Challenging the Iconic Feminine in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Abstract

This chapter shows how poets Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin dissent from both the longstanding orthodoxy of the Catholic Church and the newly ascendant orthodoxy of secular neoliberalism. Writing in the Irish language, itself a pocket of resistance to the bureaucratic languages of capitalism, Ní Dhomhnaill and Ní Chuilleanáin call on relics or ‘ruins’ of the past, such as the ‘síscéal’ (fairy tale) and the keen, to challenge the reigning ideology of growth and progress. While dismantling the ‘iconic feminine’—that is, the myth of the sexless selfless mother enshrined in both Catholic and nationalist ideology—these poets recover forms of female ritual and discourse that resist global secular capitalism.