Modernism/modernity

Over the course of the past two decades, Ireland, a country formerly known for its conservative Catholicism, has undergone a quiet revolution with regards to its sexual mores. Most notably, in 2015 and 2018, referenda led to the legalisation of gay marriage and abortion. There have also been several important investigations into the systemic sexual abuse of the country's children, leading to the publication of the Ferns, the Murphy, and the Ryan Reports from 2005 to 2009. An inquiry into the Magdalene Laundries, institutions that incarcerated "fallen" women, led to an official apology by the Taoiseach (the Irish Prime Minister) and compensation for the survivors. While late in coming, this twenty-first-century recognition of the wrongs of the past and recalibration of morality has been accompanied by a number of academic studies that have sought to ascertain how sex has been deployed by Irish authorities, both religious and political, to control the population and to craft a national identity at odds with the lived experiences of many people.

In Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health, Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston continues this work by focusing on public discourse, scientific and pseudo-scientific texts, mediatized scandals, and censorship to determine how Irish modernist writers from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century engaged with sexual health in both their public interventions and aesthetics. In so doing, Houston interweaves disciplines in a way that reflects some of the very best work being produced in the medical humanities. The result is a highly nuanced portrait, attesting to an ambivalence, and at times a hypocrisy, on the part of authors in combatting official attempts to dictate Irish identity along rather puritanical and racially pure lines. Indeed, many writers tended to contest charges that they were somehow lascivious and diseased by casting their adversaries in those same terms, effectively maintaining taboos and negative conceptions of abnormality. Much of this double standard, as Houston argues, is not only restricted to the particularities of Ireland, but was part of a broader context that included much of Western Europe and North America; however, by focusing on modern Ireland, Houston charts a course for similar explorations in other polities and other temporalities. In their book, they focus on four specific strands of sexual health: autonomy, hygiene, heredity, and fertility.

Autonomy springs from our ability to make rational choices and be responsible for ourselves with regards to our sexual behaviour, including how we govern and navigate our own desires and impulses. Charles Stewart Parnell, Ireland's great nationalist leader in the 1880s, was known for his self-mastery and independence, which many considered reflective of the country's own potential political future through Home Rule. Aware of this symbolism, Parnell cultivated a cold stoicism and manly virility that controverted colonial depictions of the Irish as rash, uncivilised, and ungovernable. However, once he was publicly outed as having had a long-term affair with Kitty O'Shea, Parnell was cast by many in Westminster and Ireland as pathologically unbalanced and incontinent, essentially perverted and unable to control his urges. Houston reads J.M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World (1907) as tapping into the Parnell case, with Christy Mahon wooing Pegeen Mike, a woman who is pledged to another man, while he overcomes his mediocrity to become an embodiment of ideal masculinity; like Parnell, Christy also suffers a public downfall. At this time, Synge attacked the Irish Ireland movement and the Gaelic League, many of whose supporters had come out against the play, as lacking Parnell's virility. In Synge's opinion, it was they, and not he, who were the true threat to the country. Indeed, the discourse surrounding the Playboy riots, which Houston carefully details, was consumed with the lexicon of sexual health. While the more insular nationalists feared contamination and the degeneration of the Irish race, Synge saw their xenophobic fears as leading them toward degeneration via inbreeding. As Houston attests, this was something that Synge discussed in his...