ABSTRACT
The 1990s were a pivotal time period for the Irish LGBTQ+ community and Irish lesbian fiction in general, where LGBTQ+ themes, which had once ensued the banning of authors in Ireland, were embraced, not unproblematically, by the market. Chapter 4 reads Emma Donoghue’s early novels Stir-fry (1994) and Hood (1995) within this context before locating Landing (2007) into a wider discourse on the relationship between space, homonormativity and economics within ‘Celtic Tiger’ Ireland. Examining the closet motif in Donoghue’s early fiction as a space of queer liminality that embraces sexual fluidity, this chapter details how (some) lesbian identities are embraced in the context of a post-millennium Irish society.
