Introduction

Abstract

RISE 6.1 is the second of a two-volume themed issue dedicated to the study of sexual liberation and its literatures in Ireland in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that extends the line of scholarly and historical inquiry first begun in RISE 5.1. The essays collected there examined the social and cultural politics that attended the historical rise of the heteropatriarchal state and interrogated the durability of conservative notions of Irishness, especially in terms of the sexual politics of the nation. While mindful of the ways in which this important historical paradigm continues to assert itself in Irish culture and the politics of the nation state, the current volume also seeks to put analytical pressure on the idea of ‘liberation’ central to counter-hegemonic ideas of sexual morality and revolution, and how it can be applied to the work of contemporary writers and social thinkers in Ireland. Adumbrating the ways in which the heteronormative social order asserts itself (the gaze, temporality and sociospatial formations), these essays collectively interrogate the dialectical tension that conjoins conservative and insurgent practices and ideologies in the still unfolding landscape of Ireland’s changing codes around sexual morality and identity.