Queer Literature in Ireland

Dedicated to the memory of Éibhear Walshe, 1962–2024. The cultural and academic soil in which queer Irish literary scholarship took root was prepared by innumerable Irish organizations, initiatives, events, and milestones in the late twentieth century. These include Catherine Rose’s founding of Galway’s feminist literary press, Arlen House, in the mid-1970s; the decriminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults in Northern Ireland, 1983; the launching of Attic Press, 1984; and Ailbhe Smyth’s establishment of the Women’s Education, Research and Resource Center (WERRC) at University College Dublin in 1990. The first anthology of Irish lesbian/gay writing appeared in 1986, a few years before male homosexuality in Ireland was decriminalized (1993); the second such anthology appeared in 1994. From the early 1990s, critical and theoretical readings of LGBT issues in Irish literature first appeared at Irish studies conferences and in academic journals on both sides of the Atlantic. The first edited collections of queer Irish literary critical essays followed, and the first monographs appeared shortly thereafter. In 1999, Alan Hayes relaunched Arlen House, which grew into a welcoming home for queer Irish-language literature and literary criticism. From 2002 to 2013, Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke convened “The(e)ories: Critical Theory & Sexuality Studies,” a lecture series that brought many international queer theorists to Ireland. In 2009, Irish studies scholar Seán Kennedy convened the first Queering Ireland conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, bringing together an international contingent of Irish studies scholars working in sexuality studies. Subsequent Queering Ireland conferences, meeting in Cork; Buffalo, NY; Dublin; Columbia, SC; and Halifax (2011–2019), remained intimate, experimental, and transnational, fostering conversations among scholars, activists, performers, graduate student scholars, and artists, and spawning multiple special journal issues. The vibrant, heterogeneous field of queer Irish literary studies as it exists in 2025 is the product of multifarious interactions around the disputed, amorphous, contentious term, queer, as it has been employed by creatives, activists, editors, public intellectuals, scholars, teachers, journalists, and others, in and beyond Ireland, to represent and theorize queer (and heteronormative) Irish lives across time, language, class, race, religion, and national and political alignments, in the face of institutional and political obstacles and opacities particular to 20th-century Ireland. Over the past several decades, these interactions have made unevenly but unarguably more legible queer lives, experiences, and communities that have been present, even familiar, yet often disavowed, across every period and genre of Irish literature and culture.