Search results for ""Author Jose Carregal""

Before gay decriminalisation in 1993, there was no solid gay or lesbian tradition in Irish writing, due to the political and cultural dominance of a conservative, censorious Catholic ideology that conflated itself with notions of national identity and social respectability. Praised today as a beacon of gay rights, Ireland has become the first nation to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote in 2015. Significantly, whereas in the recent past there was much silence, stigma and prejudice surrounding homosexuality, now there is a plethora of voices reclaiming equality, visibility and recognition. Yet today's liberal culture still silences aspects of gay and lesbian life which go beyond the parameters of the 'socially acceptable' homosexual. Queer Whispers: Gay and Lesbian Voices in Irish Fiction is the first comprehensive survey of gay and lesbian-themed fiction in Ireland, from the late 1970s until today. The book foregrounds the cultural contribution of Irish writers whose subversive, dissident voices decidedly challenged not only the homophobia and heteronormative values of Catholic Ireland, but also the persistent discrimination of more liberal times. Through the analyses of representative novels and short stories, the book addresses a number of social issues - lesbian invisibility, same-sex parenthood, sexual subcultures, HIV/AIDS and the liberalisation of Ireland, among many others -, considering how these fictions favoured a broader cultural and political awareness of the oppression and silencing of lesbian and gay people over the last decades in Ireland. The writing explored in Queer Whispers consistently exposes the limitations imposed by silence, and, while doing so, articulates a new language of recognition and resilience of the continued struggles faced by queer Ireland. 'Kudos to Jose Carregal for gathering the scattered pieces of LGBT representation in Irish literature from the 1970s and producing an intelligent and insightful analysis. Queer Whispers is a long overdue and crucial study.' - Emma Donoghue

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This Open access book is a collection of essays and offers an in-depth analysis of silence as an aesthetic practice and a textual strategy which paradoxically speaks of the unspoken nature of many inconvenient hidden truths of Irish society in the work of contemporary fiction writers. The study acknowledges Ireland’s history of damaging silences and considers its legacies, but it also underscores how silence can serve as a valuable, even productive, means of expression. From a wide range of critical perspectives, the individual essays address, among other issues, the conspiracies of silence in Catholic Ireland, the silenced structural oppression of Celtic Tiger Ireland, the recovery of silenced stories/voices of the past and their examination in the present, as well as millennial disaffection and the silencing of vulnerability in today’s neoliberal Ireland. The book ’s attention to silence provides a rich vocabulary for understanding what unfolds in the quiet interstices of Irish writing from recent decades. This study also invokes the past to understand the present and, thus, demonstrates the continuities and discontinuities that define how silence operates in Irish culture.Grant FFI2017-84619-P AEI, ERDF, EU (INTRUTHS “Inconvenient Truths: Cultural Practices of Silence in Contemporary Irish Fiction”) Funded by the Spanish Research Agency AEI http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Regional Development Fund ERDF "A Way of Making Europe"

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