Welcome again to another issue of thirdspace - our fourth and still going strong! Stronger than ever, in fact, with the addition of not one, or two, but ten new co-editors onto our editorial team. And we couldn't be happier. Our new co-editors bring a wealth of experience in editing, language-translation, and feminist activism. As well, we have a group of 'associate' editors who will be helping with publicity and sitting in as Guest Editors from time to time. All of these will, we hope, come together in an expanded mandate to publish in French, German, Spanish, and Arabic, as well as extend the range of contributing authors beyond North America and Europe. Sounds ambitious? Yes, and so does launching an international, feminist studies journal that has over 3500 unique visitors per month - and here we are! So we hope you join with us in welcoming our new editors and supporting us in our exciting future plans.

In this issue, we have a wonderful variety of areas to explore. Not only do we have two articles and a review essay dealing in feminist scholarship and teaching, we also continue our highlight on feminist publishing and bookstores in both our essays and features sections.

Samantha Thrift discusses the cultural appropriations by and of Madonna and Martha Stewart. Thrift examines Madonna's cultural appropriations and subversions in the context of queer sexuality. Her use of highly sexualized symbolism connected to images of female power and control creates a "sexual anomaly" for heterosexual, patriarchal culture. However, her use of certain aspects of queer culture (dress, sexual practices, dance) in her work must be seen both as a celebration/promotion of queer culture and its appropriation, as these are portable personas she adopts and adapts (and abandons) to suit her needs and career. As Thrift quotes, "How grateful are lesbian and gay people supposed to be?" Meanwhile, Martha Stewart's construction of ideal domesticity is part of her attraction to the gay community. Not only has her performance in various media shifted - from an archetypical femininity in the early 1980s to her current physically competent, "cute butch" persona - the erasure of core symbols of traditional family (husband, kids) even while promoting holidays and entertaining embodies a "happy sterility" that is particularly attractive to some sections of the gay community. As Madonna moves into a persona of more traditional femininity (motherhood) and Martha continues to create "a specific, butch femininity, the crossovers between these 'queer icons' will certainly bear future interest.

Sonia Sedano Vivanco's paper on Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl explores the literary genres that influenced the ways in which Jacobs wrote her narrative, the ways in which it was read and received, and the ways in which it has been interpreted within literary criticism. This paper pays particular attention to the genres of the slave narrative, the sentimental novel and the picaresque and explores the differences between male and female narrators in both experience and the act of writing about experience. Sedano Vivanco suggests that women who wrote slave narratives were concerned with different issues than men and framed their narratives accordingly, but that there was also an awareness on the part of the author about the gendered expectations of the reading audience which played a crucial role in the way that narratives by or about female slaves were written.