The politics of gender and sexuality in modern Ireland

A Reader

Jennifer Redmond & Mary McAuliffe, editors

This collection of focused, cohesive and persuasive essays is based on the newest research on gender, sexuality and sexual politics. It offers historical reflections and contemporary analyses of issues related to the contested and often hidden histories of sexual politics and gender identities in Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Including but going beyond the binary of male and female heterosexual experience, the book explores LGBTQI+ histories, the treatment of intersex persons, and the history of trans people and activism in Ireland. As an interdisciplinary work, this reader draws together scholars working in a range of fields on innovative, new research on this theme. The essays consider these histories as seen over two centuries and reflect on the societal shifts in modern Ireland as evidenced in two recent referenda and the responses to the scandals emerging from the state’s treatment of unmarried mothers. 

Jennifer Redmond is associate professor at the Department of History, MU. Her research is in the area of Irish women and gender history with a focus on migration. Mary McAuliffe is a lecturer in Gender Studies at UCD, specializing in gender histories, histories of women, war and violence and histories of sexualities.