Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows Irish state's construction of a homogenous national time that refuses to acknowledge the endemic gendered harm of pelvic surgery performed on women during childbirth from the 1940s to the 1980s. It discusses legal engagement with embodied harm to economic exploitation. The book explains the temporalizing effects of litigation, this time in the context of widespread allegations of childhood sexual abuse reported in Ireland many years after the acts were alleged to have happened. It argues that the language used in and across legal encounters can help us to understand how temporality and state law underpinned dispossession. The book also explains the land law and its associated temporal orientations and time-related mechanisms. It provides the challenge of thinking law's times topologically.