Editorial
1 Gender Roomours I is the first of two consecutive issues of gender forum to examine the intersection of gender and space. The five contributions featured in Gender Roomours I explore various spaces from a gendered perspective, engaging with the narrative space granted women in sick humour, the feminine spaces of the own childhood home, the frontier and wilderness masculinity in the Pacific Northwest, fictional representations of domestic architecture, as well as settings of confinement discernible within contemporary Irish Drama.
2 Taking its cue from the sick jokes cropping up after civilian Christa McAuliffe's death in the Challenger tragedy, Rob Baum's "Navigating the Narrative Space of Women: Gender and Sick Humour" is an assessment of the narrative space granted women in public discourse. In her analysis of the humorous public appropriation of the private tragedies of Lorena Bobbitt, and Cathleen Crowell Webb, Baum exposes how in both cases female sexuality appeared as "violable territory" and argues that as spectacles these private tragedies became public sites to be explored and traveled like theme parks, yet which the women were barred from navigating themselves.
3 In answer to Luce Irigaray's call for an altered perception and re-conception of space-time as a means of thinking through sexual difference, Lori A. Brown's art project "my mother's spaces transformed" explores the changes that her childhood home underwent after the death of her mother. Documenting these changes with the help of photographs, Brown seeks to recover some of the feminine spaces of her home that were erased and distorted after her mother's death in a series of large-scale collage drawings. These drawings synthesize the observed changes at the same time that they reclaim some of the effaced feminine spaces by creating new spatiotemporal configurations.
4 Michael Egan's contribution, "Wrestling Teddy Bears: Wilderness Masculinity as Invented Tradition in the Pacific Northwest," makes a case for the integration of natural space as a critical concept within gender studies. Recounting various narratives of bear wrestling, the article not only foregrounds how our notions of nature as either wilderness or "Mother Nature" are gendered differently, but also how the perpetuated anecdotes of men's fight against "wild beasts" helps to ensure an image of "superior" frontier masculinity that differs from but also complements its urban counterpart.
5 Katja Kanzler's "'To Tell the Kitchen Version': Architectural Figurations of Race and Gender in Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig" explores the spatial dimensions of two antebellum texts by African American women authors, thus decoding and interrogating antebellum domestic architecture as a spatial system of cultural signification. Placing particular emphasis on the kitchen as a gendered as well as - in the context of Southern U.S. slaveholding culture - racialized space, Kanzler illustrates how the kitchen features in the two texts as a site of both oppression and resistance as well as authorial empowerment.