Can I Write About It Yet?: The Influence of Politics on Literary Representations of Lesbians in Irish Women’s Writing

Abstract

The paper explores how lesbian representation evolves in a specifically Irish context. It examines selected texts of Mary Dorcey and Emma Donoghue, who were the leading lesbian authors of the last decade of the twentieth century, and whose writing entered Irish lesbian writing into a new stage of referring to lesbian desire in an open manner, thus entering lesbian fiction into the canon of Irish literature. The article analyses Dorcey’s and Donoghue’s lesbian works in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as well as the political atmosphere and the religious secularity of the Republic of Ireland, which prevented these works from coming out sooner, and whose characters are not only openly lesbian, but also occupy central spaces of their respective narratives.