Questions of masculinities have come late to the Irish historical paradigm. In many Irish historical studies gender continues to be seen as a âwomenâs issueâ: in other words, that questions regarding gender relate to the effects of patriarchy on women alone. This is no surprise, given that women continue to be underrepresented in the political, academic, and cultural life in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Such inequity is constitutionally enshrined in Article 41.2 of the Irish Constitution, which delineates womenâs role in the state as domestic support within heterosexual marriage, and exemplified by Northern Irelandâs exemption from the UKâs 1967 Abortion Act. Such marginalisation was brought to light during the 2015â2016 public controversy over the Abbey Theatreâs commemorative centenary programme, which included only one female playwright in its programme of ten plays. 1 More viscerally, the McAleese Report on state involvement with the Magdalene Laundries and Catherine Corlessâs investigation into the high mortality rates and unmarked mass burials in Tuamâs Mother and Baby Home, point to the devastating real effects of cultural, social and political marginalisation. But the status quo is increasingly contested. In the wake of 2018âs landslide referendum repealing the eighth amendment the campaign for abortion rights in Northern Ireland has intensified dramatically and, in the Republic, debates continue as whether article 41.2 should be removed or amended before it is brought to a national referendum.
Womenâs history in Ireland is clearly an urgent and necessary riposte to the erasure of women: a disciplinary focus which counters the sidelining and erasure of womenâs experiences, political agency, and the material and cultural life of the domestic spheres in older historical methodologies. The act of âwriting women into Irish historyâ was seen as a âsubversive activityâ which continues to be met with (in some quarters) resistance during this decade of commemorations. 2 Moreover, despite the burgeoning of womenâs history and gender history in Ireland since the 1970s, the effects of such scholarship have not been fully assimilated into Irish historiography as a whole. Yet notwithstanding the increasingly extensive research focused on recovering womenâs history, there has nonetheless âbeen surprisingly little expectation that a focus on gender will change the way Irish history is writtenâŚ[an attitude] partly explained by the lingering prejudice that gender historyâŚhas no serious implications for the study of established political or social themesâ. 3 This lack is, arguably, partly a result of the assumption that gender history is synonymous with womenâs history and as such, âautomatically âŚseparate from other historyâ. 4 This might be characterized as a Field Day approach in which womenâs history and gender studies are sequestered as a separate supplement rather than being integrated into, and thus renovating, the corpus. Historians have long been calling for this omission to be addressed. In 2002, Linda Connolly argued that âa gendered history of IrelandâŚrequires [an] illumination of masculinityâ and cautioned that âautomatically transferring the history of women into a history of gender, while evading the construction of masculinity as a subject of scrutiny in historical writingâ would result in âonly a partial understanding of genderâ. 5 An important publication which endeavoured to catalyse gender studies in Ireland is Gender and Power in Irish History (2009), edited by Maryann Gialanella Valiulis. This showcased a diverse selection of work on womenâs history and gender, demonstrating the utility and productiveness of gender paradigms for the understanding of Irish history, particularly in relation to genderâs ability to illuminate and interrogate power relations. 6 Yet Valiulisâ 2009 collection included only one essay which specifically addressed masculinities and, even more revealingly, only one male historian contributed to the collection. Gender history was clearly perceived as âwomenâs workâ. Eight years later still CatrĂona Kennedy laments that âIrish masculinities remains a chronically understudied areaâ where the ârelative dearth in the history of Irish masculinitiesâ makes it difficult to establish âa longer historical perspectiveâ. While âthe study of masculinities has long been directly or indirectly central to the agenda of womenâs historyâ, she acknowledges, an âexplicitly gendered history of Irish men remains one of the most promising avenues for future researchâ. 7
This brief overview suggests that the relative lack of attention by scholars to masculinities in Irelandâs history is a side-effect of the politically necessary focus on womenâs histories and is reflective of a persistent conservatism still reluctant to recognise the gendering of men. In Irish history, then, men âremain the unanalysed norm, women the exception which merits specific mentionâ. 8 The supposed primacy of the political (and the implicit distinction of âmainstreamâ politics from gender politics) often renders gender a consideration of seemingly secondary importance when compared with questions of political legitimacy, nationalism and the nation-state, violence and colonialism. 9 Such occlusion is further exacerbated by the terms of debate. As Connolly notes, âthe prominent role history, historians and politics are generally afforded in the Irish public sphereâ is frequently âa largely masculinist phenomenon and performanceâ conducted between men, excluding women, and the history writing that results is often âselective, partial and ideological in relation to womenâs history and unequal powerâ. 10 Essentialist presumption underwrites silence on masculinities.
While work on historical masculinities generally tends to be âunevenly distributed across geographical areas of focusâ, the neglect of Irish masculinitiesâand of genders and sexualities in generalâas sites of historical enquiry is notable, especially when compared with the development of these areas in the historiography of the United States and Britain for more than a generation. 11 The flourishing of Irish diaspora studies in North America in recent decades has resulted in scholarly attention to gender and the Irish in North America and to the Irish female emigrant experience in Britain. 12 But this has had little direct impact on approaches to Irish history itself. The relative lack of attention by historians to gender and masculinities in Ireland is even more remarkable as Ireland, in both jurisdictions, has been dominated historically by competing religiously orientated masculinities. Though âconfessional differences âŚmight influence understandings and practices of genderâ the tensions, conflicts and legacy of âethno-nationalistâ violence in this island are deeply inflected by discourses of masculinisation, virility and emasculation. 13 The depth and pervasiveness of religiously inspired and inflected social conservatism has had direct impact of the formation of masculinities in Ireland, including the many men who did not conform to social and cultural expectations of their gender. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, state, society and its institutions in the two Irelands have been characterised by male dominance and the âpatriarchal dividendâ. This has had direct consequences for the lives, bodies, and agency of women and sexual minorities.
Ireland and Masculinities in History aims to catalyse work on masculinities by showcasing a variety of research into Irish masculinities from a multiplicity of perspectives and periods. The collection moves towards a longer framework for historical studies of masculinities in Ireland, as delineated by Kennedy. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, literary and cultural critics have led the way in introducing critical approaches to masculinities in the Irish scholarly paradigm. Anne Mulhallâs groundbreaking work on heteronormativity and queer identity in modern and postmodern Ireland, 14 Diane Negraâs collection, Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity (2014), and collections such as Caroline Magennis and Raymond Mullenâs Irish Masculinities: Reflections on Literature and Culture (2011) 15 and Conn Holohan and Tony Tracyâs Masculinity and Irish Popular Culture: Tigerâs Tales (2014) all explore the continuing effects of Irelandâs patriarchal and conservative heritage on contemporary society. As Holohan and Tracy state, from a near-absence of these questions in Irish scholarship, in the last few years, the discipline has âcaught up dramatically to rapidly constitute a burgeoning field of new Irish masculinity studiesâ. 16 Furthermore, as Debbie Ging argues in Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema (2013), since the 1980s Irish filmmakers have been at the forefront of âsome of the most astutely observed and gender-progressive accounts of Irish men and masculinityâ. 17 A significant strand of popular Irish culture thus not merely makes âmaleness⌠visibleâ but also often âsavagely critiquesâ âpatriarchal privilegeâ. 18 Yet historians have been slower than cultural and literary critics to interrogate the role of masculinities. Among historians, the paucity of analysis on Irish historical masculinities is not simply a matter of neglect, or âbeing behindâ. Due to the focus on the national questi...