Solidarity and colonial analogies in Irish republican feminists’ discursive practices, 1890s–1980s

Published in Third World Quarterly, online 23 October 2024

Irish republican feminists across twentieth-century Ireland occupied an ambivalent position in the Global North. The Irish were complicit in imperialism in the non-West or Global South. However, they also operated against an evolving backdrop of colonialism, violence and resistance, spanning the all-Ireland anti-colonial campaign, partition, and postcolonial civil war, as well as the late twentieth-century civil rights movement and ensuing ‘Troubles’ (1969–1998) north of the disputed border. Irish women were, therefore, subject to various iterations of violent patriarchy informed by British imperialism, anti-colonialism, settler-colonialism or postcoloniality. Using the texts of a small number of prominent Irish republican feminists, including Helena Molony (1883–1967) and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington (1877–1946), as well as Bernadette Devlin (1947–) and Roisin Boyd (?–) later in the century, this article examines political women’s attempts to understand their positionality and, through this, formulate their identity. To do so, I am indebted to Global South feminist and ‘feminist of colour’ epistemologies, beginning with Chandra Mohanty’s understanding of relevant terminology as denoting ‘political and analytic sites and methodologies’ rather than geographical or spatial constructs. I hope to use this theorising in a way that does not perpetrate a recolonising of ‘women of colour’ knowledge.

Concluding thoughts to the article … Applying Global North–South and ‘Global Souths’ theorising to the history of Irish republican feminists’ strategies for constructing their political identities, all amid shifting geopolitical conditions, is valuable not only for exposing the limitations of anti-colonial feminist solidarities due to unequal positionality and temporality, but also because recognising ‘the profound influence of racialization and gendering is essential to an adequate understanding of the past, to efforts to transform the present, and to strategies to envision and produce a different future’ (Mendoza Citation2016, 119).

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