ABSTRACT

Examination of the relationship between women and Irish nationalism has tended to come from within the disciplines of history or sociology and to pay little critical attention to how national identity is formed in popular culture, and how it relates to the popular cultural formation of gender/femininity (Fairweather et al 1984; Ward 1983; Coulter, 1993). 1 On the other hand, the limited number of publications which analyse mass media representations of the ‘troubles’ pay little or no attention to the specifics of how women are represented (Rockett et al 1988; Curtis 1984a; McLoone 1991; Rolston 1991a; Hill et al 1994; Butler 1995; Miller 1994; Rolston and Miller 1996). This article aims to begin to address such an omission by attempting to determine how messages about femininity function in relation to the contested national identities of Britishness, and more particularly, Irishness within recent television and film productions.