Invisible Mothers: Biopolitical Control in Ireland

Abstract

In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault reveals how governments in the nineteenth century used penal institutions to isolate and exclude undesired elements in society, controlling the behavior of deviants by introducing new forms of discipline that gradually became normative. This article examines Irish mother and baby homes in the twentieth century where unwed Irish mothers were confined, deprived of their identities, used as slave labor and forced to give up their children for adoption. It demonstrates how such institutions were normalized in a society controlled by Roman Catholic dogma and morality, and how films, theatrical performances and journalism have shed light on the nature of these institutions and their lucrative practice of marketing Irish babies to America.