‘Kiss My Royal Irish Ass.’ Contesting Identity: Visual Culture, Gender, Whiteness and Diaspora

Abstract

Feminist artists and critics have located postcolonial ‘Irish woman’ as ‘other’ to a dominant construct of ‘Irish manhood’, or to British colonialism. But what are the limits of a paradigm of woman as ‘other’ that privileges ‘gender’ and misses its intersections with ‘race’; or favours simplistic analogies between postcolonial Irish women and black and Third World women? Ireland's 2004 Referendum on Citizenship, which sought to exclude Ireland's non-white immigrants and reproduced national identity through gendered discourses of whiteness, highlights the need for feminist cultural critics to interrogate the hegemonic conflation of the categories ‘white’ and Irish. The referendum redefined the basis of citizenship as jus sanguinis – transmitted through bloodline – threatening many immigrants with deportation while affirming the belonging of the ‘Irish diaspora’ as a ‘blood’ inheritance. Influenced by Jacques Derrida's deconstructive methods, this essay shows that ironically, in works by women artists of the ‘Irish diaspora’, such essentialist notions of ‘Irishness’ are rebuked. It looks to visual culture to explore how Irish national identity has been construed through gendered discourses of ‘race’ and whiteness, and then turns to the symbolic practices of women to theorise whiteness as a historical and cultural construct, and a performed social location.