As we continue to push back the theocratic oppression of 20th-century Ireland, historical research forms a crucial plank in the underpinning that will help safeguard, and further advance, our new hard-won human rights.
It’s hearteningly evident on every page of this fascinating reader – a collection of interdisciplinary essays by 20 experts in their fields – that incisive research and reflection are cracking on into the contested, taboo, often hidden histories of sexual politics and gender identities in Ireland during the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
There’s a risk of disjointedness with a breadth of subjects as varied as that here. But a strong editorial cohesion flows through these essays, emanating from their imperative to investigate and reflect from an equality perspective, reporting on the experience of people who’ve been historically persecuted, discriminated against, marginalised, dehumanised and denied the space to exist. Amid these harrowing histories there are accounts of love and work, triumph, fun and community-building along the path to emancipation.
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From a peek into the 1901-02 premarital courtship between an upper-class heterosexual couple, which was “characterised by sexual desire combined with an adherence to the patriarchal social structure”; to the sexist institutionalisation of “criminally inebriate” women; to the radically eye-opening “Intersex in Ireland: a legal history from ancient times to the present day”; to the horrors in Northern/Ireland of state-sanctioned strip-search sexual violence as a form of torture and weapon of war in prisons; to an uplifting history of the LGBT Archive and lesbian activism in Cork 1970-2000, the superb “Out is a very dangerous place: the emergence of the trans movement in Ireland”, and stylishly succinct histories of the struggle for women’s work and reproductive rights – this stimulating smorgasbord coheres under the north star of liberation.
Eimear McBride: ‘When my brother died, it was not only losing him but losing all the illusions that you were going to be safe’
Blind Spots by Marty Makary: Diagnosing the danger to our health of dogma over data
The Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland: A Reader. Harrowing histories that cohere under the north star of liberation
Books in brief: Cádiz: The Story of Europe’s Oldest City; It Comes From the River; and Web of Betrayal: Murder in Ireland’s Brutal Gangland
In a poignant afterward, Maria Luddy describes the tragic story of one of our thousands of “disappeared” women – her aunt, a victim of secrecy and family shame who spent most of her life until she died aged 93 incarcerated in an institution, for reasons that no one really knew – and because there were no records, Luddy could not find out.
Which is why, Luddy makes clear, the archiving of records, and the creation of radical social history, is such crucial work, for now and for future generations.
