Book Details
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Maureen O'Connor
2010
May
The Female and the Species: The Animal in Irish Women's Writing
Peter Lang
Oxford
Published
0
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Describing the Irish as 'female' and 'bestial' is a practice dating back to the twelfth century, while for women, inside and outside of Ireland, their association with children, animals, and other 'savages' has had an even longer history. A link among systems of oppression has been asserted in recent decades by some feminists, but linking women's rights with animal advocacy can be controversial. This linkage responds to the fact that women's inferiority has been alleged and justified by appropriating them to nature, an appropriation that colonialism has also pracriced on its racial and cultural others. Nineteenth-century feminists braved such associations; for instance, often asserting vegetarinaism as a form of rebellion against the dominant culture. Vegetarianism and animal advocacy have uniquely Irish implications. This study examines a tradition of Irish women writers deploying the 'natural' as a gesture of resistance to paternalist regulation of female energies and as a self-consciously elaborated stage for the performance of Irish identity. They call into question the violent dislocations and disavowals required by figurative practices, particularly when utulizing Irish topography, an already 'unnatural' cultural construct shaped by conflict and suffering.
978-3-03911-959-2
193
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