Theorizing Violability in the Life Narratives of Irish Women

I will be a Fellow at the University of Dublin’s School of Gender Studies and School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice, to collaborate with an interdisciplinary set of scholars across the university, and to conduct archival research in the Irish Women at Work Oral History Project at University College Cork, the Jewish Women’s Archives at the Dublin Jewish Oral History Project, and the life writing archives of women at the Royal Irish Academy. My research at UCD focuses on understanding how violability operates in an Irish context, using the life writing and archives of Irish women and other marginalized communities. By combining cultural, historical, and legal perspectives, my project aims to reveal the complexities of violability and its impact on women’s lives in Ireland, particularly in contexts of conflict, colonialism, and revolution. Through my research, I ask: how are Irish women discursively marked to and materially made violable in such a way that sexual terror has become normalized; and what do Irish women’s life writing and histories tell us about the intimate printing of violation, how it travels and is felt, made sense of, unmade and contested?

Faculty Supervisor:

Alison Crosby

Student:

Partner:

University College Dublin

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Education

University:

York University

Program: