Gender, Sovereignty, and the Changing Nation: Irish Feminist Mythmaking, 1963-2022

In pre-Christian mythology, Mother Ireland or “the sovereignty goddess” endowed a prospective king with power over the land through a consummation, imagined either as a sexual or allegorical encounter. This thesis identifies the ways in which Irish women’s writing over the last seven decades queers and critiques the sovereignty ritual central to that mythology at flashpoints of socio-political change related to society’s Other. More specifically, I argue that Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn (1963), Emma Donoghue’s Hood (1995), Anne Enright’s The Green Road (2015), and select rap songs by Denise Chaila (2020-2022) disinter the sovereignty goddess in a previously undocumented strand of feminist neo-mythmaking that queers the tradition’s sovereignty ritual for the allegorical assimilation of LGBTQIA+ characters, migrants, and queer migrants into Ireland’s cultural imaginary. Deploying Bracha Ettinger’s psychoanalytic feminism, Julia Kristeva’s work on “abjection”, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s narratological studies, I contend that these texts are matrixial borderspaces that exploit the goddess figure’s primordial association with the cycle of pre-birth, birth, death, and re-birth in an attempt to deconstruct phallogocentric allegory and produce new, intersectional foundation myths. However, these texts are not utopian, nor do they imagine facile progress narratives of the Irish state. Some hierarchies of privilege remain intact by their conclusions, exposing the obstinate, pervasive, and sometimes surreptitious mechanisms of heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy. Alongside traditional theoretical frameworks, I develop a novel cultural analytics approach to mapping. Charting the chronotopes in Murdoch, Donoghue, and Enright’s novels, I illustrate how these narratologies are imbued with mythopoeic storytelling, down to their configurations of individual time-space units and how, despite being published over a fifty-year period, these novels construct comparable mythic landscapes in which their queer sovereignty rituals can occur.