ABSTRACT
Ireland has a long history of being represented as feminine. In turn, versions of Irish national identity have prescribed certain kinds of gender and sexual identities for Irish men and women. These gendered representations of Ireland and Irish gender identities impact upon the lives of women and men and influence their opportunities and constraints in work, education, political activity, personal relationships and senses of themselves. This double sense of embodied nationhood forms the focus of this chapter, which investigates the relationship between the representation of Ireland as female and the construction of gender and sexual identities in Ireland. Irish feminist activists, artists and writers have pointed to the ways in which the gendering of Ireland and national versions of ideal Irish femininity have been deeply problematic and damaging for women. Feminist work on the relationship between national, gender and sexual identities has explored the ways in which they are mutually constructed in geographically, historically and culturally specific manners. Because the rights and welfare of individuals and definition of citizenship in the nation-state are differentiated according to gender and sexuality, concepts of nationhood and national identity have been criticised but also reworked to avoid traditional patterns of exclu-sions and exclusiveness. Two examples can introduce some of the issues involved in the conjunction of the historical and contemporary imagining of the nation and the construction and experience of gendered and sexual identity. Both constitute interventions into the meaning of Irishness.
