Abstract Book of the 4th International Conference on LGBT Studies
Year: 2025
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Queering Irish Nationalist Mythology in Jamie O’Neill’s Fiction
Dr. Michael Lapointe
ABSTRACT:
My paper examines the homosocial and homoerotic desires configuring the representation of Dublin’s Easter Rising of 1916 in Jamie O’Neill’s novel At Swim, Two Boys (2001). The novel charts the overlapping psychosexual and political development of its young heroes, Jim and Doyler. Drawing upon the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler, I argue that the Irish representation of homoeros is an integral part in the constitution of modern nationalist identity. Specifically, the unstable border between homosociality and homoeroticism have affected the nature of Irish literary and cultural nationalisms insofar as homosocial desire resides in the heart of nationalisms’ ideology and symbolism, and in its sacrificial interpellation of the homosexual figure. O’Neill’s novel queers Irish nationalist mythology and excoriates the hypocrisy surrounding homoeros within Irish social conventions and silences. At Swim, Two Boys does not veil nor distort the male object of homosocial desire, but rather, it specifies that the object is not only presumably coded as male but, in this instance, marked by homosexual desire as well. O’Neill demonstrates that one of the foundational sources for configurations of Irish nationalism is a conflicted homosociality with its purchase on sacrificial violence, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia, but through the novel’s trio of sympathetic gay men, a counter-narrative of the possibility of freedom and of male-male love resonates. O’Neill injects his mournful revision of Easter 1916 into Irish cultural discourse through the novel’s crossing of imaginary national/sexual borders.
Keywords: Easter 1916, gay, Ireland, nationalism, novel