Occupied Country: The Negotiation of Lesbianism in Irish Feminist Narrative1

OCCUPIED COUNTRY: THE NEGOTIATION OF LESBIANISM IN IRISH FEMINIST NARRATIVE1 KATHRYN CONRAD the back of June Levine’s A Season of Weddings states that the novel is “an extraordinarily powerful insight into how the instinctive bonds between women can spill over into love, and into the great gaps—in all societies— between women’s lives and expectations.” The jacket summary does not belie the book’s contents, though it does rehearse universalism and essentialism more aggressively than the novel; if anything, the jacket summary is more explicit about sexuality than the book itself when it asserts that “through her increasingly intimate relationship with Maya, the young Indian mother of a bride, [the protagonist, Nora Ryan] begins to probe the nature of sexuality and ritual. . . .” I introduce this book-jacket blurb because it suggests the difficulties presented by lesbianism in Irish feminist discourse. Levine’s novel is one of many Irish feminist narratives, fictional and historiographical, that subsume the lesbian experience of their protagonists into a more general narrative of feminist “awakening.” Lesbianism is put to the service of self-discovery and engagement with the difficulties of being a woman in Ireland. While such insights into women’s experience are useful, this incorporation of lesbianism into a more general narrative of feminist experience results in the erasure of lesbian experience. I argue that this erasure follows the pattern and logic of Irish nationalist discourse, which, as David Lloyd has argued , seeks control of narratives “since its political and legal frameworks can only gain consent if the tale they tell monopolizes the field of probabilities ” (6). By accepting the logic of nationalism, feminist writers do to THE NEGOTIATION OF LESBIANISM IN IRISH FEMINIST NARRATIVE 123 1 “Occupied Country: The Negotiation of Lesbianism in Irish Feminist Narrative,” originally presented at the Ninth Annual Graduate Student Irish Studies Conference, was awarded the 1995 Dermot McGlinchey Award established by the Irish American Cultural Institute to recognize “work that is a signal contribution to Irish Studies, or pioneering work that opens new areas of inquiry.” Essays winning this award are published in ÉIRE-IRELAND. lesbianism what nationalism has historically done to feminism: silence it in the name of “freedom.” To understand the relationship of Irish feminism to lesbianism, then, we must first turn to the relationship between feminism and nationalism. Margaret Ward has noticed that Irish women’s “emotional and ideological identification with nationalism, which always overrode all other considerations , was a crucial factor in preventing them from ever developing a strategy which could have encompassed a larger definition of liberation” (249). Irish feminism has had a long and difficult fight for recognition, and, as Ward suggests, this is in part due to the tendency for Irish feminists to champion the cause of Irish liberation from English rule. The connection between feminism and nationalism has a long history, a history that begins at least as early as the 19th century and that continues to present -day feminist-nationalists in the North such as Bernadette Devlin McAliskey.2 The connection between the movements is hardly surprising: both feminism and Irish nationalism share a telos of “liberation,” or freedom from the oppressive hegemony (the colonial power structure, the patriarchy , etc.). That shared telos, however different in real detail, organizes these movements into narratives reinforced both by formal historiography and by myths of origin perpetuated by both folk tradition and “high culture ” art forms. Herein lies the bind of the feminist-nationalist alliance: women’s movements are read through a “master narrative” of liberation, one which puts nationalism at the forefront as the more universally desirable telos. Feminism is subordinated in a hierarchy based on a culturally constructed gender duality that sees women and women’s concerns as secondary , as Other to the “universal” male subject. This hierarchy of concerns —national freedom over women’s freedom—will be familiar to anyone who has studied the interrelationship of gender and nationalism. As Anne McClintock notes in her discussion of the ANC and Afrikaner nationalism , “all too frequently, male nationalists have condemned feminism as divisive, bidding women hold their tongues until after the revolution ” (77). The same has been argued of Marxism by such feminist writers as Simone de Beauvoir and...