ABSTRACT
Through the work of such scholars as James Kincaid (1998) and Lee Edelman (2004), queer studies has established a fairly detailed account of the logic by which homosexuality and paedophilia became ideologically entangled within Anglo-American modernity (Kincaid 1998; Edelman 2004, especially Chapter 1). The more recently-occurring conditions under which a similar entanglement between homosexuality and intergenerational sex occurred in Northern Ireland, however, have yet to be accounted for. In Northern Ireland, a stigmatising discourse equating child sexual abuse or, indeed, all child abuse, to homosexuality, came into being during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the period when homosexuality was first emerging as a public, contested discourse. The process by which this new discourse emerged represents an important test case for ongoing debates regarding paedophilia's status within queer theory. The 1981 Kincora scandal represents a well-documented case in which the entanglement of various forms of abuse and homosexuality in a public scandal vastly complicated the emergence of homosexuality into discourse in a particular society. The centrality of violence, coercion and the generalised abuse of power to the Kincora scandal thus allows for a re-examination of the relationship between child sexual abuse and the gay community as a whole, a matter that gay rights activists and queer theorists in various ways have routinely bracketed out. 2
