“Deposited Elsewhere”: The Sexualized Female Body and the Modern Irish Landscape

Through an analysis of diaries, memoirs, and folklore narratives, this essay analyzes the containment of the female body in the modern Irish landscape. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which Irish communities both literally and through legendry controlled the sexualized female body from the 1850s to the 1920s. The bodies of sexually active women, pregnant and post-parturient women, and dead women who had committed sexual transgressions were fraught with meaning; dangerous and polluted, they were isolated from the rest of the community. The regulation of the female body within the landscape became a mechanism for harnessing troublesome women. By separating and containing the impure and sexual female body, nineteenth-century Irish communities established the modern gender hierarchies that would result in what James Smith has labeled an “architecture of containment”.À travers une analyse de cahiers et journaux intimes, mémoires et récits populaires, cet article interroge la stratégie de contention dont le corps féminin fait l’objet dans le paysage irlandais moderne. Il s’intéresse plus particulièrement à la manière dont les communautés irlandaises, à la fois littéralement et par le biais des légendes, ont contrôlé la sexualité du corps féminin des années 1850 aux années 1920. Les corps des femmes sexuellement actives, enceintes, ou post partum, mais aussi les corps des mortes ayant commis des transgressions sexuelles, étaient chargés d’une signification de danger et d’impureté, et étaient isolés du reste de la communauté. L’inscription contrôlée du corps féminin dans le paysage devint un moyen de garder sous le joug les femmes posant problème. En isolant et en contraignant le corps féminin impur, les communautés irlandaises du dix neuvième siècle établirent les hiérarchies sexuelles modernes qui ont débouché sur ce que James Smith appelle une « architecture de la contention » (« architecture of containment »)

‘Our Darkest Hour’: Women and Structural Violence under Ireland’s 8th Amendment

This article analyses women’s stories of violence in the context of the 8th Amendment. Our analysis of 773 anonymous women’s narratives from In Her Shoes reveals instances of rape and partner violence, health disparities, forced travel, barriers to care, and withholding of information by healthcare providers. Posts described the impact of structural violence on women’s medical care and lived realities. While scholars have produced essential analyses of structural violence in twentieth-century Ireland, assessing how harm has impacted women and children in particular, most works focus exclusively on the institutions run by the state and Catholic Church: schools, asylums, laundries, and homes for unmarried mothers. Here, we argue for the expansion of the concept of structural violence, demonstrating that it also affected women and children who were not institutionalised. Anti-abortion policies, we contend, are part and parcel of gendered structural violence. In Ireland, the 8th Amendment enacted interconnected forms of violence on many of Ireland’s women and, in some cases, girls. Despite the violence these women faced, their voicing of their experiences served as resistance, demonstrating how support and storytelling, in some instances, can help start the process of healing the individual and collective wounds of the past

Fashion and Faith: Girls and First Holy Communion in Twentieth-Century Ireland (c. 1920–1970)

With a focus on clothing, bodies, and emotions, this article examines girls’ First Holy Communions in twentieth-century Ireland (c. 1920–1970), demonstrating that Irish girls, even at an early age, embraced opportunities to become both the center of attention and central faith actors in their religious communities through the ritual of Communion. A careful study of First Holy Communion, including clothing, reveals the importance of the ritual. The occasion was indicative of much related to Catholic devotional life from independence through Vatican II, including the intersections of popular religion and consumerism, the feminization of devotion, the centrality of the body in Catholicism, and the role that religion played in forming and maintaining family ties, including cross-generational links. First Communion, and especially the material items that accompanied it, initiated Irish girls into a feminized devotional world managed by women and especially mothers. It taught them that purchasing, hospitality, and gift-giving were central responsibilities of adult Catholic women even as it affirmed the bonds between women family members who helped girls prepare for the occasion