Abstract
Scholarly questions of masculinities have come late to the Irish paradigm. The neglect of questions of masculinities—and of questions of gender and sexualities in general—in research in the humanities and social sciences in relation to Ireland, is a remarkable omission, particularly if compared, for example, with over a generation’s worth of developments in questions of gender and masculinities for Britain. Ireland has been dominated, historically and contemporaneously, by conflicting religions; competing masculine hegemonies; tensions, conflicts, and competing nationalisms and a long legacy of ethnonationalist violence; and a depth of social conservatism, north and south of the border, that directly has affected and shaped the lives, bodies, and public agency of women, sexual minorities—and of course many men who somehow do not “fit in” with the social expectations of their gender. State, society, and its institutions in Ireland have been characterized by male dominance, irrespective of the religion or particular sense of nation espoused. The books reviewed here, in conjunction with two very recent conferences on questions of masculinities in Irish literature, culture, society, and history, represent a radical departure in critical questions of Ireland, and often in the face of an indifferent, and occasionally hostile mainstream scholarship in this paradigm. The books reviewed here each are pioneering in their respective disciplines, and from the outset, the authors are to be commended for the originality, and the inspiration to further research, that their books inspire.
Banerjee addresses the complex phenomena of “muscular nationalism” in twentieth-century Ireland and India. In her ambitious and empirically rich study, Banerjee achieves originality not only through the lens of masculinities but also through the comparative between nationalisms and gender in India and Ireland. Comparative historical studies of Ireland, a core component of the historical United Kingdom, and of India, arguably the most important territory in the British Empire, only very recently have been argued for and researched. And yet, as Banerjee amply demonstrates, the historical connections are intimate, particularly in questions of anti-Imperialism and development of nationalism through the prism of resistance to British rule. Banerjee’s book is engagingly written throughout. She emphasizes the relational dynamic between masculinity and femininity in the Indian and Irish contexts, and what the development of militarized, “muscular” nationalism has implied for femininities and female bodies, and the ways in which femininities are played out and negotiated within masculinized nationalist political spaces. Influenced predominantly by George Mosse’s analysis of nationalism, Banerjee argues that nationalism and the martial, muscular masculinity it engendered, cast women as chaste, and heightened anxieties surrounding women’s physicality and sexuality. Women’s activism, where it existed, could be imagined only in terms of chaste femininity. This book is an often-moving account of the ways in which political nationalist women in India and Ireland negotiated and challenged the constraints, and the tensions created by their public agency.
Valente’s book, however, serves to challenge some of the assumptions inherent in Banerjee’s analysis of muscular nationalism and its implications for Irish nationalist men. In this important book, which concentrates upon literary and cultural representations, Valente analyses with nuance what he terms a “metrocolonial double-bind” for Irish men in the period in question. Men with nationalist aspirations—such as Charles Stewart Parnell, Patrick Pearce, and W. B. Yeats—and who were intimately concerned with forging an Irish national culture counter to dominant “West-Britainisation” in Ireland faced peculiar and conflicting difficulties in fashioning an abiding and distinct sense of Irish manhood that could compete effectively with dominant British hegemonic forms. Banerjee concentrates upon the development of muscular manhood in Ireland through analysis of the Gaelic Athletic Association and the rhetoric inherent in the ideas of Pearce, comparing this with the masculinist language of Indian nationalists such as the Swami Vivekananda. The argument that in both India and Ireland, muscular nationalism developed out of intense reaction to British characterizations of Indian and Irish men as “effeminate,” or “simian” or “savage” is resonant. But Valente’s argument brings a greater degree of subtlety to the contingencies in the development of Irish nationalist manhood in the period. On one hand, many political Irishmen ended up internalizing gendered racial stereotypes and were compelled to endorse assumptions about being Irish, that simultaneously disenfranchised them. However, attempts to assert an alternate, Irish masculinity in direct defiance (such as violent insurrection) of the expected masculine norm did not signify muscular masculinity but instead “savagery,” racial and cultural sub-humanity, an absence of self-control, and therefore unfitness, in British imperial views, for any form of freedom or self-determination. Valente argues convincingly that it is this paradox which shaped the tensions and contradictions within Irish nationalist manhood and masculinity. On one hand, a muscular, assertive, and dignified moral status might be a compulsory element in the development of an alternate Irish cultural and political nationalist manhood; on the other hand, any attempts to assert muscular manhood ran the risks of being outcast, including by fellow Irishmen, as exceeding fundamental standards of accepted virile masculinity, through resistance to colonial rule and espousal of violence. In many respects, Valente’s analysis challenges the binary in Banerjee’s work, of muscular nationalism versus dominant colonial hegemonic masculinity, and has implications for her analysis of the political agency of nationalist women in India and in Ireland, in their negotiation with multivalent, slippery and often conflicting forms of masculine dominance, both nationalist and imperial.
McGaughey’s excellent book examines the social frameworks of Ulster Protestant unionist masculinities and masculine identities in the years of long crisis, 1912–1923. Ulster Protestant masculinities formed historically distinct identities and an outlook within Ireland that contrasted both with Irish nationalist masculinities and with British metropolitan masculinities. In a work of cultural history, McGaughey’s analysis penetrates the fields of sociopolitical and military history. In Ulster, men’s popular understanding of martial, political, and social organizations in the province involved metaphors that underpinned ideas of fellowship and solidarity between Protestant men. This involved specific conceptions of dominance over women—bearing in mind that Protestant unionist women in Ulster probably were the most politically active in the public sphere in Europe in the period in question, though their activities were subsumed entirely to the central constitutional question of keeping Ireland and ultimately Ulster within the United Kingdom. Also, maintaining power over other men, especially through socially and politically dominant and pervasive institutions such as the male-only Orange Order lodges, was (and is) a striking feature of Ulster Protestant masculinities. The Orange Order, and paramilitary organizations such as the Ulster Volunteer Force, served to keep Protestant men in line with loyalism and functioned as organs of dominance over all Catholic and nationalist men, irrespective of class. In terms of bravery of soldiers, or valorization of manliness, characterization of these traits differed little from those in Britain, the rest of Ireland, or in the Empire as a whole. The salient point is that Ulster Protestant men regarded themselves as different to other men and other forms of manliness. Representations of Ulster Protestant unionist masculinities reflected what was desired by and for the community at large, rather than fact. In Ulster, appearance mattered more than the realities. The conviction was widespread in Ulster that their Protestant and loyal men were the most loyal imperialists in the empire and that Ulstermen were the bravest men in the trenches in the First World War, particularly in their use of the symbolism of sacrifice by the Ulster regiments at the Battle of the Somme.
These representations formed a powerful amalgam that Ulster unionists used, in both actions and language, to identify what mattered most to them in a man. Being an “Ulsterman” was fluid in the period. It was not determined by birth in Ulster—Edward Carson was a Dubliner, for example,—but by a strong identification with the Protestant religion, a dedication to the ascendancy of Protestantism in Ulster, and syncretism of this with notions of British citizenship in Ulster and service to the British military or to homosocial fraternities dedicated to the promotion of Ulster unionism and its values. The tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes in competing notions of masculinities analyzed in Irish nationalist culture by Valente, and in Ulster unionist culture analyzed by McGaughey, serve in synthesis as a valuable framework for future research that is thoroughly gendered, interdisciplinary, and critically incisive of men, masculinities, and historical conflict within Ireland, of Ireland’s troubled relationship with Britain, and of Britain’s problematic handling of Ireland’s loyalist and nationalist traditions. Masculinities in Ireland, whether nationalist or Protestant unionist, are distinctive to Ireland. Valente’s and McGaughey’s work remind scholars of the need to localize masculinities and trace their distinctive historical trajectories within the politics and religions of the locale. Banerjee’s case for comparative between Ireland and India is compelling and convincing. But the dissonances as well as the similarities between apparent muscular nationalisms hopefully will stimulate further critical research that brings the history of women’s political agency in both India and Ireland into even sharper critical focus, through transnational analysis that takes the significance of locale into even greater account.
Ging’s engaging book traces the representation of Irish men and masculinities in Irish film from 1918 to the present. Her perceptive arguments bear out the tensions highlighted in Valente’s analysis of the paradox of concepts of manhood and manliness in Irish national culture from the 1880s to the 1920s. As Ging states, Irish cinema has been strikingly deficient in heroic men. Unlike other national cinema traditions, which tended historically to treat heroic, patriarchal and patriotic masculinities as relatively unproblematic, Irish filmmakers have represented Irish men as dysfunctional patriarchs, prone to violence, alcoholism, suicide, emotional dysfunction, tyranny over women and other men, and in general excluded from the popular associations accorded to cinematic male heroism. Although Irish filmmaking has been a male-dominated activity, Irish cinema, particularly since the 1980s, has rejected a masculinist and “patriarchal point of view in favor of telling stories about men in which maleness is rendered visible and patriarchal privilege is often savagely critiqued.” Irish filmmakers have been precocious in this respect in world cinema. This strong tendency was borne out of the emergence of an indigenous Irish film industry in the late 1970s, and which functioned as a vehicle, and an opportunity, for radical filmmakers to deconstruct pervasive nationalist and patriarchal myths about Irish men and masculinities. Ging, for example, compares film about Ireland, such as Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins (1996), with film made by Irish filmmakers. Jordan’s portrayal of Collins resonates with the conventional handsome, muscular cinematic Hollywood hero, and the film is, in essence, a gangster movie, a male-orientated genre with women distinctly at the margins of the narrative. In contrast, the dominant message in Irish cinema about masculine ethnonationalist violence has tended to be that violence was not, and never will be, a liberating force for Irish people.
Arguably, Irish filmmakers long ago have intervened critically in questions of masculinities in Ireland, whereas scholars of the Irish paradigm most emphatically have not, until very recently. The four outstanding books reviewed here represent a new generation of research, criticism, and critical intervention in questions of men and masculinities in the Irish paradigm, and the implications of these meticulously researched books are far reaching, for research not only of Ireland but of diaspora, empire, and transnational history. It is no coincidence that only one of the four authors, Debbie Ginn, is based in an academic institution within Ireland, north or south. An inherent methodological and political conservatism, especially in Irish historical studies, have either ignored or resisted the development of research that questions gender and masculinities in the Irish paradigm. This first wave of critically incisive books, along with new questions being raised now within scholarly circles concerned with Irish history, society, politics, and culture, surely represents a development that cannot be ignored, and one that is to be welcomed by scholars in all disciplines.