Rethinking Occupied Ireland: Gender and Incarceration in Contemporary Irish Film

3 Body Politics

139 3 Body Politics Republican Women and Political Action T H E C O V E R O F L I L Y F I T Z S I M O N S ’S B O O K L E T Does Anybody Care? features a stylized image of a woman in a blanket. The woman’s face is drawn with stereotypically feminine features—a small nose, high cheekbones , a prominent mouth—and her loose dark hair flows past her shoulders , emphasizing her gender. The blanket she wears lends her body a statuesque solidity that contrasts with the visual renderings of emaciated Blanketmen from the same era. In her hand, the woman holds a poster featuring an image of a man’s face placed over the words “Long Kesh.” Fitzsimons’s booklet documents her years as a member of the Relatives Action Committee (RAC), a group of predominantly women activists who organized in support of republican prisoners on protest in the H-Blocks and Armagh Gaol. Like Fitzsimons, the woman on the cover of the booklet is also a member of the RAC; she is dressed in a blanket and holds a representation of her own son. Placing herself on display, the RAC mother functions as an emissary of her jailed son. She carries him symbolically so that he may become visible to the wider nationalist community, in whose name he suffers. Nationalist women have used the authority ascribed to motherhood to powerful ends, but the idealization of the “mother” as a national identity has also been an obstacle for women who try to act as political subjects in their own right or demand to be heard as political agents. When the 1921 treaty proposing partition and a twenty-six county Irish Free State was put before the Dáil Éireann, Pádraig Pearse’s mother shamed the deputies for considering a settlement that would institute a deformed version of the 140 ◎ Rethinking Occupied Ireland ideal nation for which her son and the other leaders of 1916 had died. She invoked her right as a mother to speak not on her own behalf as a Teachta Dála (TD) (a deputy of the Dáil), but for her son, who could not represent himself because five years earlier he had sacrificed his life to the cause of an Irish nation. At the same time, other women who spoke against the treaty as legislators were dismissed precisely because of their ties to the dead. When the treaty vote was put to the Dáil, all six women TDs vehemently opposed it, and Cumann na mBan (the Women’s League) even tried to raise a union jack over the building “as a mordant comment on what was being proposed” (Kiberd 1995, 402).1 Male deputies trivialized the women’s opposition with the patronizingly sympathetic notion that “as bereaved relatives of national martyrs, they were allowing their hearts to rule their heads” (Kiberd 1995, 403). Women had actively participated in political meetings, military campaigns, and the construction of a national vision of Ireland that was decolonized, socialist, and anti-patriarchal, and although the six women deputies had their own political stakes in opposing the treaty, their relationships to slain male nationalists obscured this earthly motivation. In the previous chapter, I addressed the prevalence of sacralizing imagery in representations of the Blanketmen who found a way out of the space of the exception by invoking the authority of an alternative set of laws. Republican prisoners were the objects of British sovereign power, but they became the subjects of a transcendental Irish national power. The Blanketmen used their homo sacer status as evidence of the illegitimacy of British rule. Their performance of and existence as men positioned outside the boundaries of British legality enabled them to reveal Britain’s history of placing Irish people outside the law, a discursive practice often accompanied by physical displacement. The body of the Blanketman— naked, unshaven, covered in filth, starving, and jailed—evoked the historical mistreatment and dislocation of the Irish, from Cromwell’s “to hell or 1. Partition was only one of several offenses in the treaty; in establishing an Irish free state and not a republic, the treaty required the Dáil to swear an oath of loyalty to Britain and to follow British foreign policy. Body Politics ◎ 141 Connacht” policy, through the Famine and emigration, penal servitude in Australia and the Caribbean, and into...