Szabo, Frank Joseph
(2018)
Sex and Respectability in Ireland:
A Chronology of Cultural Change.
PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.
Abstract
This thesis is concerned with the changing cultural attitudes towards sexuality in contemporary
Ireland. Adopting both a conceptual and a chronological approach, this project explores the
interconnected themes of respectability, sexuality, and biopolitics through an investigation of,
or making visible, a series of ‘figures’ and ‘sites’ that demarcate historical and contemporary
understandings of sexual respectability in Irish culture. This study occurs at a time when Ireland
is experiencing a belated modernity, yet grappling with a traumatic history of
institutionalisation of persons deemed to have deviated from normative sexual values, that
continues to re-emerge into the national consciousness. While recent plebiscites have been
interpreted as a rejection of Ireland’s abjection of ‘unrespectable’ bodies, this dissertation
argues that Ireland’s contemporary sexual politics are still undergirded by ideas of
respectability. Chapter One serves to locate this research within a distinguished body of
literature on the anthropology of Ireland, particularly in relation to questions of sexuality and
kinship. Chapter Two analyses the emergence of the Irish state, and the biopolitical
operationalisation of Catholic social and moral teaching, in the twentieth century, and how the
legacy of that period continues to mould contemporary social thought and political action.
Chapter Three considers the contested role of the institution of marriage within Irish culture:
once iconic of a prescriptive, exclusive, and traditional form of kinship, it now is a marker of
Ireland’s reputation as a socially progressive liberal democracy. Chapter Four analyses the
figure of Panti Bliss, the drag queen whose comments on homophobia in Irish culture set the
stage for the same-sex marriage referendum. Much like the marriage movement, Panti Bliss
represents the sanitisation, desexualisation, and the rendering respectable of the gay man in
Western culture. Chapter Five studies the role of HIV/AIDS in Irish culture. Retaining a partial
focus upon Panti Bliss’s role as one of the few publicly known HIV positive individuals in
Ireland, it considers the impact of the respectability politics of the Marriage Equality movement
upon the prolonged silence around sex, gay men, and the escalating HIV crisis in contemporary
Dublin.
| Item Type: |
Thesis
(PhD)
|
| Keywords: |
Sex; Respectability; Ireland; Chronology; Cultural Change; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Social Sciences > Anthropology |
| Item ID: |
15542 |
| Depositing User: |
IR eTheses
|
| Date Deposited: |
22 Feb 2022 10:34 |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
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