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.

Politics, Power, PISA: a genealogy of mathematics education policy at second level in Ireland at the beginning of the 21st century

This thesis traces a genealogy of the discourse of mathematics education reform in Ireland at the beginning of the twenty first century at a time when the hegemonic political discourse is that of neoliberalism. It draws on the work of Michel Foucault to identify the network of power relations involved in the development of a single case of curriculum reform – in this case Project Maths. It identifies the construction of an apparatus within the fields of politics, economics and education, the elements of which include institutions like the OECD and the Government, the bureaucracy, expert groups and special interest groups, the media, the school, the State, state assessment and international assessment. Five major themes in educational reform emerge from the analysis: the arrival of neoliberal governance in Ireland; the triumph of human capital theory as the hegemonic educational philosophy here; the dominant role of OECD/PISA and its values in the mathematics education discourse in Ireland; the fetishisation of western scientific knowledge and knowledge as commodity; and the formation of a new kind of subjectivity, namely the subjectivity of the young person as a form of human-capital-to-be. In particular, it provides a critical analysis of the influence of OECD/PISA on the development of mathematics education policy here – especially on Project Maths curriculum, assessment and pedagogy. It unpacks the arguments in favour of curriculum change and lays bare their ideological foundations. This discourse contextualises educational change as occurring within a rapidly changing economic environment where the concept of the State’s economic aspirations and developments in science, technology and communications are reshaping both the focus of business and the demands being put on education. Within this discourse, education is to be repurposed and its consequences measured against the paradigm of the Knowledge Economy – usually characterised as the inevitable or necessary future of a carefully defined present.

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.