Search results for ""author michael g. cronin""

Sexual/Liberation addresses the paradoxes of sexual freedom in contemporary neoliberal Ireland. It invites readers to imagine a revolutionary form of sexual liberation beyond the present objective of achieving equality within a grossly unequal social order. Centrally, the book offers a critical meditation on images of gay men circulating in post-marriage equality Irish culture. Such images tell us little about the actual lives of gay men but offer us considerable insight into the political imaginary - the values, norms, anxieties and contradictions - of the society in which those images circulate. The images of gay men, male bodies and male intimacy discussed are drawn from varied sources: Leo Varadkar's media profile; digital portraits curated by men engaged in sex work; Irish Queer Archives; media, scholarly and artistic commemorations of Declan Flynn and Roger Casement; Joe Caslin's murals. Taking inspiration from the ideas of Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Herbert Marcuse, Sexual/Liberation encourages us to re-think the political as sexual - to reflect on how our political perspectives are shaped by desires, needs, vulnerabilities and hopes. Above all, this book challenges us to move beyond a politics of identities and injuries and strive instead for a politics universal and radically humanist in its imaginative scope, anti-capitalist and revolutionary in its objectives.

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Impure thoughts is the first study of the twentieth-century Irish Catholic Bildungsroman. This comparative examination of six Irish novelists tracks the historical evolution of a literary genre and its significant role in Irish culture. With chapters on James Joyce and Kate O’Brien, along with studies of Maura Laverty, Patrick Kavanagh, Edna O’Brien and John McGahern, this book offers a fresh new approach to the study of twentieth-century Irish writing and of the twentieth-century novel.Combining the study of literature and of archival material, Impure thoughts also develops a new interpretive framework for studying the history of sexuality in twentieth-century Ireland. Addressing itself to a wide set of interdisciplinary questions about Irish sexuality, modernity and post-colonial development, as well as Irish literature, it will be of interest to students and scholars in various disciplines, including literary studies, history, sociology and gender studies.

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This is the first sustained and broad-ranging critique of the legacies of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger boom. Contributors identify the damaging impact that the free market has had on a wide range of areas in public life, including the media and the pharmaceutical industry, and also examine its influence on health, education, state surveillance, immigrants, the welfare state, consumerism and the Irish language. Challenging the notion that there is no alternative for Ireland but the present economic and political dispensation, experts map out an alternative politics that could create spaces for hope and renewal in contemporary Ireland.In a society whose public debates have been largely dominated by the instrumentalist logic of stockbroker economists and the regressive populism of talk-radio shock jocks, Transforming Ireland offers a more substantial and considered analysis, uncovering hidden aspects of everyday Irish life. It reveals that, virtually unnoticed by the media, there exist lively debates in today’s Ireland which draw on international insights about globalisation to probe how it is reshaping Irish society. Covering four principal topics – culture and society, media and social change, social control, and power and politics – this impressive volume opens new and hopeful perspectives for students and also the general reader. Though primarily a book about Ireland, it is also a book about today’s form of globalisation, offering a rare and accessible analysis of the damage done to society when market forces are given free rein.

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