`Whitely scripts' and Irish women's racialized belonging(s) in England

Abstract

This article investigates the multilocated belonging(s) of Irish women in England and how these are mediated by what Alison Bailey (1998) calls `whitely scripts'. The concept of belonging(s) and theoretical approaches to `whiteness' frame the discussion of gendered Irish migrancy in England. Belongings are broken down into `political', `cultural' and `ethnic' forms of membership in late 20th-century England. The article argues that slippages between inclusion and exclusion, identification and (dis)identification, constitute Irish women's belongings in England as gendered, migrant, national and transnational in contradictory ways. In response to their positioning by a gendered migrant labour market and postcolonial stereotypes of a feminized culture, some women embrace masculine discourses of national identity and mobility as a means of asserting an agentic self. Simultaneously, the adoption of `whitely scripts' by some women locates them within the gendered constraints and privileges of the category `white women'.