The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 facilitated the establishment of the Irish Free State and independence from Great Britain, with the exception of course of the six counties in Northern Ireland which remain under British rule to this day. 1922 saw the adoption of the Constitution of the Irish Free State. This was later replaced in 1937 by Bunreacht na hÉireann, the Constitution of Ireland that established the Republic of Ireland as we know it today. The 1937 constitution contained in it a number of controversial articles that have served to inhibit the rights of Irish Citizens, and of women and children in particular. Foremost among these were a number of explicit religious references and terminology that reflected the conservative environment the original constitiutions were drafted in, incorporating Catholic doctrine on the family into a supposedly secular document. This had the effect of create an intertwining between Church and State, allowing for conservative Catholic laws with respect to gender, marriage, divorce, sexual liberty, bodily autonomy and abortion rights to direct government policy and medical practice on the island of Ireland. Divorce, for example, was prohibited until 1996. The Marriage Equality Act of 2015 amended the constitution to allow for same-sex marriage, and a controversial ban on abortion remained in effect until as recent as 2018. This gradual secularisation of the Irish constitution has allowed it to finally begin to truly reflect and recognise the rights of its diverse citizens. And with this has come a surge in contemporaneous non-fiction writing by Irish citizens, North and South of the border, seeking to make sense of and process these events and impositions of the Church into government policy. Irish writers are actively writing about the body, about the impositions made on the body, about stigmas associated with the body, about the body in sickness. In this advanced seminar we will study a selection of contemporaneous non-fiction writings on the body by Irish and Northern Irish authors.
Our Course Texts are as follows: Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat; Emma Dabiri, Don't Touch My Hair; Kerri Ní Dochartaigh, thin places; Rosaleen McDonagh, Unsettled. We will also read and discuss selected essays from Emilie Pine's Notes to Self and Sinéad Gleeson's Consellations.
- Teacher: Georgina Nugent-Folan