ABSTRACT
In contrast to normative Western masculinity, Irish republican masculinity developed within the context of the feminizing humiliation of British colonization. It therefore provides an informative site for analysing the relationship between masculinity, humiliation, and normalizing power, as well as for illustrating how the relation of self to self is implicated in both the reproduction and countering of normalization. I show that the self-constitutive character of humiliation intensifies reductive, reactive, and therefore normalizing aspects of the Irish republican masculine self-relation at the same time that it opens onto engagement with, rather than mere disavowal of, the (feminizing) conditions for humiliation’s possibility. This engagement has the potential to disrupt normalizing modes of masculine self-relation and, therefore, to facilitate cultivation of alternatives. I focus on the situation of republican men in the north of Ireland. For them, the 1921 partition of Ireland in accordance with the Government of Ireland Act, the Troubles generally, and conditions of imprisonment while participating in protest in the H-Blocks more specifically, compounded humiliation and thereby intensified the normalizing character of Irish republican masculinity. Drawing upon interviews I conducted with former republican prisoners in the north, I also show, however, that men who participated in prison protest took on and therefore engaged humiliation, engagement that disrupted normalizing constructions of masculinity and in doing so introduced a potentially transformative element into their modes of self-relation. I conclude by arguing that for protesting prisoners, engaging humiliation and confronting the constitutive nature of its disavowal possessed, more specifically, subversive potential. These actions enabled prisoners to turn the humiliation to which they were subjected back against it and therefore expose its source.
