Using masculinities as a paradigm for the history of the Irish Revolution

ABSTRACT

The essays in this collection are a significant contribution to the expanding scholarship on the history of Irish masculinities. Their focus on the era of the Irish Revolution, a time that has received a tremendous amount of attention from political, social, and military histories, but which is in its infancy regarding gendered analyses of masculinity’s meaning in the period, means that their individual arguments and insights are highly pertinent. By comparing and contrasting the themes of heroism, bodies, republicanism, migration, and war that have arisen in this volume, this conclusion argues that the authors have made important advances in how a masculinities paradigm can “revolutionise” the conceptualisation and deconstruction of this time in Irish history.

KEYWORDS:

• Irish masculinities
• Irish Revolution
• historiography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Rose, “Afterword,” 299.

2. Scott, “Gender,” 1067.

3. For example, Frawley, ed., Women and the Decade of Commemorations; Connolly, ed., Women and the Irish Revolution; McAuliffe and Gillis, Richmond Barracks 1916; and Tiernan, ed., The political writings of Eva Gore-Booth.

4. Fitzpatrick, Irish Emigration, 30.

5. “Century Ireland – Gallipoli,” https://gallipoli.rte.ie/; Macleod, Gallipoli; and Mac Cormaic, “Higgins notes ‘silence’.”

6. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles. See also Kenny, “Diaspora and Comparison” and more recently, Kenny, “Two Diasporic Moments.”

7. Madden, Tiresian Poetics, 196.

8. Garden, The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement; Lewis, “The Queer Life and Afterlife of Roger Casement;” and Tóibín, “The Tragedy of Roger Casement.”

9. Ó Conchúir, “Casement, Choreography and Commemoration,” 159.

10. For example, Bourke, “Effeminacy, Ethnicity and the End of Trauma;” Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War; and MacPherson, “Irish Protestant Masculinities.”

11. Auger, “On the Brink of Civil War.”