Irish Feminist Futures

Claire Bracken

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415635981
• eBook ISBN: 9781317451334
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is about the future: Ireland's future and feminism's future, approached from a moment that has recently passed. The Celtic Tiger (circa 1995-2008) was a time of extraordinary and radical change, in which Ireland's economic, demographic, and social structures underwent significant alteration.

Conceptions of the future are powerfully prevalent in women's cultural production in the Tiger era, where it surfaces as a form of temporality that is open to surprise, change, and the unknown. Examining a range of literary and filmic texts, Irish Feminist Futures analyzes how futurity structures representations of the feminine self in women's cultural practice. Relationally connected and affectively open, these representations of self enable sustained engagements with questions of gender, race, sexuality, and class as they pertain to the material, social, and cultural realities of Celtic Tiger Ireland.

This book will appeal to students and scholars of Irish studies, Irish feminist criticism, sociology, cultural studies, literature, women's studies, gender studies, neo-materialist and feminist theories.

1
Interrogating the subject

Alienation in Irish postmodernity

There is a predominance of narratives about siblings in the Celtic Tiger period, with women’s writing particularly interested in stories of brother-sister relationships. Anne Enright’s Booker winning novel The Gathering (2007) is an exploration of the effects of a brother’s suicide on his sister, while Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013), written during the Tiger period, though published after, is an innovative stream of consciousness female Bildungsroman, constituting a sister’s address to a brother who suffers with a brain tumour. Anxieties about the narrator-sister’s subjectivity are threaded throughout both, a feature also shared by the three texts explored in this chapter: Kirsten Sheridan’s film Disco Pigs (2001), Claire Kilroy’s novel All Summer (2003), and Marina Carr’s play Portia Coughlan (1996). Brother-sister relationships are elements within these narratives, narratives that are variously concerned with a female character’s dissolution of subjective structures in the inhabitation of an alternate form of being, a more affective and connected embodied self. That one psychic aspect of a sibling relationship can be an experience of annihilation, as Juliet Mitchell notes in her important work on the topic (2003: 43), is subtly drawn through complex explorations of desire, death, and the regeneration of relational feminine selves marked and infused by an undefined and undetermined futurity.

Disco Pigs, All Summer, and Portia Coughlan all figure central female characters that struggle with the subjective positionings made available to them in their various socio-symbolic orders. While they are enacted in very different locations – Disco Pigs takes place in a working-class neighbourhood of Cork, All Summer in a middle-class sphere of professionalism and mobility (signalled in the narrative’s movement between geographical spaces of city and country) and Portia Coughlan in the rural midlands – they share an interest in Ireland and cultural change. Concerned with tensions between the forces of tradition and those of postmodernity, there is a tapping into a general cultural condition in which subjects are not just separated and isolated from others, but also from their own embodied selves, caught up as they are in a powerful late capitalist system that aggressively manages and controls the desires of the supposedly individualistic self. As such, these three Celtic Tiger texts engage a critical exploration of a subjectivity based on alienation, absence, or lack, figuring it as an unliveable construction for their central female characters. The unbearable nature of this identity construction, variously indicated through motifs of mirroring, suffocation, and breathing, is ultimately what is at stake and, taken together, they constitute a harsh indictment of the alienating forces of Irish postmodernity. However, there is no nostalgia here for a pre-Tiger past, with Disco Pigs and Portia Coughlan particularly identifying alienated subjectivity as preceding Irish postmodernity, a legacy that works to compound its dominant position in late capitalist Celtic Tiger Ireland.

Moreover, all three texts move beyond critique, through a shared desire for something different, for the future, and for the new, imagined through a figurative dissolving of alienating identity. Crucially, all three imagine the dissolving of subjectivity through the motif of water. This dissolving of the self is linked to the unknowability of an undetermined future, a future that all three connect with materiality and, crucially, the womb. Playing on Nietzschean themes in Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze establishes a connection between a condition of futurity and the ‘dissolved self’, figuring the future as a force of subjective disassembly, which takes apart all fixed and knowable sureties of the ‘I’ (1994: 131).¹ All self-defining and predetermined external structures of otherness, on and through which alienated subjectivity relies, dissipate in the force of unknowable futurity, and the subject dissolves in this temporal space. In this chapter, I identify similar processes of subjective disassembly in Disco Pigs, All Summer and Portia Coughlan. The rejection of subjectivity is generated, the rejection of subjectivity is generated through a configurative shedding of selfhood in a bid to free the central characters from their entrenchment in an intolerable situation and affectively reconnect them with an embodied material existence. Water imagery is engaged to connect the force of the maternal, a force that is made present in all three texts, in contrast to configurations of alienated subjectivity in which the figure of the maternal is absented as invisible ground. Thus functioning to re-inscribe the maternal body in processes of self-formation, a feminist motivation marks a subjective dissolving: a figurative death generative of futuristic and potential life, pointing towards new ways of living the feminine self in contemporary Irish postmodernity.

Alienating experiences of postmodernity can be paradigmatically aligned with the structures of subjectivity described by classical psychoanalysis, which figures a subject constituted through a symbolic order that regulates and manages desire. Emma Radley powerfully connects psychoanalysis and postmodernism, identifying the ways in which contemporary cinema plays out the dynamics of psychoanalytic identity formation, particularly exploring the ways in which the ‘vicissitudes of the Real’ are consistently revealed in postmodern filmic work (Radley 2007: 20). One of the most significant contributions that classical psychoanalysis provides is the insight that our claims to subjective coherence are in fact illusory and, ultimately, unattainable. Lack governs the Lacanian symbolic order and a phallic mode of being regulates its subjectivities.² It is this mode of being that is of interest to me in this chapter because of the pervasiveness of psychoanalytic identity paradigms in twentieth-century Irish cultural life. As noted, the internal processes of alienation are in many ways indicative of Irish postmodernity. However, this structure of subjectivity was not necessarily heralded in new on the tails of Celtic Tiger social change, but, as identified in pioneering feminist, gender, and queer studies’ work, has a much longer trajectory in Irish cultural representation.

The trajectory of alienated subjectivity is also very much gendered. Joseph Valente, in his ground-breaking study of Irish manliness, highlights it as a structuring component of constructions of masculinity in the pre-independence period in what he terms the ‘double bind of manhood’. His argument is that Victorian ideals of manliness ‘consisted in the simultaneous necessity for and achievement of a vigilant, rational self-control – in strong passions strongly checked’ (2010: 3) that, operating quite like the Lacanian phallus, were never fully attainable or accessible (Valente notes the correlation between his careful parsing of Victorian manliness and the psychoanalytic working of the phallus). The inhabitation of certain class and racial subject positions made attainability even more difficult (the Victorian ‘gentleman’ closest to the ideal), something particularly pronounced in articulations of Irish manhood, which speak to the impossibility of the attainment of the ideal of manhood for Irish subjects. Valente’s ‘double bind’ identifies that the call for self-control lends itself to a not-so-manly passive acceptance of colonisation, while a more virile overthrow of self-restraint ultimately positions the Irish masculine subject as uncivilised brute. Thus, in this pre-independence Irish context, ideal manliness becomes a double impossibility and it is through this impossibility that a masculine form of subjectivity is seen to be constructed in terms of alienation and lack.

The dominant paradigm of subjectivity in twentieth-century Irish cultural representation tends towards this psychoanalytic model of self, revealed in detailed mappings of the terrain by Irish feminist and queer studies critics. This body of work reveals the ‘Oedipal’ and ‘phallic’ structuring of Irish subjectivity across Irish culture, as a hallmark of literary and filmic representation (Meaney 2010; Coughlan 1991; Sullivan 2006), as the ego mechanic of the Irish Literary Tradition (Bracken 2008a; Cahill 2011; Kelleher 2003; Meaney 2010; Mulhall 2011), and the paradigmatic shaper of Irish criticism and Irish Studies itself (Sullivan 2000; Sullivan 2008; Radley 2013). Haunting the contours of this phallogocentric terrain is an excised feminine, and it is through a careful attention to these gendered dynamics that we can identify the ‘universalizing construction of “Irish subjectivity”’ (Sullivan 2008: 247) as modelled on male identity formation. As Moynagh Sullivan so astutely notes: ‘in Irish Studies, the category of Irishness (Irish subjectivity) is repeatedly deconstructed, questioned, recontextualized and interrogated, but masculinity remains an unquestioned, presumptively static template for such identity politics’ (2008: 247). The deconstructive drive of Irish criticism figures subjectivity in the phallic model, as a form of being consistently and continuously alienated from the wholeness and completeness of selfhood. This alienated, male subject is evident across the gamut of twentieth-century Irish literature, film, and popular culture, from the inner torments of James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, the lost souls of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and the desolation of Patrick Kavanagh’s Patrick Maguire, to John Banville’s agonised protagonists, Colin Farrell’s portrayal of comi-tragic heroes (Lehiff in Intermission, 2003; Ray in In Bruges, 2008) and The Rubberbandits’ disenfranchised posturings.³ Alienated from themselves and the world around them, these male characters are marked by the psychodynamics of phallic incompleteness, connecting with a more pervasive cultural landscape of Oedipal subjectivities, anxieties, and power plays.⁴

The question explored in this chapter is what happens when this form of alienated subjectivity is mapped onto women’s bodies and identities? It is no surprise that we see its manifestation and, as I will argue, its critique in texts produced by women in the post-feminist Celtic Tiger era, given the neo-liberal discourses that privilege the individuated ‘I’ as the primary expression of being. In this respect, Patricia Coughlan makes the salient point that

the rationalizing language of the modern, with its emphasis on personal freedom and autonomy of subjects, ignores personal ties and emotional connectedness, thus placing women, in particular, under new forms of regulation’ where ‘individualism is the dominant mode of selfhood’ and ‘the drive towards style, affluence, success, and a guise of self-sufficiency places new obligations […] upon increasingly isolated subjects.

(2004: 177–8)

The texts analysed in this chapter all share a thematic interest in self-alienation and Irish postmodernity, focusing specifically on its impacts on constructions of feminine selfhood.

Produced in a post-feminist era that claims full subjecthood as a supposed given for women, these texts explore what this ‘given’ might be, its shapes and contours.⁵ As the dominant mode of subject construction in Irish cultural life, past and present, it is the alienated phallic model that is culturally available and grafted onto constructions of women’s subjectivity. The problems with figuring feminine identity in phallic terms are manifold, not least of which include an erasure of sexual difference in the figuration of women as ‘equal’, that is as the ‘same’ in a representational economy that services patriarchal heteronormativity. As Kaja Silverman notes, while the Lacanian phallus signifies alienation and loss, it also invariably refers to the ‘cultural privileges and positive values which define male subjectivity in patriarchal society’ (1983: 183). As such, the phallic model, which subtends neo-liberal, late capitalist discourses of individualism, is even more intensely alienating for female subjects, who stand at a double remove from their bodies and desires. Disco Pigs, All Summer, and Portia Coughlan reveal the phallocentrism inherent to this construction, ultimately rejecting it for their female protagonists, putting into question the gendered suitability of an alienating structure of subjectivity, gesturing at their conclusions towards more affective, embodied, and connective modes of feminine selfhood always open to a future of undetermined possibility and potential change.

Disco Pigs: mirroring alienations and reflective subjectivity

Disco Pigs is Kirsten Sheridan’s directorial debut for a feature length film.⁶ An adaptation of Enda Walsh’s play of the same name (1997),⁷ it is set in Cork city during the late 1990s. However, it is not a representation of affluence and middle-class wealth as represented in films such as About Adam (Stembridge 2001) and Goldfish Memory (Gill 2003); rather, its characters are drawn from working-class culture in boom time Ireland. Described by actor Cillian Murphy, who stars in the film, as a ‘warped kind of love story’ (2001: 15), it resists easy categorisation, and critics have noted that it is a very different, ‘less-conventional’ type of Irish film (O’Connell 2010: 48).⁸ Darren and Sinead are the two central characters, self-named ‘Pig’ and ‘Runt’ (expertly played by Murphy and Elaine Cassidy respectively), two teenagers who have been locked in a symbiotic relationship formed since birth. Twins in all but blood, they share the same birthday, live as neighbours in identical, adjoining houses, and have their own communicative language and behavioural system as dual-self defining codes. In a bid to keep out the world and resist socialisation, they have constructed their own imaginary world in which they are ‘King’ and ‘Queen’ and reject (in many cases violently) the social order of both family and peers. The film spans a period of seventeen days, culminating the morning after the pair share their seventeenth birthday, charting (initially) the dynamics of the relationship and (subsequently) its disintegration. This disintegration is largely precipitated by the awakening of Pig’s sexual desire for Runt, which she rejects in a bid to construct an identity less based on an alienating model of reflection (Pig as mirror of herself) and more in tune with her own body and affective desires. When her parents move her to a residential training centre in Donegal, a psychically distraught Pig fol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: feminism, futurity, and the Celtic Tiger
• 1 Interrogating the subject: alienation in Irish postmodernity
• 2 ‘The promise of her’: Celtic Tiger girls and connective-selfhood
• 3 Time machines and nomadic travelling: past and present post/modernities
• 4 Narratives of journeying: restricted mobilities, migrancy, and the Celtic Tiger imaginary
• Conclusion
• Index