This book is about the future: Ireland’s future and feminism’s future, approached from a moment that has recently passed. The Celtic Tiger (circa 1995-2008) was a time of extraordinary and radical change, in which Ireland’s economic, demographic, and social structures underwent significant alteration. Conceptions of the future are powerfully prevalent in women’s cultural production in the Tiger era, where it surfaces as a form of temporality that is open to surprise, change, and the unknown. Examining a range of literary and filmic texts, Irish Feminist Futures analyzes how futurity structures representations of the feminine self in women’s cultural practice. Relationally connected and affectively open, these representations of self enable sustained engagements with questions of gender, race, sexuality, and class as they pertain to the material, social, and cultural realities of Celtic Tiger Ireland. This book will appeal to students and scholars of Irish studies, Irish feminist criticism, sociology, cultural studies, literature, women's studies, gender studies, neo-materialist and feminist theories.

This book is about the future: Ireland’s future and feminism’s future, approached from a moment that has recently passed. The Celtic Tiger (circa 1995-2008) was a time of extraordinary and radical change, in which Ireland’s economic, demographic, and social structures underwent significant alteration. Conceptions of the future are powerfully prevalent in women’s cultural production in the Tiger era, where it surfaces as a form of temporality that is open to surprise, change, and the unknown. Examining a range of literary and filmic texts, Irish Feminist Futures analyzes how futurity structures representations of the feminine self in women’s cultural practice. Relationally connected and affectively open, these representations of self enable sustained engagements with questions of gender, race, sexuality, and class as they pertain to the material, social, and cultural realities of Celtic Tiger Ireland. This book will appeal to students and scholars of Irish studies, Irish feminist criticism, sociology, cultural studies, literature, women's studies, gender studies, neo-materialist and feminist theories.

This book is about the future: Ireland's future and feminism's future, approached from a moment that has recently passed. The Celtic Tiger (circa 1995-2008) was a time of extraordinary and radical change, in which Ireland's economic, demographic, and social structures underwent significant alteration. Conceptions of the future are powerfully prevalent in women's cultural production in the Tiger era, where it surfaces as a form of temporality that is open to surprise, change, and the unknown. Examining a range of literary and filmic texts, Irish Feminist Futures analyzes how futurity structures representations of the feminine self in women's cultural practice. Relationally connected and affectively open, these representations of self enable sustained engagements with questions of gender, race, sexuality, and class as they pertain to the material, social, and cultural realities of Celtic Tiger Ireland. This book will appeal to students and scholars of Irish studies, Irish feminist criticism, sociology, cultural studies, literature, women's studies, gender studies, neo-materialist and feminist theories.

This book makes the case for an inclusive form of socialist feminism that puts multiple disadvantaged women at its heart. It moves feminism beyond contemporary disputes, including those between some feminists and some trans women. Combining academic rigour with accessibility, the book demystifies some key feminist terms, including patriarchy and intersectionality, and shows their relevance to feminist politics today. It argues that the analysis of gender cannot be isolated from that of class or race, and that the needs of most women will not be met in an economy based on the pursuit of profit. Throughout, the book asserts the social, economic and human importance of the unpaid caring and domestic work that has been traditionally done by women. It concludes that there are some grounds for optimism about a future that could be both more feminist and more socialist.

Straddling disciplines and continents, Feminist Futures interweaves scholarship and social activism to explore the evolving position of women in the South. Working at the intersection of cultural studies, critical development studies and feminist theory, the book's contributors articulate a radical and innovative framework for understanding the linkages between women, culture and development, applying it to issues ranging from sexuality and the gendered body to the environment, technology and the cultural politics of representation. This revised and updated edition brings together leading academics, as well as a new generation of activists and scholars, to provide a fresh perspective on the ways in which women in the South are transforming our understanding of development.

This book is about mapping the future of eighteenth-century women’s writing and feminist literary history, in an academic culture that is not shy of declaring their obsolescence. It asks: what can or should unite us as scholars devoted to the recovery and study of women’s literary history in an era of big data, on the one hand, and ever more narrowly defined specialization, on the other? Leading scholars from the UK and US answer this question in thought-provoking, cross-disciplinary and often polemical essays. Contributors attend to the achievements of eighteenth-century women writers and the scholars who have devoted their lives to them, and map new directions for the advancement of research in the area. They collectively argue that eighteenth-century women’s literary history has a future, and that feminism was, and always should be, at its heart. Featuring a Preface by Isobel Grundy, and a Postscript by Cora Kaplan.

Austerity and Irish Women’s Writing and Culture, 1980–2020 focuses on the under-represented relationship between austerity and Irish women’s writing across the last four decades. Taking a wide focus across cultural mediums, this collection of essays from leading scholars in Irish studies considers how economic policies impacted on and are represented in Irish women’s writing during critical junctures in recent Irish history. Through an investigation of cultural production north and south of the border, this collection analyses women’s writing using a multimedium approach through four distinct lenses: austerity, feminism, and conflict; arts and austerity; race and austerity; and spaces of austerity. This collection asks two questions: what sort of cultural output does austerity produce? And if the effects of austerity are gendered, then what are the gender-specific responses to financial insecurity, both national and domestic? By investigating how austerity is treated in women’s writing and culture from 1980 to 2020, this collection provides a much-needed analysis of the gendered experience of economic crisis and specifically of Ireland’s consistent relationship with cycles of boom and bust. Thirteen chapters, which focus on fiction, drama, poetry, women’s life writing, ​and women's cultural contributions, examine these questions. This volume takes the reader on a journey across decades and forms as a means of interrogating the growth of the economic divide between the rich and the poor since the 1980s through the voices of Irish women.

In Foucault's Futures, Penelope Deutscher reconsiders the role of procreation in Foucault's thought, especially its proximity to risk, mortality, and death. She brings together his work on sexuality and biopolitics to challenge our understanding of the politicization of reproduction. By analyzing Foucault's contribution to the politics of maternity and its influence on the work of thinkers such as Roberto Esposito, Giorgio Agamben, and Judith Butler, Deutscher provides new insights into the conflicted political status of reproductive conduct and what it means for feminism and critical theory.

This book offers the first comprehensive survey of writing by women in Ireland from the seventeenth century to the present day. It covers literature in all genres, including poetry, drama, and fiction, as well as life-writing and unpublished writing, and addresses work in both English and Irish. The chapters are authored by leading experts in their field, giving readers an introduction to cutting edge research on each period and topic. Survey chapters give an essential historical overview, and are complemented by a focus on selected topics such as the short story, and key figures whose relationship to the narrative of Irish literary history is analysed and reconsidered. Demonstrating the pioneering achievements of a huge number of many hitherto neglected writers, A History of Modern Irish Women's Literature makes a critical intervention in Irish literary history.

This book addresses the notion posed by Thomas Kilroy in his definition of a playwright’s creative process: ‘We write plays, I feel, in order to populate the stage’. It gathers eclectic reflections on contemporary Irish theatre from both Irish theatre practitioners and international academics. The eighteen contributions offer innovative perspectives on Irish theatre since the early 1990s up to the present, testifying to the development of themes explored by emerging and established playwrights as well as to the (r)evolutions in practices and approaches to the stage that have taken place in the last thirty years. This cross-disciplinary collection devotes as much attention to contextual questions and approaches to the stage in practice as it does to the play text in its traditional and revised forms. The essays and interviews encourage dialectic exchange between analytical studies on contemporary Irish theatre and contributions by theatre practitioners.