A Girl is a Half-formed Thing?: Girlhood, Trauma, and Resistance in Post-Tiger Irish Literature

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Notes

^1. Follow @revgirlschool and #SchoolRevGirls for more information and videos of the final performance.

^2. The longevity of these anxieties connecting girls to commodity, sexuality, and consumerism can be observed in this mid-nineteenth-century example: Eliza Lynn Linton’s famous diatribe against “The Girl of the Period,” published anonymously in The Saturday Review in 1868. In it, Linton admonishes the modern girl for her “immoral” investment in fashion, elaborate dress, artificial beauty, and consumerism, which, for her, brings the girl into dangerous alliance with overt sexuality and the commercial sphere. “The girl of the period,” Linton writes, “is a creature who dyes her hair and paints her face, as the first articles of her personal religion; whose sole idea of life is plenty of fun and luxury; and whose dress is the object of such though and intellect as she possesses. Her main endeavor in this is to outvie her neighbours in the extravagance of fashion… Men are afraid of her; and with reason” (Linton 340).

^3. The X case refers to a 1992 Supreme Court Case in which the Attorney General sought an injunction to prevent a fourteen-year-old girl, pregnant as a result of rape and suicidal because of the pregnancy, from travelling to the UK to terminate the pregnancy. The Supreme Court overturned the injunction ruling that the threat of suicide was legitimate ground for granting the right to seek an abortion, although legislation was not put in place. A referendum followed which allowed for the freedom to travel for a termination and the freedom to obtain information about such. See timeline of the events here: O’Carroll.

^4. See for example the texts under discussion in Bracken’s Irish Feminist Futures: Ursula Rani Sarma’s play Blue, which circulates around the death of a teenage girl, and Leanne O’Sullivan’s poetry collection, Waiting for my Clothes, which explores the effects of an eating disorder.

^5. Bracken’s reading of the texts (32A, Blue, and Waiting for my Clothes) offers some potential for reimagining the ways in which girlhood functions, arguing that while the texts stage critiques of the difficulties of girlhood experience in the climate of the Celtic Tiger, they generate alternate models of selfhood and relationality, models, I would add, that are not marked by threat. For Bracken, these texts challenge a neo-liberal rhetoric of isolation, privileging instead collectivity and selfhoods characterized by connection, immersion, and affective relations. She notes that “affective immersion, relationality, and queer collectivity […] all operate as mechanisms through which to engage a feminist reflection on and critique of constructions of girlhood, as well as provide imaginative hope, ultimately figuring connective selfhood as a model for a fluid becoming-woman, the about-to-be of the girl figure” (86).

^6. The Steubenville High School rape was the sexual assault of an unconscious sixteen-year-old girl by two high school football players whose friends filmed and photographed the acts, then posted them to social media sites, resulting in the public shaming of the victim. “Slane Girl” refers to the 2013 case in which a seventeen-year-old girl was photographed performing oral sex on a young man at an Eminem concert. The photos and a video were posted to social media sites with the hashtag #Slanegirl and the public shaming the occurred resulted in her hospitalization and sedation. There was no hashtag #Slaneboy. The final case referred to here occurred in 2009 at a case in the Circuit Criminal Court in Tralee in which a convicted sex offender, waiting for his sentence, was publicly supported by around fifty people, including the parish priest, who all shook his hand while the twenty-four-year old woman he had raped watched. See Oppel Jr.; Wiseman; Hickey Tralee.

^7. I recently taught Asking For It to a group of undergraduates and they were unanimous in their feelings of rage and frustration at the novel’s conclusion, while understanding the importance of its effects and affects. I would like to thank my 2016 “Narrating Irish Childhoods” class for the stimulating discussions of this novel which have informed my analysis here.

^8. For a timeline of this case, see Holland.