Editors' Introduction

The essays in this special issue illustrate the range and richness of current feminist and gender research in Irish Studies. Although the articles examine a wide variety of time periods, texts, and issues, several shared preoccupations emerge from the volume as a whole. All of the essays participate, in one way or another, in the contemporary shift among scholars from treating gender as ideology toward examining gender as a series of lived possibilities. Of course, these possibilities are structured by ideological forces and material pressures. But individual subjectivities, actions, and realities are enabled as well as limited by such structures, and many of these articles show women creatively exploiting the opportunities that gender systems offer them.

The volume also embodies the commitment to interdisciplinarity that animates much current work on gender. Most of the essays draw on more than one field of inquiry, and most examine negotiations between representation (whether defined as ideology or within particular texts) and lived reality. The scholars collected here employ diverse methodologies, and draw on a wide range of sources, including court records, newspaper accounts, period magazines, written memoirs, oral testimony, literary texts, film, and visual arts.

Various other currents and cross-currents connect clusters of essays. The volume opens with a pair of essays about Irish nuns. Elizabeth Butler Cullingford demonstrates how the codes of a particular genre—the anti-Catholic Gothic—structured representations of recent scandals over the Magdalene laundries. As an alternative, she develops a comparative and historical understanding of Irish nuns and their relation to abuse within religious institutions. Yvonne McKenna draws on oral testimonies to examine the voices and subjectivities of Irish nuns themselves. Both essays emphasize the complexity and ambiguity of what religious life meant to nuns and to various observers, and both carefully situate the gender identity of nuns in relation to other versions of Irish femininity.

Another set of essays takes up the gendered nature of violence, crime, and punishment. Dianne Hall asks how medieval Irish communities understood physical violence, and how that understanding was gendered. Answering these questions involves examining gendered medieval conceptions of the relationship between speech and violence. Pauline Prior analyzes a single, anomalous case that seems to offer an exception to a general gendered understanding of women who killed men in nineteenth-century Ireland. Gerardine Meaney traces representations of oedipal violence between fathers and sons in canonical Irish drama and film, arguing that this metaphorical violence forms a series of meditations on the legitimacy, or lack thereof, of Irish social and political authority. And Margaret Ward explores the implications of violence and violent masculinity for conflict transformation, arguing for the crucial importance of a gender perspective in negotiating and implementing current peace agreements in Northern Ireland and elsewhere.

Several essays examine how specific individuals lived and performed their gender identities in response to various historical pressures. Ruth Barton explores the contradictions of Maureen O'Hara's femininity in her life and screen career, examining those contradictions in relation to her Irishness, the studio system in which she worked, and the generic requirements of the films she made. Joseph Valente describes Charles Stewart Parnell as engaging in a gender performance that was enormously effective politically, situating that performance in the context of colonial Victorian Ireland. Yvonne McKenna's nuns had to "become" nuns, performing their new gendered identity by submitting to particular codes of dress, diet, and bodily deportment. Brian Griffin documents the processes through which late-Victorian Irish female cyclists sought to maintain some elements of traditional gender identities while violating others.

Sexuality and motherhood are important issues in another group of essays. Clair Wills traces the divergent ways that post-revival realist texts depicted female sexuality, and Hall shows that sexual insults were considered the most damaging kind of verbal assault on medieval women. In McKenna's analysis, the ideals of nun and mother, while apparently opposed, actually had much in common. Griffin shows that the threat women cyclists posed to their contemporaries' sense of respectability was in part a sexual threat: the threat of women outside the home, unescorted or in all-female groups, exhibiting and taking pleasure...