Gênero e alteridade no nacionalismo irlandês

Abstract

Irish anticolonialism was based on the maximization of gender boundaries in order to stress the manliness of Gaelic men and oppose their feminization by the English colonialism, which legitimized itself by gendering the relation between England and Ireland, while inscribing the empire in the male register and the colony in the female. Through research on primary sources, we investigate the implications of this counter-strategy in the representation of subversive women who challenged a dual gender matrix in which masculinity was defined in oppositional and complementary relation with femininity. Feminists, who privileged their own agenda against that of nationalism, as well as Republicans, who defended the nation with the rifle rather than with the rosary, were othered by the nationalist intelligentsia as gender aberrations in satirical descriptions that could hardly hide the fear that their transgression could destabilize the gender boundaries that supported the national remasculinization project.