Gender, Nation, and the Politics of Shame: Magdalen Laundries and the Institutionalization of Feminine Transgression in Modern Ireland

Revealing Ireland's “Proper” Heart: Apology, Shame, Nation

“…I have previously argued that this gendered institutionalization and the moral panic surrounding reproduction and sexuality in the early decades of the Irish state should be read in terms of the disidentification with the former colonial power and the need to develop a new national identity that secured the superiority of the Irish people (Fischer ). The project of nation‐building, post‐Independence, came to be premised on the unrivaled moral purity of Ireland—a moral purity that easily translated into the sexual purity of Irish women.…”

“…Since all women, though, also formed potential threats to this national identity through their embodied capacity for impurity—and, importantly, visible and therefore indisputable impurity—the Irish state, with the support of the Catholic Church, developed an aggressive strategy for excising those who “lapsed.” Sexual transgression was to be hidden and punished through a system of often mutually reinforcing institutions, thereby allowing for the continued representation of Ireland to itself and the world as a nation of morally pure superiority. What becomes evident, in this context, is the operation of the gendered politics of shame, as contemporaneous discourses illustrate the rationalization of mass incarceration of gendered Others through the pervasive mobilization of shame (Fischer ). By constructing sexual transgressors as shameful and attracting shame—to themselves, their families, and the wider polity—the gendered politics of shame underpinned a vast system of institutionalization that performed that classic mechanism of shame itself: it covered and hid Ireland's assumed national blemishes.…”

“…Shame is thus a deeply debilitating emotion that keeps intact the assumed blemish on one's character—a blemish that requires covering lest one “lose face” and be revealed as inadequate. In post‐Independence Ireland, church and state deployed shame as a disciplining device to satisfy the national imaginary's demands for a superior vision of Ireland by constructing as shameful those women who threatened the formation of a new national identity built on moral (that is, sexual) purity (Fischer ). In a performance of the gendered politics of shame, shameful national subjects thus came to be identified and constructed as blemishes on the nation, and were covered, that is, hidden away, in institutions to guarantee the preservation of a national identity of purity and superior virtue…”

“…Understood like this, Irish nation‐building engages a politics of shame that operates both via the construction of shamed, deviant Others hidden away in Ireland's network of institutions, and via the shame brought onto itself precisely through the maltreatment meted out to those deemed deviant Others. The Irish nation thus reproduces itself in this paradoxical, circular manner, as it draws on shame's capacity to bind people in the creation of national collectivities through the establishment of “insiders” and “outsiders” (which never quite works for women as the Outsiders Within anyway [Fischer ]), or through the assumption of collective or supra‐individual failings that make us feel shame as (the) people of Ireland.…”

“…Building on work that problematizes the gendered politics of shame in the context of nation‐building and the disciplining of bodies, this article focuses on the role shame plays in state apology and the desire to recover pride (see Fischer ) . Specifically, it analyzes the state apology offered to the survivors of Magdalen Laundries by Enda Kenny, the Taoiseach (prime minister) of Ireland .…”