Irish Women's Writing and Culture under the Shadow of Austerity

Flynn, Deirdre; Murphy, C.

doi:10.4324/9781003207474-1

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…However, McCormack decries neoliberalism's gendered violence, just not so overtly as Barker, even closing on a female-led call to communal action. As such, he reflects how ‘women were hardest hit by the 2008 recession’ due to the downplaying of equality initiatives and cuts to welfare support combined (Flynn and Murphy, 2022). While Union Street sits easily against female-centred theatrical and filmic contexts, Solar Bones corresponds to a subset of 1990s and early 2000s Irish theatrical productions denouncing property speculation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tracking the monstrous gendered precarity of neoliberalisation through novels and films of 1980s England and contemporary Ireland

Houlden

2023

Feminist Theory

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article compares cultural production about 1980s working-class industrial England with that of contemporary, middle-class rural Ireland in order to identify aesthetic through lines in the portrayal of social reproductive violence across both early- and later-stage neoliberalism. It argues that, despite their differences in setting and demographic, novels by Pat Barker and Mike McCormack use peripheral political experience to show the bodies of women bearing the brunt of late capitalism's horrors. Barker's Union Street (1982) serves as an early warning of the neoliberal consensus-to-come, bringing to life the geographic peripheralisation that would accompany deindustrialisation. It portrays the conflicted dynamic between childhood and capital, also anticipating the ways in which care work would increasingly be externalised onto women in the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond. This overlaps with the 1987 film Rita, Sue and Bob Too's portrayal of childhood sexual vulnerability, as well as Letter to Brezhnev (1985) and its rendering of capitalism's consumption of women. Instead of the realism for which these films are known, Union Street uses gothic modes and the motif of vomiting in ‘irrealist’ fashion. So too, Mike McCormack's Mayo-set 2016 novel Solar Bones employs spectrality, as well as ideas of contamination, to evoke the damage wrought by a now-entrenched neoliberalism as it imperils the middle classes. The novel's recognition of female social reproductive labour is more oblique, but women are again shown to be at the coalface of neoliberal violence, their very bodies marshalled to detect and, crucially, resist gendered precarity. In this, I draw parallel with the Dundalk-set film Kissing Candice (2017) , which uses gothic tropes to show rural dispossession writ large through the body of a teenage girl.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%