Roundtable: Are We Queer Yet?

Abstract

This roundtable features six position papers by key scholars and activists enquiring into the past, present and future of Irish Queer Studies, LGBT/Queer activism and politics in Ireland, and the position of an Irish-based Queer Theory in a global frame. The roundtable addresses such issues as the problematic dominance of US-based Queer Theory for the international field (Ireland included); the relationship between queer activism and academic fields of queer enquiry; the ‘quare pair’ that constitutes the uniquely productive relations between Feminist and Queer Theory and Studies in and about Ireland; the problematics of advocating for social justice and systemic change for LGBT youth during a time of neoliberal focus on the individual and their atomised rights; and the spaces and places from which LGBT, Feminist and Queer activism, pedagogy, critique and knowledge-production emerged most influentially over the last twenty odd years. The roundtable provides us with an invaluable and multiplicitous archaeology of Queer in Ireland, thinks through both the deflations and the generative energies of the present moment in the development of an Irish Queer Studies, and points toward future horizons for the field. Michael O'Rourke, ‘How Queer Is Now’; Aideen Quilty, ‘Naming a Politics of Place on a Queerly Irish Landscape: Remembering WERRC’; Eibhear Walshe, ‘From Gay to Queer in Irish Studies’; Moynagh Sullivan, ‘A Quare Pair: Feminist and Queer Ecologies in Irish Cultural Criticism; Kathryn Conrad, ‘“You Won't Re-route this Fruit”: Northern Ireland, “Queer”, and a Geopolitics of Affection’; Michael Barron, ‘Advocating for LGBT Youth: Seeking Social Justice in a Culture of Individual Rights’.