| Sumario: | Irish republican feminists across twentieth-century Ireland occupied an ambivalent position in the Global North. The Irish were complicit in imperialism in the non-West or Global South. However, they also operated against an evolving backdrop of colonialism, violence and resistance, spanning the all-Ireland anti-colonial campaign, partition, and postcolonial civil war, as well as the late twentieth-century civil rights movement and ensuing 'Troubles' (1969–1998) north of the disputed border. Irish women were, therefore, subject to various iterations of violent patriarchy informed by British imperialism, anti-colonialism, settler-colonialism or postcoloniality. Using the texts of a small number of prominent Irish republican feminists, including Helena Molony (1883–1967) and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington (1877–1946), as well as Bernadette Devlin (1947–) and Roisin Boyd (?–) later in the century, this article examines political women's attempts to understand their positionality and, through this, formulate their identity. To do so, I am indebted to Global South feminist and 'feminist of colour' epistemologies, beginning with Chandra Mohanty's understanding of relevant terminology as denoting 'political and analytic sites and methodologies' rather than geographical or spatial constructs. I hope to use this theorising in a way that does not perpetrate a recolonising of 'women of colour' knowledge.
|
|---|