Rob Baum: Navigating the Narrative Space of Women:  Gender and Sick Humour

Abstract: Women's "narrative space" - the authority granted women's stories - exists marginally, as the concept of female story continues to compete with the perceived monopoly of the "master text." "Sick humour," an approved method of publicly reducing subject to object, principally reconstructs its target, or "butt," through the mechanism of gender identification. Exploring the culture and popularity of "sick humour," I critique the means by which sick jokes-which can in some cases effect social change-define the public awareness of three ordinary American women: Christa McAuliffe, Cathleen Webb and Lorena Bobbitt. Assessing the narrative space of these women, whose private tragedies became sensational public domain, we experience how the humour surrounding and confining women replaces their specificity with the saleable and consumable images of other female bodies.

Author's Bio: Rob Baum's research publications include Female Absence: Women, Theatre and Other Metaphors (Peter Lang, 2003) and journal articles on Palestinian ritual, dance, race/gender issues and identity politics; Rob's current book project concerns dramatic representations of the Holocaust. Rob performs in improvisational movement, circus and theatre, and trains disabled practitioners. Her feminist plays feature strong, desirable roles for women: Every Woman's War premiered in Singapore, 2006. Rob chairs the Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies at Monash University and has a clinical practice in Dance Movement Therapy

Lori A. Brown: my mother's spaces transformed

Abstract: Emerging from the desire to document changes in my childhood home, this art project examines gender's impact on this space after the death of my mother. Over the next several years I photographed the house many times. During this period I was in residence at two artist colonies and presented the work in progress. Through conversations with other artists, I received insights proving helpful in the project's development. A series of collage drawings became a part of the project enabling me to synthesize my observations using particular photographs, research and writing I had been doing since the project's inception. The photographs and drawings have been exhibited at Wells College and the Earlville Opera House in Central New York.

Author's Bio: Lori Brown is an assistant professor of architecture at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. Her research and design work examines the relationships between gender and space. Her most current work includes designing a library for the feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation in Fayetteville, New York and researching the space and access of abortion clinics.

Michael Egan: Wrestling Teddy Bears:  Wilderness Masculinity as Invented Tradition in the Pacific Northwest

Abstract: At the turn of the last century, the tale - end of the great period of invented tradition, Americanism was steeped in or preoccupied with the rediscovery of American masculinity - displaced by Civil War and the economic depression and uncertainty of the Gilded Age - the closing of the frontier, and a growing appreciation of outdoor recreation. The result was division over the expansionist tendencies of proponents for war against Spain, continued labor resentment, and a reinvigorated surge of white supremacy. This paper follows an unorthodox avenue to investigate these themes and tensions. In exploring instances of turn-of-the-last-century human encounters with bears in hand-to-hand combat in the Pacific Northwest, I mean to demonstrate that notions of the frontier and environmental determinism constructed a new, wilderness masculinity distinct from changing expressions of urban masculinity.

Author's Bio: Michael Egan is an assistant professor in the History Department at McMaster University, where he specializes in the history of science, technology, and the environment. He is the author of Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism (forthcoming from the MIT Press, 2007).

Katja Kanzler: "To Tell the Kitchen Version":  Architectural Figurations of Race and Gender in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig

Abstract: I propose to engage the spatial dimension of antebellum domesticity by exploring architectural figurations in two texts by African American women authors. This reading, first of all, seeks to challenge prevailing assumption about the antebellum American home as a culturally coherent and cohesive space that finds its conflicts with the world outside rather than within its own. Quite to the contrary, the structures of domestic architecture allow writers to engage complex systems of social ordering, the spatial signification and enforcement of as well as the resistance against socio-cultural hierarchies. In the context of thus interrogating architecture as a system of cultural signification, I focus on the kitchen as the room that most centrally hosts narratives of gender and racial difference.

Author's Bio: Katja Kanzler teaches American Studies at the University of Leipzig. Her current project focuses on complications of 'separate spheres' and separate genres in antebellum women's writing of the kitchen and the factory.

Mark Schreiber: Bedbound Beauty Queens:  Negotiating Space and Gender in Contemporary Irish Drama

Abstract: As concepts of nation and national identity are more and more being questioned in the globalised and transcultural environment of contemporary Ireland, the creative and imaginative potential of drama and theatre takes up a crucial position. The performative quality of drama and its theatrical realisation on the stage allows the genre to constantly oscillate between the imagined spaces and places of the text and the real, social, cultural and political spaces and places of its production and reception. Thus, a critical assessment of how theatre and drama imagines and playfully manipulates what it means to be "male" and "female" in a society that has experienced such tremendous economic, social and cultural transformations in the last decade as Ireland can also productively contribute to the necessary discussions of Irish identity in the 21st century.

Author's Bio: Mark Schreiber is currently completing his PhD thesis on dramatic and cinematic representations and evaluations of Celtic Tiger-Ireland. He has held positions as Research Assistant and Lecturer in American Cultural Studies and co-editor of the Mitteilungsblatt der Deutschen Gesellschaft fuer Amerikastudien. Since 2005 he holds a lectureship in English Literature at Chemnitz University of Technology. His research interests include Contemporary British and Irish Theatre and Drama, British and Irish Film, Cultural Studies and Theory.

Interview: "Every choice we make takes us on a different journey…":  Helen Cooper in Conversation

Abstract: "I want to say that we have so many more possibilities, not just these three. Every choice we make takes us on a different journey leaving behind many parallel might-have-beens..."

Author's Bio: Christina Wald teaches English Literature at the University of Augsburg. Her main research interests are contemporary drama, feminist and gender theory, psychoanalytic theory and filmic adaptations of Jane Austen's novels. Her dissertation on Hysteria, Trauma, and Melancholia - Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama is forthcoming with Palgrave in 2007. Astrid Recker teaches American Literature at the University of Cologne and currently finishes her Ph.D. thesis on Herman Melville. Her fields of interest inlcude cultural studies, poststructuralist theory, postcolonial theory, as well as the interface between literature and science.

Review: Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff Hearn and R. W. Connell, eds. “Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities.” Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005.

Abstract: Edited by leading researchers in the field, Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff Hearn and Robert W. Connell, the collection provides a rich overview of developments within critical men's studies, primarily from a social science perspective, establishing the viability of, and productivity within, the field. The book includes key articles by those researchers who have had a meaningful impact on the development of the studies on men and masculinities, as well competent and interesting articles from newer, yet still accomplished, voices.

Kai Merten (Review): Ina Habermann. “Staging Slander and Gender in Early Modern England.” Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.

Abstract: What makes Ina Habermann's concisely argued and well-written study on early modern slander fascinating reading is not least the fact that she deals with a period just as obsessed as our own with individuality, reputation and social as well as erotic prowess and no less ready to gender these issues. Early modern England differed in many respects from present-day Britain but the problems of self-fashioning and of the husbandry of one's own economic and social position that Habermann examines are not only similar to today's culture of self-realisation but can also be read as an archaeology of contemporary forms of (gendered) subjectivity.

Review: Martina Tißberger, Gabriele Dietze, Daniela Hrzán, and Jana Husmann-Kastein, eds. “Weiß - Weißsein - Whiteness. Kritische Studien zu Gender und Rassismus. Critical Studies on Gender and Racism.” Berlin: Peter Lang, 2006.

Abstract: Weiß - Weißsein - Whiteness. Kritische Studien zu Gender und Rassismus. Critical Studies on Gender and Racism (edited by Martina Tißberger, Gabriele Dietze, Daniela Hrzán, and Jana Husmann-Kastein) is a much-needed collection of German- and English-language essays on Critical Whiteness Studies that combines different disciplinary and thematic approaches to the topic and explores this relatively new field in German academia. The articles - all of them well-structured and of readable length - interrogate a number of important (political) questions: What are the blind spots of German feminism when confronted with its own hegemonic position? Can Critical Whiteness Studies serve as a tool to approach the structural racisms that so are so easily neglected when racism is time and again only equated with right wing extremism and Neo-Nazi brutality? And how can we clarify the fact that race is not something that applies only to racially and ethnically marked people, but has a lot to do with Whiteness and Occidentalism?