Rewriting Desire: the Construction of Sexual Identity in Literary and Legal Discourse in Postcolonial Ireland

Abstract

The failure of the legal imaginary to reflect sexual difference in the opening decades of the postcolonial Irish state led to what in psychoanalytical terms may be described as the creation of socially abjected groups. Lesbians and gay men were numbered among such groups. The failure of official discourse to contemplate sexual difference as an integral part of Irish national identity was a residue of the Irish colonial experience. The association of Ireland with the female in colonial discourse led the Irish revolutionary elite to propagate a myth of hypermasculinity. This strategy had farreaching consequences for the manner in which matters of sexual difference were to be treated in the postcolonial era. The exclusion of sexually dissident voices from official discourse did not stifle attempts at the levels of literary discourse and pressure group politics to voice alternative desires which were deemed antithetical to the heterosexual Irish state. The growth of alternative narratives of sexual identity led to a gradual transformation of the legal and cultural construction of homosexuality in Ireland. This demonstrates the power of narrative strategies to counter a dominant discourse of blindness to sexual difference and reflects a link between the cultural and legal constructions of sexual identity.

Queer Patriots

“…58Á59. See also Carlson 1990, Hanafin 1998, Hug 1999, Kelley 1982, Lee 1989 (Robson 1995, p. 48) and put Ireland at the European vanguard on these issues. In the field, I investigated these changes, not in terms of their effects on a 'gay community', but how these shifts in legislative and public discourse were impacting on social relations more broadly.…”

“…2 In 1937, after many years of anti-colonial action and a bitter civil war Ireland became a sovereign state and adopted a newly drafted constitution. The constitution expressed a conservative cultural nationalism that reified a monocultural, inward-looking nation rooted in the soil, the Church and in tradition, and articulated the 'special position' of the Roman Catholic Church in the new Irish state (see Hanafin 1998). In the following decades, the cultural protectionism that flourished under the social and political influence of the Church was sanctioned by the idea that the Irish people were under threat of contagion from English Protestant laxity on issues of sexual morality such as divorce, contraception and abortion (see Carlson 1990).…”