Gender, Nationality and Cultural Representations of Ireland: An Irish Woman's Place?

Ireland has struggled with its ‘feminine’ identity throughout its history. The so-called ‘chasmic dichotomy of male and female' is embedded in colonial and postcolonial constructions of Irishness and it continues to manifest itself in contemporary cultural representations of Ireland and Irishness. This study explores issues of gender and nationality via a reading of a 70-second television advertisement for Caffrey's Irish Ale, titled ‘New York’. The article suggests that, although colonial and postcolonial discourse on Ireland continues to perceive the ‘feminine’ in problematic terms, this is gradually changing as Irish women increasingly, in poet Eavan Boland's words, ‘open a window on those silences, those false pastorals, those ornamental reductions’ that have confined us.