The Woman in the Red Dress: Gender,Space, and Reading. Minrose C. Gwin. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2002.

An eclectic montage of literary analysis, autobiography, and reader response, taking the form of personal anecdotes and autonomous essays, The Woman in the Red Dress takes the reader on a journey in which Minrose C. Gwin analyzes both metaphoric and physical personal space. As Gwin defines it, space is "not an entity that contains something else but [is] the swirl of social relations and productions in particular locations, whether these locations be material, cultural, or even psychological" (6). The purpose of Gwin's work, as she says, perhaps too repetitively is: "to dramatize textual encounters in which narrative, space, and gender inscribe themselves on one another and their readers" (38). The title of this volume refers to the first work Gwin discusses in her introduction: Native American poet Joy Harjo's poem, "Deer Dancer," about a woman in a stained red dress who dances naked on a bar, changing not just the lives of those present, but also those who, like the narrator, merely hear the story (6-7).