Women, the diaspora and the ‘global Irish family’

The debates and struggles around sexuality, migration, Traveller identity, ‘whiteness’ and feminism that mark the accounts of Irish women in this book offer some ‘local’ resources for the development of feminist theory and activism in Ireland and the diaspora in the twenty-first century. The global and the diaspora are rarely identified in feminine terms, yet as this book demonstrates, they are occupied and constructed by women who, like men, are agents of diasporisation and globalisation. Through her speeches, global journeys and intercultural encounters, President Mary Robinson imaged the globe as feminine. Her own image as an Irish, but also as a global figure, circulated in media representations of her encounters with women around the world, whether they were starving women in Somalia (understood primarily through their local belonging; see Kelleher 1997), or other women figures of global mobility such as Hillary Clinton. Her subsequent positions as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and director of the Ethical Globalisation Initiative1 based in New York established her as a global figure. The UN is involved in constituting women as global citizens, Ahmed argues, by locating the well-being of all women in relation to the degree to which they ‘are “brought” into modernity by global agencies’ (2000: 175).2 In Hillary Clinton’s speech at the 1995 UN conference on women, she implied ‘that women become global actors precisely through an extension of the activities within the home’ (ibid.: 172). The documentation for the conference can be read as identifying the goal of global feminism as the ‘developed woman’ constituted as an individual who has ‘autonomy, rights and freedom’: it also defines global citizenship ‘in terms of the heterosexual couple and the heteronormative family’ (ibid.: 174/176).3 The family is put forward as ‘a form of global nomadic citizenship, which despite its emphasis on movement and the overcoming of boundaries, remains predicated on traditional forms of social differentiation’ (ibid.: 176).