Resumen de Reasind Dermon Bolger's "The Holy Land": National Identity, Gender and Sexuality in Post-colonial Ireland
The first part of this essay traces a genealogy of the colonialist and nationalist discourses in Ireland, with a view to demonstrating the derivative nature of the latter and its intimate, fundamental connection with a particular construction of gender and sexuality.
The roots of the feminization of Ireland in colonialist discourse are examined, as are the reasons for the systematic negation of (particularly female) sexual desire in Irish nationalist discourse, i.e. that which became the ideological founding block of the Irish Free State after 1921. On the basis of the insights gained in the first part, the essay then goes on to read Dublin playwright Dermot Bolger's The Holy Ground (l990), a one-act motiologue spoken by midde-aged, midde-class Monica, where the author, it is claimed, sets out to deconstruct the nationalist myth of female identity, i.e. of the submissive, suffering, asexual Irish woman.
