Embodied sexualities: exploring accounts of Irish women’s sexual knowledge and sexual experiences, 1920–1970

This chapter explores the ways in which sexuality has been understood, embodied and negotiated by a cohort of Irish women through their lives. It is based on qualitative data generated as part of an oral history project on Irish women’s experiences of sexuality and reproduction during the period 1920–1970.1 The interviews, which were conducted with 21 Irish women born between 1914 and 1955, illustrate that social and cultural discourses of sexuality as secretive, dangerous, dutiful and sinful were central to these women’s interpretative repertoires around sexuality and gender. However, the data also contains accounts of behaviours, experiences and feelings that challenged or resisted prevailing scripts of sexuality and gender. Drawing on feminist conceptualisations of sexuality and embodiment (Holland et al., 1994; Jackson and Scott, 2010), this chapter demonstrates that the women’s sexual subjectivities were forged in the tensions that existed between normative sexual scripts and their embodied experiences of sexual desires and sexual and reproductive practices. While recollections of sexual desire and pleasure did feature in the accounts of some of the women, it was the difficulties experienced around sexuality and reproduction that were spoken about in greatest detail. What emerges clearly from the data is the confusion, anxiety and pain occasioned by the negotiation of external demands and internal desires and the contested, unstable nature of both cultural power and female resistance.

The Resurgence of Gaelic power in Ireland and Scotland and its wider impact, c.1350-1513

Over the course of the later Middle Ages nearly half the landmass of the British Isles fell under the control of a handful of Gaelic dynasties in Ireland and Scotland. The impact of this profound geopolitical recasting of much of the Atlantic Archipelago has however, received very little scholarly attention. Instead, historians have tended to view events within this expanding Gaelic world, or Gàidhealtachd, as peripheral to the political development of the British Isles and the course of Anglo-Scottish relations during the later Medieval period. Drawing upon a comprehensive range of sources from Ireland, Scotland, and England, as well as significant archival research, this thesis challenges the concept of the so-called 'Celtic fringe' and illustrates how developments within the Gàidhealtachd impacted upon the course of 'British' politics during the period c.1350-1513. The thesis centres on an examination of how two competing Gaelic alliance systems came to dominate much of the Gàidhealtachd from the late fourteenth century through to the early 1500s. The first of these alliance blocs was controlled chiefly by the O'Neills of Tyrone, the O'Briens of Thomond, and MacDonalds of the Hebrides; in the other network the O'Donnells of Tyrconnell, the Burkes of Mayo and the Campbells of Argyll held sway. By tracing the interconnectivity of the lordships in each respective network, the thesis investigates how these alliance systems became a durable force not only within the Gàidhealtachd but also on the broader 'British' stage. The thesis is structured in a manner that makes the intricate, lineage-based world of the Gàidhealtachd more accessible. Each chapter shifts between the various regions of the Gaelic world and examines how developments in one region impacted upon corresponding territory. Ultimately, this provides historians with a new model for exploring what has previously been a majorly neglected area of Irish and British history.