Becoming women: Irigaray, Ireland and visual representation

This chapter outlines the intertwining representation of nation and 'woman' in Ireland. An initial discussion of representations of women in Irish myth and religion will outline how iconic representations of women in Ireland produce the function of the representation, 'woman', as being a cypher of nation, while reducing actual women, politically and empirically, to mother. Irigaray argues that patriarchy has disrupted mother-daughter relationships through an act of matricide. The iconic and multi-faceted figure of Mother Ireland and the social ideal of the self-sacrificing mother both set reductive limits on any horizon of possibilities for each other and for actual women. At the heart of nationalist political and cultural thinking in Ireland, it is easily possible to locate a formation of 'woman' which is restrictive for actual women. It is a formation resulting from a highly specific interlacing of history, religious structures, myth, metaphor and metonymy, interlaced and represented in local language and visual imagery.