Abstract
Transnational modes of thought play a constitutive role in the imaginary of Irish queerness. The novels of Elizabeth Bowen and Kate O'Brien offer a dualistic contestation of hegemonic sex/gender conventions that can be theorised as ‘the queer transnational.’ Based on sustained engagement with the thematics of abjection, their writing highlights how the transnational is deeply embedded in the structure of queer imaginaries in Irish writing. Through readings of O’Brien’s novels Mary Lavelle (1936) and The Land of Spices (1942), and Bowen’s The Last September (1929) and Eva Trout (1968), this article proposes ‘the queer transnational’ as a new way of thinking about queer literary histories in the formative years of the modern Irish State. 
 
 Keywords: Queer; Transnational; Irish Literature; Elizabeth Bowen; Kate O’Brien; Abjection; Twentieth Century
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