‘He devours her with his gaze’: Maurice Leitch's Stamping Ground and the Politics of the Visual

Abstract

This essay is a critical reappraisal of Maurice Leitch's 1975 novel Stamping Ground through theories of the gender, sexuality, and the visual. The novel will be read as a disruptive critique of hegemonic Unionist identity and the rural idyll in Northern Irish cultural discourse but, importantly, the limits of using gendered metaphors in the case will be considered. For, although this novel seeks to critique ideology built around a certain kind of masculine dominance it does so using tropes which will be deconstructed through theories of the body, sexuality, and the visual aesthetic. For Leitch, the Ulster countryside is recast as not the authentic space reconstructed by both Nationalist or Unionist ideology but rather as a nightmarish world of voyeurs, sexual assault, and bodily terror.