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Gendering the Holy Cross School Dispute: Women and Nationalism in Northern Ireland
Abstract
This article explores the Holy Cross school dispute in Northern Ireland from a feminist perspective. This ethnic quarrel produced a situation whereby women and young schoolgirls became the focal point of a sectarian protest from September 2001 to early 2002. Throughout the conflict, issues of gender were sidelined from the analysis of the dispute. The article attempts to remedy this omission by moving the category of gender to the forefront of the analysis. It examines the relationship between nationalist discourses of gender identity and representations of the nationalist women's agency during the dispute. While exposing these dimensions of the conflict, the article also considers the impact of women's ethno-nationalist agency on their role and positioning within nationalist cultures. It concludes that the Holy Cross conflict exposes the potentially disruptive aspects of women's ethno-nationalist agency and highlights the political significance of that agency for nationalist cultures pursuing ideals of gender equality.
... Hence women's engagement in wars and other conflicts is often invisible to external observers. Moreover, where such actions are noted, they are evaluated specifically in light of gendered norms and expectations (Dowler 1998;Alison 2004;Ashe 2006aAshe , 2007. This point is explored below; first, we contextualize ethno-nationalism and gender in NI. ...
... Nationalist discourses use female icons (e.g. the Virgin Mary, Mother Ireland) to emphasize female chastity, suffering and self-sacrifice, thereby idealizing the notion of 'good' wives and mothers. While unionism does not have an equivalent female iconography, it similarly emphasizes the ideal of the chaste and dutiful wife/mother through conservative religious discourses, which position the husband as head of the household and the point of natural authority (Sales 1998;Ashe 2006a). ...
... Nonetheless, as demonstrated in Ashe's (2006aAshe's ( , 2006bAshe's ( , 2007) own analyses of nationalist women's public protests, women's engagement in ethno-nationalist conflict can engender forms of female agency through the very fact that it is non-normative and disruptive. Simultaneously, however, normative expectations mean that women's conflict behaviour is evaluated differently from that of men. ...
Women's involvement in ethno-national conflicts is often overlooked, due partly to gender expectations. The gendered nature of ethno-nationalist identities and the salience of gender categories during conflict both work to render women ‘invisible’. However, women do frequently engage directly in ethno-national conflict. Such engagement can provide a space to disrupt gender ideologies, but is typically evaluated by others with reference to gender norms. This paper examines direct conflict engagement by a group of loyalist women in Northern Ireland, a region noted for both ethno-national conflict and gender conservatism. Using discourse analysis, it explores how the women themselves understand their central role in street protests and confrontations. It examines: (1) how they construct their identities as women in this situation; (2) the extent to which they refer to gender in explaining the conflict; and (3) how they see their actions affecting gender norms and relations within their community.
... Commemorative landscapes, particularly those which evoke the memory of war, are among the most gendered, as they largely document (and subsequently reproduce) the experiences and narratives of men (Muzaini and Yeoh 2005), and often elide or complicate the interpretations of women (Johnson 1994;Morris 1997). This phenomenon is inexorably bound to nationalism and nationhood as countries emerging from war often attempt to restore the ideals of masculinity (Ashe 2006a) such as national pride, courage, physical strength and self-sacrifice. Nations as Nagle (1998) asserts are inherently patriarchal and nationalism (which can be understood as a narrative of the nation that binds a collective people -Layoun 1991, 410), according to Enloe (1990, 45), emanates from 'masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope'. ...
... Throughout the conflict private spaces such as the home were stereotypically gendered and quintessentially feminine (Dowler 1998). Throughout the Troubles, however, private and public spaces often became blurred as violence spilled over from the street and penetrated the sanctity of the home which, in identifying its occupants as being from one side or the other, often became the place where killings occurred (Aretxaga 1997;Reid 2005, Ashe 2006a). The sectarian segregation of residential space 2 in Northern Ireland meant that the home could and did become a place of directed violence. ...
... During their brief history, the women facilitated exchange between Republicans and politicians and frequently lobbied for civil rights before being pushed out of the political sphere as a result of what Hammond Callaghan (2002,35) believes to have been 'structural inequalities including gender conditions'. Similarly the motivations behind the 1970s Peace People (who again were entirely female) had their roots in the killings of three children, conforming to what may be seen to be stereotypical maternal values (McWilliams 1995;Ashe 2006a). ...
War is instrumental in shaping and negotiating gender identities. But what role does peace play in dispelling or affirming the gender order in post-conflict contexts? Building on a burgeoning international literature on representative landscapes and based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Northern Ireland between 2003 and 2006, this article explores the peacetime commemoration of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ in order to explore the nuances of gender. Tellingly, the memorial landscapes cultivated since the inception of the paramilitary ceasefires in 1994 privilege male interpretations of the past (and, therefore, present). Gender parity, despite being enshrined within the 1998 Belfast Agreement which sought to draw a line under almost three decades of ethno-nationalist violence, remains an elusive utopia, as memorials continue to propagate specific roles for men and women in the ‘national project’. As the masculine ideologies of Irish Nationalism/Republicanism and British Unionism/Loyalism inscribe their respective disputant pasts into the streetscape, the narratives of women have been blurred and disrupted, begging the question: what role can they play in the future?
... Conversely, men have been constituted through ethno-nationalist discourses and practices as 'natural' combatants (Ashe 2006 and. Men's more visible roles in paramilitary violence have meant that 'the Troubles' have been viewed as revolving around the activities of 'hard men' prepared and able to transcend common morality through violence to protect and defend the higher ideal of the nation and its people (Ashe 2006 and. ...
... Conversely, men have been constituted through ethno-nationalist discourses and practices as 'natural' combatants (Ashe 2006 and. Men's more visible roles in paramilitary violence have meant that 'the Troubles' have been viewed as revolving around the activities of 'hard men' prepared and able to transcend common morality through violence to protect and defend the higher ideal of the nation and its people (Ashe 2006 and. Scholars of CBRJ have tried to illustrate that combatant men's involvement in violence during conflict does not mean that they FROM PARAMILITARIES TO PEACEMAKERS 303 have to remain outside the sphere of peacemaking or conflict-transformational activities. ...
... Incorrectly the terrain of peacekeeping has been associated with women and violent conflict with men (see, e.g. Sales 1998;Ashe 2006Ashe , 2007aAshe and 2008. Men's move on to the terrain of peacemaking therefore has an element of uniqueness. ...
Community-based restorative justice (CBRJ) schemes emerged in Northern Ireland during the ‘peace process’ to provide an alternative to paramilitary systems of justice. These initiatives have received considerable academic attention. A complex and critical literature has now emerged in this area; however, extant explorations of CBRJ have tended to sideline issues of gender power. Feminists and international bodies, such as the United Nations, have highlighted the importance of addressing historical gendered inequities in terms of the design and evaluation of conflict transformation initiatives. Drawing on contemporary feminist frameworks this article exposes the importance of the category of gender in evaluations of CBRJ in Northern Ireland. Moreover, it scrutinises the theoretical processes through which issues of gender power have been filtered out of evaluations of community-based restorative justice schemes in the region.
... The author has previously developed gendered accounts of the conflict in Northern Ireland and its transformation (see e.g. Ashe, 2006aAshe, , 2006bAshe, , 2008Ashe, , 2011. This book extends the reach and depth of that previous research. ...
... That body of research mapped the reproduction of gender and sexual identities and inequalities within the context of peacebuilding across particular institutions, processes and narratives of conflict transformation (see e.g. Ashe, 2006aAshe, , 2006bAshe, , 2008Ashe, , 2011. ...
... Additionally, women are often granted less freedom in the aftermath than during the struggle (Anand, 2010). Even in cases when women actively contributed to nationalist struggles (Ashe, 2006) and when women's emancipation is declared integral (Steans, 2006), they seldom gain long-term advances in gender equality. As such, "nationalist revolutions are certainly not watersheds for women" (Steans, 2006, p. 42). ...
This chapter explores how citizenship, nationalism and gender intersect, specifically in deeply divided transitional societies. It discusses how these intersections impact women’s political citizenship and public participation with the aim of defining what a gender-just political citizenship entails. This chapter thus provides a theoretical framework that addresses gendered political citizenship in ethno-nationalist societies and explores how gender equality is affected by transitions from war to peace; how this can open space for renegotiating citizenship but also cause a backlash for women’s rights. The theories of agonistic peace and transversal politics are studied, especially in terms of their potential for creating space for inclusive dialogue and political activism in deeply divided societies. This chapter then theorises how women’s grassroots cross-community activities could inform the conceptualisation of citizenship so that it recognises, validates and encourages women’s political participation. Transversalism is utilised to imagine a gender-just citizenship that builds on intersectionality, multi-sited participation and facilitates coalitions across difference.
... Following Arlene Foster's ascension to First Minister in 2016, her DUP colleague Edwin Poots MLA declared in the Assembly that becoming First Minister is the 'second most important job that she will ever take on' and that 'her most important job has been, and will remain, that of a wife, mother and daughter'. 20 Fidelma Ashe (2006aAshe ( , b, 2007 notes the way that public female figures in the immediate years following devolution, most notably the McCartney sisters and the mothers of children in the Holy Cross school dispute, 21 became symbolic of certain socially conservative ideals surrounding the family and motherhood. ...
2018 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement and the establishment of devolved governance in Northern Ireland. Yet, whilst devolution has largely been held to have positive effects in Scotland and Wales with regards to both women’s descriptive and substantive representation, this impact has been less discernible in Northern Ireland. Of the four regions of the United Kingdom, politics in Northern Ireland is arguably the most unfeminised—women have routinely seen lower descriptive representation in the Northern Irish Assembly and policy-making in areas such as reproductive rights lies far behind the rest of the UK. The article explores why politics is so unfeminised in the post-conflict context in Northern Ireland, by looking at efforts to feminise formal politics (especially the various peace/inter-party agreements and attempts to include women in formal politics) and efforts to politicise feminist activism (the work of the women’s sector to influence policy-making in the province). It then explores some of the academic explanations as to why the feminisation of politics remains so difficult in Northern Ireland.
... Moreover, in 2001, North Belfast was the scene of the virulent sectarian Holy Cross dispute where a route used by Catholic primary school children was contested and blocked, as it passed through the Protestant enclave Glenbryn/upper Ardoyne(Jarman 2003). Residents claimed that republicans were using the cover of taking their kids to school to enter the area and attack Protestants(Ashe 2006). ...
In Northern Ireland, parades have long been important carriers of politico-cultural identities and collective memories, as well as arenas of struggle and conflict. Taking as its starting point that these contests over meaning are always framed by their contexts of articulation both in temporal and spatial terms, this article examines the role of parades in the current ‘post-conflict’ phase of the peace process as it plays out in a particular location, namely North Belfast. Using theories of cultural and collective memory and examples from republican and loyalist parades in North Belfast, it is argued that there is fear of memory and identity collapse in particular communities on the margins of the peace process, leading to a conscious doubling of efforts to (re)articulate the hidden recesses of memory in the current transition. In this, the patterns of ‘competitive commemoration’ in parades should be understood both horizontally: as majority memory traditions move to minority memory positions, and vertically: in relation to the increasing dissonance between vernacular practices of conflict and the official post-conflict discourses in Northern Ireland. Central to these arguments is the recognition that parading traditions are at once presentist, competitive instruments and also emotional and embodied practices to ensure the continuity of identity. It follows that both dimensions must be recognised together, if cognitive and visceral templates of conflict are to be explained and shifted. This article applies a wide-angle memory studies lens to capture the two together and explore the changing parade-scape.
... In Northern Ireland feminists have attempted to expose how women became positioned as sym- bols of the nation, for example, in the form of Mother Ireland (see Ashe 2008 for overview). Traditionally, ethno-nationalist discourses in Northern Ireland have associated women with the private sphere, and women in the region have often embodied the cultural values of both ethno-nationalist groups (see Ashe 2006aAshe , 2006bAshe , 2006cDavis and Roulston 2000;V. Morgan 1995). ...
... In Northern Ireland, Dowler (1998) found that women ex-combatants were treated with suspicion and their contribution to the military campaign quickly forgotten. Ethnonationalist discourses tend to frame women's roles as maternal and domestic (see Yuval- Davis and Anthias 1989) and this has been the case in Northern Ireland (see Ashe 2006Ashe , 2007aAshe , 2007cDavis and Roulston 2000). In contrast, men have been associated with public arenas and traditionally dominated military organizations. ...
There has been extensive academic analysis of Northern Ireland’s ethnonationalist antagonisms. However, academic literature that has explored both the region’s ethno-nationalist conflict and its more recent processes of conflict transformation has neglected the concept of masculinities. This article employs the framework of critical studies of men/masculinities to analyze why men’s gendered identities have received so little attention in a society that is marked by deep gendered inequalities and also exposes the consequences of this neglect in terms of exploring gendered power relationships in Northern Ireland society. Additionally, the article employs the concept of militarized masculinities to explore the relationships between ethnonationalist conflict, conflict transformation, men’s gendered identities, and gender power in the region.
This chapter analyses women’s political identities and public participation in Northern Ireland since the 1998 peace agreement. It discusses grassroots, party-political and legislative notions of citizen participation and how women participate in formal political life. Northern Ireland’s ethno-nationally based consociational structures and the barriers they present to women’s participation and the advancement of gender equality are also explored. The analysis addresses different manifestations of women’s public, political participation, filtered through aspects such as ethno-nationalist background, level of political activity and gender norms. The chapter also discusses the potential for and obstacles to women’s descriptive and substantive political representation in the formal political system. Overall, this chapter explores indications of progress, standstill or backlash in terms of women’s right to participate in public, political life in Northern Ireland since 1998.
Trauma demands a melancholic orientation to the past, a wish to recover what is lost. In conflicts located in long histories of political difference, a focus on the traumas acquired through the violences of the past is crucial, but this focus may do more than inform the politics of the present. The risk is that the symptoms of the trauma become the symptoms of policy. The political environment that emerges lacks the maturity to understand the ordinary emotions of politics and this further limits the possibility of creative political horizons. In short, in the interests of placating trauma survivors and sometimes in the interests of ensuring no issue gets left behind, politics can be trumped by trauma. Here, we discuss how this has occurred in Northern Ireland and how the ‘trauma’ of non-indigenous Australians has trumped the possibility of addressing the ‘unfinished business of justice’ for Indigenous Australians.
Explorations of Protestant, unionist and loyalist (PUL) women’s identities during the conflict suggested that they were less politically active than their Irish nationalist and republican counterparts. Throughout the conflict, they appeared to be suspicious of feminism and content to ‘do their bit’ to defend the Union within the regulatory gender structures of male dominated unionist politics and culture. Generally, unionism has been viewed as providing limited space for feminist reconstructions of PUL women’s identities. Certainly, in comparison to Irish nationalist and republican women, PUL women were less visible during the conflict. However, recent feminist research has illustrated that their political agency and gendered transgressions are diverse and shifting. This chapter employs a radical constructionist framework to explore the complex processes through which PUL gendered identities are constituted, disciplined and transgressed. This volume’s division of pro-unionist identities into the categories of Protestant, unionist and loyalist already recognises the necessity of mapping the effects of intra-communal differences on seemingly homogeneous groups. This chapter explores the concept of difference in the unionist community further by foregrounding the intersection of Protestantism, unionism and loyalism with gender. Throughout, it illustrates how extant feminist research exposes the challenges for PUL women in a context not only marked by contested political histories and processes of conflict transformation/management, but also the historical relationships of gender that have impacted women in both ethno-nationalist communities.
This chapter looks at the politics of the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and argues that the faltering attempts to establish devolution in Northern Ireland were a product of the ways in which contemporary political developments are saturated with the politics of the past. This chapter explores how the legacies of the conflict continued to influence post-Agreement politics in the North. The underlying question is the extent to which it is possible to speak of peace and transition in a society that is still characterised by sectarian division at the social and geographic levels and political entrenchment and polarisation at the level of elite politics. The chapter examines the episodic attempts to establish a power-sharing government at Stormont and the similarly sporadic attempts by the Northern Ireland Office and the Northern Ireland Assembly to establish mechanisms for dealing with the legacies of the Troubles. Although these mechanisms have created financial and medical assistance for victims, the debate over the meaning of the conflict reveals an underlying trend concerning the ability of the past to influence the present. Thus, while governmental initiatives may appear to deal with the past in a piecemeal fashion, in fact, the divisions over power-sharing and the meaning of the Troubles simply reflect the fact that the contributory causes of the conflict — namely, antagonistic policy objectives and different, communally-based experiences of the violence — continue to shape contemporary politics.
The field of masculinities research continues to expand, and has become increasingly complex. Much of the contemporary analysis of men, masculinity and power has been influenced by the work of a number of profeminist writers who have been leading figures in developing new political interventions around men's identities and power. These men have been at the forefront of interrogations of the concept of masculinity and have attempted to develop new forms of radical gender-conscious politics for men who seek to extend gender justice. The New Politics of Masculinity is the first single-authored feminist text to engage critically with the theoretical frameworks which leading profeminist writers have developed in the field of masculinity studies. Drawing on new social movement and contemporary theory, the book examines the different models of politics that such writers have evolved for men who want to challenge dominant forms of masculinities and inequitable gender relationships. It also assesses the broader effects - on the field of men and masculinities research - of these writers' diverse theorisations of key political concepts such as masculinity, subjectivity, power and resistance.
Public policy is expected to be both responsive to societal views and accountable to all citizens. As such, policy is informed, but not governed, by public opinion. Therefore, understanding the attitudes of the public is important, both to help shape and to evaluate policy priorities. In this way, surveys play a potentially important role in the policy making process.
The aim of this paper is to explore the role of survey research in policy making in Northern Ireland, with particular reference to community relations (better known internationally as good relations). In a region which is emerging from 40 years of conflict, community relations is a key policy area.
For more than 20 years, public attitudes to community relations have been recorded and monitored using two key surveys: the Northern Ireland Social Attitudes Survey (1989 to 1996) and the Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey (1998 to present). This paper will illustrate how these important time series datasets have been used to both inform and evaluate government policy in relation to community relations. By using four examples, we will highlight how these survey data have provided key government indicators of community relations, as well as how they have been used by other groups (such as NGOs) within policy consultation debates. Thus, the paper will provide a worked example of the integral, and bi-directional relationship between attitude measurement and policy making.
This study is written by three 'insiders' to church peacebuilding in Northern Ireland, who are also sociologists and bring to their analysis a wealth of experience and analytic insight, based on four years of qualitative interviewing amongst church leaders and rank-and-file members of political parties, prime ministers, paramilitary organizations, community development, and civil society groups, as well as government politicians and advisors. It seeks to correct various misapprehensions about the role of the churches by pointing to their major achievements in both the social and political dimensions of the peace process, by small-scale, lesser-known religious peacebuilders as well as major players. The book is replete with hard sociological realism; it does not treat the churches lightly or sentimentally but highlights major weaknesses in their contribution. It challenges the view that ecumenism was the main religious driver of the peace process; focusing instead on the role of evangelicals, it warns against romanticizing civil society, pointing to its regressive aspects and counter-productive activities, and queries the relevance of the idea of "spiritual capital" to understanding the role of the churches in post-conflict reconstruction, which the churches largely ignore. The study develops a conceptual framework to understand religious peacebuilding in a comparative perspective, allowing the Northern Irish case study to speak to other conflicts where religion is thought to be problematic. © John D. Brewer, Gareth I. Higgins, and Francis Teeney 2011. All rights reserved.
Academic feminists have turned to feminist theory to develop ways of managing or solving ethnic antagonisms, especially among feminists/women in Northern Ireland. This essay troubles the application of feminist theory to conflict resolution/management in Northern Ireland. It examines the impact of this type of deployment of theory on key feminist categories such as identity and difference. It also considers what becomes marginalised from the analysis of gender politics in Northern Ireland when feminist theory is harnessed to solving/managing the Northern Ireland problem. The essay concludes by arguing for the development of alternative feminist frameworks that are not contained within the boundaries of a search for solutions.
The murder of Robert McCartney in Belfast in January 2005 sparked a campaign by his sisters and partner to bring his murderer(s), allegedly members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, to justice. The article examines the gender politics of this campaign. It explores how the campaign simultaneously reflected and contested traditional ideas about women's subjectivities and roles in ethnically divided societies. Furthermore, the article highlights how the ideologies of masculinity and femininity acted as political resources for the campaigners in their struggle with the Irish republican hierarchy.
The implementation of post-conflict transitional justice in Northern Ireland has been an extremely contentious part of the tenuous peace. Indeed, issues of accountability and culpability frequently trouble countries in times of transition and post-conflict reconstruction. Following more than thirty years of civil war, Northern Ireland now struggles with how to remember, reconcile and recover from the violence. Yet parties to the conflict fail to agree on the simple dichotomy of who are the victims and who were the perpetrators. Through an analysis of 40 in-depth interviews conducted with ordinary people who suffered violence, this paper examines the variations in violence experienced during the Troubles and how this variation is affecting justice claims in the post-conflict period. The future of peace in Northern Ireland has yet to be determined, but it is certain that issues of justice and accountability will be central in the healing and political reconstruction of the country.
Studies of the female partners of politically motivated prisoners have generally studied women via a caring paradigm. Less well observed are those women who privately transgressed and challenged masculine-centred renditions or political imprisonment. This lacuna in the research dedicated to such women has been constructed around stereotypical depictions of them as a barely visible support network. We argue that the relatively indiscernible appearance of women who challenged such typecasting is attached to a persistent process of gender blindness within which women remain peripheral to wider narratives of collectivity and ideological presentation. We chart how some women actively involved themselves in creating their own identity as active agents, especially when the effects of conflict entered the private sphere.
War is a highly gendered experience which is both informed by and informs constructions of masculinity and femininity. The dominant depiction of masculine heroes and feminine victims simplifies the complex intersections of militarism, nationalism and gendered roles and identities. Focusing on a case study of the Anglo-Irish War or War of Independence (1919–1921), this paper examines how violence against women, especially sexual violence, was written about and reported in ways which framed representations of Irish and British masculinity and Irish femininity.
In addition, by analysing a range of varied sources including newspapers, autobiographical accounts and recorded testimonies, this paper attempts to assess the extent to which violence against women formed a key aspect of military practice in the war. In conclusion, I engage with some of the difficulties faced by researchers today in exploring evidence of gendered violence in specific historical, cultural and militarized contexts.
Monica McWilliams is a senior lecturer in social policy at the University of Ulster at Jordanstown and acts as the course director for postgraduate and access courses in women's studies at Belfast and Derry. She has been active in the civil rights and women's rights movements, held an elected seat on the Northern Ireland Committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, and has worked closely with a wide range of women's and community groups since 1978. She is coauthor of Bringing It Out in the Open: Domestic Violence in Northern Ireland.
1. Royal Ulster Constabulary Statistics Unit (Belfast: Northern Ireland Office, October 1994). The injuries figure date from 1968 whilst the first death attributed to the political situation occured in 1969.
2. John Ditch and Mike Morrissey "Northern Ireland: Review and Prospects For Social Policy," Social Policy and Administration, 26, 1 (1992): 18.
3. It has been claimed that 35 million tranquilizers are used in Northern Ireland each year and that twice as many women as men are dependent on these. See Marie-Therese McGivern and Margaret Ward, Images of Women In Northern Ireland (London: Crane Bag, 1982).
4. The term "frozen watchfulness" is one that has applied to children who have been victims of abuse.
5. Pauline Prior, Mental Health and Politics in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Queen's University, 1993).
6. Monica McWilliams, "The Woman 'Other,'" Fortnight: An Independent Review of Politics and the Arts in Northern Ireland 328 (1994): 24-25. See Lena Ferguson, "Some Are More Equal," Ibid., 25.
7. Cathy Harkin coined this term when working with Women's Aid in Derry City between 1977 and 1981. She died in 1984; a year after her death an article was published outlining some of these views. See Cathy Harkin and Avilla Kilmurray, "Working With Women In Derry" in Women In Community Work, ed. M. Abbott and H. Frazer (Belfast: Farset Press, 1985), 38-45.
8. Joan McKiernan and Monica McWilliams, "The Impact of Political Conflict on Domestic Violence in Northern Ireland," in Gender Relations In Public and Private, ed. Lydia Morris (London: Macmillan, in press).
9. Royal Ulster Constabulary Statistics Unit (Belfast, Northen Ireland Office, October 1994).
10. Convictions which apply to domestic violence in Northern Ireland are often referred to as part of the "ordinary decent" crime to distinguish it from the convictions which result from political offenses.
11. Margaret Ward, The Missing Sex: Putting Women Into Irish History, (Dublin: Attic Press, 1991).
12. Very little material is available on the lives of Cathy Harkin and Madge Davison who died in 1984 and 1991 repectively. Both were leading activists in the civil rights movement and were influential in the development of the women's movement in Northern Ireland.
13. At a women's history conference in Dublin in 1989, particpants commented that the use of the telephone rather than letter writing may help to explain why so little archival material is currently available.
14. Mary Daly, Outercourse: The Be-Dazzling Voyage (London: The Woman's Press, 1993).
15. Jill Radford, "History of Women's Liberation Movements in Britain: A Reflective Personal History," in Stirring It: Challenges For Feminism, ed. Gabrielle Griffin, Marriane Hester, Shirin Rai and Sasha Roseneil (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994), 40.
16. Ruth Taillon, Grant-aided . . . or Taken For Granted? A Study of Women's Voluntary Organisations in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Women's Support Network, 1992).
17. F. Haug, Lessons From the Women's Movement in Europe," Feminist Review 31 (1989): 109.
18. Rebecca Dobash and Russell Dobash, Women Violence And Social Change (New York: Routledge, 1992), 17-18.
19. Pamela Montgomery and Celia Davies, "A Woman's Place in Northern Ireland," in Social Attitudes in Northern Ireland, ed. Peter Stringer and Gillian Robinson (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1991), 74-96.
20. Monica McWilliams, "The Church, the State and the Women's Movement in Northern Ireland," in Irish Women's Studies Reader, ed. Ailbhe Smyth (Dublin: Attic Press, 1993), 79-100.
21. It is only since the late 1980s that women in Northern Ireland have begun to identify more easily with the label of feminist. At one stage the term "family feminists" was applied to local women...
This article argues against general or unitary theories of nations and nationalism, stressing instead the irreducible specificity of the national phenomena. It is argued that individual nationalisms always contain a very particular ‘content’ that aims to define the general culture and values of the ‘national’ people and which, in turn, is related to the construction and deployment of such values within political ideological discourse. The significance of this specific ‘content’ is obscured by unitary theories.
t is further argued that the best way to understand and analyse this ‘content’ is a discourse analysis that relates the production of nation and national identity to wider political, and other, discourses. Conceptualizing nations and nationalism in this way enables us to see the centrality of nation in framing modern political discourse and its crucial place in the ideological ‘institution’ of modern society providing an appearance of ‘closure’ or ‘unity’ where there is division and contradiction.
In this article I will firstly argue that genocide and wars are gendered but also often feminised via the positioning of women not only as sexual trophies exchangeable between male enemies, not only as markers of collective boundaries, but also as the symbolic representations of national and ethnic collectivities. I will then interrogate the centrality of rape as a component of ethno-sexual identities and an instrument of war, focusing on the difficulties we have \'as women\' but also as social scientists, to theorise wartime rape. Finally I will propose that creating a forum for women war victims to narrativise their traumatic experiences is a vital feminist strategy of beginning to close the gap between genocide and gender and between trauma and the discourses available to narrate it.
This book examines the place of women within ethnic and national communities in nine different societies, and the ways in which the state intervenes in their lives. Contributions from a group of scholars examine the situations in their religious, economic and historical context.
The movement for ‘military preparedness’ in America and Britain gained tremendous momentum at the turn of the century. It assimilated the cult of manliness - the key public virtue, which allowed a person to claim possession of himself and a nation to reclaim possession of itself. An army was the means of marshalling a mass of people for regeneration. The symbol of a nation's preparedness to take control of its own soul was the readiness to bear arms.
Although this movement originated in the middle-class, Protestant cultures of the USA and England, its core ideas were adopted by many political movements. Affected by these ideas, as well as the formation of the Protestant Ulster Volunteers in 1913, a movement to reclaim Irish independence through the mass bearing of arms began in South and West Ireland in autumn 1914. Women were excluded from these Volunteer companies, but set up their own organization, Cumann na mBan, as an auxiliary to the men's. The Easter Rising in 1916 owed as much to older ideas of the coup d'état as new ideas of mass mobilization, but subsequent history recreated that Rising as the ‘founding’ moment of the Irish republic.
It was not until mass conscription was threatened two years later that the mass of people were absorbed into the idea of an armed campaign against British rule. From 1919 to 1923, the reality of guerrilla-style war pressed people into a frame demanding discipline, secrecy, loyalty and a readiness to act as the prime nationalist virtues. The ideal form of relationship in war is the brotherhood, both as actuality and potent myth. The mythology of brotherhood creates its own myths of women (as not being there, and men not needing them) as well as creating the fear and the myth that rape is the inevitable expression of brotherhoods in action. Despite explicit anxiety at the time about the rape of Irish women by British soldiers, no evidence was found of mass rape, and that fear has disappeared into oblivion, throwing up important questions as to when rape is a weapon of war.
The decade of war worsened the relationship of women to the political realm. Despite active involvement as ‘auxiliaries’ women's political status was permanently damaged by their exclusion as warriors and brothers, so much so that they disappear into the status of wives and mothers in the 1937 Irish Constitution.
The movement for 'military preparedness' in America and Britain gained tremendous momentum at the turn of the century. It assimilated the cult of manliness - the key public virtue, which allowed a person to claim possession of himself and a nation to reclaim possession of itself. An army was the means of marshalling a mass of people for regeneration. The symbol of a nation's preparedness to take control of its own soul was the readiness to bear arms. Although this movement originated in the middle-class, Protestant cultures of the USA and England, its core ideas were adopted by many political movements. Affected by these ideas, as well as the formation of the Protestant Ulster Volunteers in 1913, a movement to reclaim Irish independence through the mass bearing of arms began in South and West Ireland in autumn 1914. Women were excluded from these Volunteer companies, but set up their own organization, Cumann na mBan, as an auxiliary to the men's. The Easter Rising in 1916 owed as much to older ideas of the coup d'état as new ideas of mass mobilization, but subsequent history recreated that Rising as the 'founding' moment of the Irish republic. It was not until mass conscription was threatened two years later that the mass of people were absorbed into the idea of an armed campaign against British rule. From 1919 to 1923, the reality of guerrilla-style war pressed people into a frame demanding discipline, secrecy, loyalty and a readiness to act as the prime nationalist virtues. The ideal form of relationship in war is the brotherhood, both as actuality and potent myth. The mythology of brotherhood creates its own myths of women (as not being there, and men not needing them) as well as creating the fear and the myth that rape is the inevitable expression of brotherhoods in action. Despite explicit anxiety at the time about the rape of Irish women by British soldiers, no evidence was found of mass rape, and that fear has disappeared into oblivion, throwing up important questions as to when rape is a weapon of war. The decade of war worsened the relationship of women to the political realm. Despite active involvement as 'auxiliaries' women's political status was permanently damaged by their exclusion as warriors and brothers, so much so that they disappear into the status of wives and mothers in the 1937 Irish Constitution.
This article defines a republican feminist agenda by reference to the key term 'self-determination', in its nationalist and its feminist meanings. It describes the activities of a republican feminist group, Clár na mBan, including a conference organized in March 1994, and initiatives taken since then.
Nationalisms are polymorphous and often internally contradictory, unleashing emancipatory as well as repressive ideas and forces. This article explores the ideologies and mobilization strategies of two organizations over a 10-year period in the occupied Palestinian territories: a leftist-nationalist party in which women became unusually powerful and its affiliated and remarkably successful nationalist-feminist women's organization. Two factors allowed women to become powerful and facilitated a fruitful coexistence between nationalism and feminism: (1) a commitment to a variant of modernist ideology that was marked by grassroots as opposed to military mobilization and (2) a concern with proving the cultural worth of Palestinian society to the West, a project that was symbolized by women's status in important ways. By comparing international and indigenous feminist discourses, the study also demonstrates how narratives about gender status in the Third World are implicated in, and inextricable from, international economic and political inequalities.
ABSTRACT This article examines the spatial construction of gender roles in a time of war. During a period of armed conflict both women and men are perceived as beings who exemplify gender-specific virtues. The relationship of gender and identity in this case is a paradoxical one: war-usually a catalyst of change-can often become an agent of conservatism as regards gender identities. This conservatism can be seen in the wartime spatial relegation of women to the private/domestic realm. When a society is in armed conflict there is a predisposition to perceive men as violent and action-oriented and women as compassionate and supportive to the male warrior. These gender tropes do not denote the actions of women and men in a time of war, but function instead to re-create and secure women's position as non-combatants and that of men as warriors. Thus, women have historically been marginalized in the consciousness of those who have researched the events of war. This article is largely based on interviews I conducted in the fall of 1993, in an Irish Catholic community in Belfast, Northern Ireland. I will offer both female and male interpretations of what women did and how they were affected by the upheavals of the Irish Nationalist struggle in Northern Ireland.
Academic feminists have turned to feminist theory to develop ways of managing or solving ethnic antagonisms, especially among feminists/women in Northern Ireland. This essay troubles the application of feminist theory to conflict resolution/management in Northern Ireland. It examines the impact of this type of deployment of theory on key feminist categories such as identity and difference. It also considers what becomes marginalised from the analysis of gender politics in Northern Ireland when feminist theory is harnessed to solving/managing the Northern Ireland problem. The essay concludes by arguing for the development of alternative feminist frameworks that are not contained within the boundaries of a search for solutions.
This article explores the intimate historical and modern connection between manhood and nationhood: through the construction of patriotic manhood and exalted motherhood as icons of nationalist ideology; through the designation of gendered 'places' for men and women in national politics; through the domination of masculine interests and ideology in nationalist movements; through the interplay between masculine microcultures and nationalist ideology; through sexualized militarism including the construction of simultaneously over-sexed and under-sexed 'enemy' men (rapists and wimps) and promiscuous 'enemy' women (sluts and whores). Three 'puzzles' are partially solved by exposing the connection between masculinity and nationalism: why are many men so desperate to defend masculine, monoracial, and heterosexual institutional preserves, such as military organizations and academies; why do men go to war; and the 'gender gap', that is, why do men and women appear to have very different goals and agendas for the 'nation?'
All nationalisms are gendered, all are invented, snd all are dangerousdangerous, not in Eric Hobsbawm's sense as having to be opposed, but in the sense of representing relations to political power and to the technologies of violence. Nationalism, as Ernest Gellner notes, invents nations where they do not exist, and most modern nations, despite their appeal to an august and immemorial past, are of recent invention (Gellner, 1964). Benedict Anderson warns, however, that Gellner tends to assimilate 'invention' to 'falsity' rather than to 'imagining' and 'creation'. Anderson, by contrast, views nations as 'imagined communities' in the sense that they are systems of cultural representation whereby people come to imagine a shared experience of identification with an extended community (Anderson, 1991: 6). As such, nations are not simply phantasmagoria of the mind, but are historical and institutional practices through which social difference is invented and performed. Nationalism becomes, as a result, radically constitutive of people's identities, through social contests that are frequently violent and always gendered. But if the invented nature of nationalism has found wide theoretical currency, explorations of the gendering of the national imaginary have been conspicuously paltry. All nations depend on powerful constructions of gender. Despite nationalisms' ideological investment in the idea of popular unity, nations have historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalization of gender difference. No nation in the world gives women and men the same access to the rights and resources of the nation-state. Rather than expressing the flowering into time of the organic essence of a timeless people, nations are contested systems of cultural representation that limit and legitimize peoples' access to the resources of the nation-state. Yet with the notable exception of Frantz Fanon, male theorists have seldom felt moved to explore how nationalism is
Scared-Or Scarred for Life? ', Spiked Politics
- C Gilligan
Children on the Frontline
- D Brown
Children in the Frontline
- M Bunting
Disaffected Mob Turns its Rage on School Children
- S Breen
Holy Cross and the Victim Discourse
- L Friel
All We Wanted Was to Get Our Kids to School
- S Hall
Ghetto of Hate where Conflict is a Way of Life
- A Hill
Don't Blame These Pathetic Creatures
- D Orr
Scared - Or Scarred for Life?
- C Gilligan
Holy Cross: The Lies behind the Truth
- L Friel
Troops out Organise Holy Cross Mothers' Speaking Tour
- M Pearson
Last Stand in the Ghetto of Hate
- M O'kane