Digital Object Identifier
Feminist critics have established that the kitchen in Susan Glaspell’s A Jury of Her Peers is crucial to the story’s gender critique. Yet, they have not fully theorised how the kitchen produces the epistemological difference that enables two farmwives to solve a murder that professional investigators cannot. This paper addresses that gap through spatial analysis, applying Bachelard’s vertical polarity, Foucault’s heterotopia, and Ahmed’s affective economies to demonstrate that the kitchen is not merely symbolic but materially productive of alternative knowledge. These spatial mechanisms reveal that gendered knowledge does not simply emerge from social positioning alone but through material engagement with space and objects. This reveals how contemporary institutions continue to devalue domestic knowledge, which is embedded in spatial hierarchies.
Sakshi Kachchhap. “Reading the Kitchen: Domestic Architecture and Gendered Knowledge in Susan Glaspell’s ‘A Jury of Her Peers’.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 2, Apr. 2026, pp. 392–402. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n2.23.
Open Access · CC BY 4.0 · Crossref DOI ·
the-criterion.com