Volumes: Notes from the Editors

This special issue of the JIWS seeks to examine the topic of gendered constructions of space(s). How does space structure our understanding of gender? How does it participate in cultural constructions of race, class, and sexuality? What are the political and economic dimensions of the spaces that we construct and that construct us? Despite the many seminal studies of the role of space in the fields of architecture, geography, history, and cultural theory, the role of space in the field of women's studies remains underappreciated. In this issue we wanted to explore the role(s) that space plays in shaping and maintaining identities and power relations. Far from being neutral or self-evident, we take space to be a site and a means of cultural power, informed by a set of historically and culturally specific notions that are loaded in gender and class terms. Like discourse, space is always political. Space can discipline by restricting access, and empower by giving presence. Spatial organization is a historical and cultural product of meshing and clashing discourses of the body, sexuality, and morality. Instead of being neutral, our notions of space are informed by a set of gender, class, and race terms. Therefore, the everyday spaces of our homes, offices, streets, and cities not only reflect existing social relations and identities but also actively produce and re-produce them. Each essay in this issue shows in its own way that space needs to be recognized as a central component of power that is socially constituted through material relations. Combined, the authors adopt a space framework for critical, rhetorical, and cultural scholarship, and thus lead us to see the many social meanings of space as it structures the operation of gender. This issue is entitled Volumes, because we felt there must be a lot to say about space and gender in an era of outsourcing and global economies; rapidly changing social mores; and the radical miniaturization of everyday objects. Indeed, we received 188 submissions--a testimony to the popularity and value of the topic. The essays we are pleased to present here range widely in style, subject matter, and geographical loci, as befitting our sense that there is much to say. They are linked by their analysis of the adroit means by which social actors manipulate space for their own ends while being undeniably shaped by it; they are linked further by their commitment to the insights that spatial analysis is uniquely capable of providing. Such examination of space has to be interdisciplinary and multi-media. We have included scholarly essays, poetry, art, photography, and book reviews. In exploring a range of spaces, we wanted to go beyond the usual spatial binaries of public and private, centrist and border. We wanted to account for privileged, partitioned, designed, contemplative, glamorous, grotesque, and resistant spaces. And so we chose a range of essays that cut across gender, race, class, and geography: some critically examine public places of leisure and entertainment (inter-racial bars in the early 20th c. New York, and coffeehouse museums in 17th c. England), others question gains and failures of private domestic spaces (in a German middle-class household and in Soviet communal apartments). Our issue juxtaposes gendered expression of religious architecture (Royal Abbey of Fontevrault in France) with the power relationships in taboo places (sex work in Cuba, women's urinals in 18th century England, and contemporary men's toilets in Australia). The two visual essays document spaces as diverse as an immigrant quarter in Paris, and a marginal beach in Tel Aviv. Leisure Spaces Historian Elizabeth Clement examines inter-racial bars and night clubs in New York City in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. She demonstrates that the unsegregated north observed a variety of social codes and spatial arrangements by which bar owners could either encourage or discourage interracial dating. …