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The work of representation and representations of work: the feminist experimental poetries of Catherine Walsh and Ellen Dillon

Fleming, Will; (2023) The work of representation and representations of work: the feminist experimental poetries of Catherine Walsh and Ellen Dillon. Irish Studies Review , 31 (1) pp. 34-52. 10.1080/09670882.2023.2164338. Green open access

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Abstract

This article analyses how Catherine Walsh and Ellen Dillon employ a shared feminist experimental poetics to address notions of female labour in contemporary Ireland. It argues that both subscribe to a contemporary feminist consensus, outlined in Angela McRobbie’s The Aftermath of Feminism, that neoliberalism has co-opted the ideals of second-wave feminism, and redeployed them as spurious evidence that “there is no longer any place for feminism in contemporary political culture.” Both poets challenge this latter assertion, positioning a distinctly female form of traditional Irish labour – butter-making – as a site in which to reclaim lost feminist ideals and forms of social solidarity. Beginning with an account of how Ireland has transitioned to the logic of capital while paradoxically exploiting the ideals of the social movements it necessarily suppresses, it then shows how Walsh uses a feminist experimental poetics in Optic Verve (2009) to simulate the experience of the Irish female subject in a harsh “post-feminist” neoliberal landscape, while gesturing towards lost female forms of labour and commoning. It then posits that Dillon’s Butter Intervention (2022) seeks to expose the neoliberal erasure of feminist labour struggles from Irish history, as well as present ways to repatriate them within a contemporary social consciousness.

Type: Article
Title: The work of representation and representations of work: the feminist experimental poetries of Catherine Walsh and Ellen Dillon
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1080/09670882.2023.2164338
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2023.2164338
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
Keywords: Catherine Walsh; Ellen Dillon; post-feminism; labour; experimental poetry; Celtic Tiger
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of English Lang and Literature
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10191252
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