Naisten ääniä ja periferian politiikkaa

Feministisiä tulkintoja 1990-luvun murroskauden Irlannista

Authors

• Anu Hirsiaho

Abstract

The Republic of Ireland is currently going through a period of political transtion, one of its cornerstones being the legal position of women and the family. If Ireland’s parliamentary politics can be called peripheral, due to the frequent rural and conservative emphasis, it has not been left unchallenged by the vocal women’s movement, the members of which range from nuns and the ex-president Mary Robinson to radical lesbians and nationalist feminists. It is important to see the movement as an umbrella for different passions and aspirations, and also for different generations, not simply as one category of feminists who are all opposed to a common enemy, patriarchy. The texts produced by the members of the Irish women’s movement during its 30 years of existence are an excellent starting point for exploring Irish feminist politics. In this article, an artificial voice space will be created to allow different voices to speak to each other. Read together with contemporary feminist theorists, such as Adrienne Rich and Rosi Braidotti, and with politological figurations of time by Walter Benjamin and Reinhart Koselleck, the texts reveal to their reader one possible way of interpreting the situation in Ireland in the 1990s, as a crossroads in "the space of experience" and "the horizon of expectation". The texts are also expressions of feminist subjects, who constantly redefine their position in their writing as an exercise in the ”politics of location”