scholarly journals Female Surfers Riding the Crest of a ‘New Wave’ of Irish National Identity

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 190-207
Author(s):  
Rachel Telford ◽  
PJ Kitchen ◽  
David Hassan

With surfing debuting at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics (postponed from summer 2020 due to the COVID 19 global pandemic) it is timely to consider surfing and the national identifications women in Ireland may have with this sport. As Lee Bush states, ‘with so little scholarship on surfing women, descriptive studies are needed as a foundation for launching future interpretive and critical studies.’[1] Twelve women who surf in Ireland spoke about the links their surfing may or may not have with their national identity. Previous academic inquiry on links between national identity and sport on the island of Ireland has almost exclusively focused on men’s experiences of team sports and issues of ‘Irishness’.[2] ‘Irishness’ is globally recognised and stereotypically linked to traditional and indigenous Irish sports such as Gaelic football and a range of other cultural activities. Research into women’s sport participation has largely been restricted to the study of soccer in the Republic of Ireland,[3] and gendered evaluations of various lifestyle and health surveys.[4] Katie Liston, a key researcher in sport and gender relations in Ireland, highlights that ‘there seems to be an increasing diversity in the kinds of activities in which people participate in’,[5] and that there is a shift towards ‘lifestyle’ activities for adults as diversity increases in young people’s participation in sports and leisure activities. Against the backdrop of Liston’s work, this article delves deeper into data collected as part of a wider research project, discussing whether or not women who surf in Ireland do so as part of a process designed to construct and reflect their national identities related to this arguably ‘postmodern’[6] ‘lifestyle sport’,[7] in which Ireland will be represented on the Olympic stage for the first time in 2021. [1] Lee Bush, ‘Creating Our Own Lineup: Identities and Shared Cultural Norms of Surfing Women in a U.S. East Coast Community’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 45, no. 3 (2016): 290–318. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0891241614556346, 262. [2] See the work of Alan Bairner, John Sugden, David Hassan and Mike Cronin for a broad range of work in this area. [3] See for example Katie Liston, ‘Women's Soccer in the Republic of Ireland: Some Preliminary Sociological Comments’, Soccer & Society 7, no. 2 (2006b): 364 – 384. Also see Ann Bourke, ‘Women’s Soccer in the Republic of Ireland: Past Events and Future Prospects’, in Soccer, Women, Sexual Liberation: Kicking Off a New Era ed. Fan Hong and J.A. Mangan (London: Frank Cass, 2004): 162–82. [4] Katie Liston, ‘A Question of Sport’ in Contemporary Ireland: A Sociological Map ed. Sara O'Sullivan (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2007), 159-180. [5] Liston, ‘A Question of Sport’, 161. [6] The idea of lifestyle sport as postmodern sport is discussed in Belinda Wheaton, ed., Understanding Lifestyle Sports: Consumption, Identity and Difference (London: Routledge, 2004). Also see: Lincoln Allison, Amateurism in Sport: An Analysis and a Defence (London: Frank Cass, 2001); R. Rinehart, ‘Emerging Arriving Sport: Alternatives to Formal Sport’ in Handbook of Sports Studies ed. Jay Coakley and Eric Dunning (London: Sage, 2000), 504-519. [7] The term is used by two leading researchers in the field. See Wheaton, Understanding Lifestyle; Rinehart, ‘Emerging Arriving’.

1998 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronit Lentin

This paper argues that ‘Irishness’ has not been sufficiently problematised in relation to gender and ethnicity in discussions of Irish national identity, nor has the term ‘Irish women’ been ethnically problematised. Sociological and feminist analyses of the access by women to citizenship of the Republic of Ireland have been similarly unproblematised. This paper interrogates some discourses of Irish national identity, including the 1937 Constitution, in which difference is constructed in religious, not ethnic terms, and in which women are constructed as ‘naturally’ domestic. Ireland's bourgeois nationalism privileged property owning and denigrated nomadism, thus excluding Irish Travellers from definitions of ‘Irishness’. The paper then seeks to problematise T.H. Marshall's definition of citizenship as ‘membership in a community’ from a gender and ethnicity viewpoint and argues that sociological and feminist studies of the gendered nature of citizenship in Ireland do not address access to citizenship by Traveller and other racialized women which this paper examines in brief. It does so in the context of the intersection between racism and nationalism, and argues that the racism implied in the narrow definition of ‘Irishness’ is a central factor in the limited access by minority Irish women to aspects of citizenship. It also argues that racism not only interfaces with other forms of exclusion such as class and gender, but also broadens our understanding of the very nature of Irish national identity.


1998 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Smyth

This paper considers the ways in which discourses of abortion and discourses of national identity were constructed and reproduced through the events of the X case in the Republic of Ireland in 1992. This case involved a state injunction against a 14-year-old rape victim and her parents, to prevent them from obtaining an abortion in Britain. By examining the controversy the case gave rise to in the national press, I will argue that the terms of abortion politics in Ireland shifted from arguments based on rights to arguments centred on national identity, through the questions the X case raised about women's citizenship status, and women's position in relation to the nation and the state. Discourses of national identity and discourses of abortion shifted away from entrenched traditional positions, towards more liberal articulations.


1997 ◽  
Vol 18 (First Serie (1) ◽  
pp. 45-53
Author(s):  
Yvonne Galligan

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 302-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daphne Halikiopoulou

AbstractWhereas most of Western Europe experienced a separation between the political and religious spheres in the past decades, in Greece and the Republic of Ireland the process of secularisation has been inhibited due to close association between religion and national identity. This paper examines these countries in a comparative perspective and argues that the process of secularisation in Ireland has been explicitly linked to a shift in national identity, a development which has not taken place in Greece. The relationship between religion and national identity is contingent on two factors: internally, the degree in which a church obstructs the modernisation process and, externally, the level of threat perceptions.


Retos ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 419-426
Author(s):  
Raúl Fraguela-Vale ◽  
Lara Varela-Garrote ◽  
Laura Varela-Crespo

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar las características de la práctica físico-deportiva durante el ocio de la juventud que cursa Educación Secundaria Postobligatoria no universitaria (ESPO) en España (de edades entre 15 y 20 años). Concretamente, se estudia la práctica de ocio deportivo en función del género y se analizan las características de la misma (frecuencia, organización, compañía, etc.). Para ello se realizó un diseño de investigación cuantitativo en el que se aplicó un cuestionario elaborado ad hoc a una muestra representativa de 2694 estudiantes españoles de ESPO, que señalaron el ocio deportivo como su opción preferida de ocio (n= 901). En general, la modalidad de ocio preferida por la juventud española es la deportiva. Las chicas se decantan por actividades físicas individuales y artístico-expresivas, mientras que los chicos por la práctica de deportes colectivos; siendo menor el interés de las chicas por participar en competiciones deportivas. Además, la frecuencia de práctica es inferior en las mujeres durante la semana, pero no durante los fines de semana. Ellas renuncian en mayor medida que ellos a practicar actividades de ocio que les gustan. Respecto a la dimensión social de la práctica, ambos colectivos realizan deporte mayoritariamente con gente de su edad, pero ellas puntúan más bajo en esta opción de respuesta. El género es un factor determinante en la práctica de ocio deportivo juvenil, constatándose desigualdades en la frecuencia y preferencias de práctica y en la renuncia a actividades físico-deportivas que son de su agrado.Abstract. We study the profiles of sports participation of youths enrolled in Post-Compulsory Secondary Education (PCSE) in Spain (15-20 years). Specifically, it is analyzed if there are any differences according to gender in sports leisure practice and what are the sport participation features of each group. In order to do so, a quantitative research design was carried out and an ad hoc questionnaire was applied to a significative sample of 2694 ESPO Spanish students. Nine hundred and one of them were specifically studied because they selected sports practice as their main leisure preference. Overall, it is observed that the kind of leisure activity chosen by the Spanish youth is sport activity. We found that girls prefer individual and artistic-expressive physical activities, while boys opt for practicing team sports. We found a lower interest of girls in participating in sports competitions. Also, the frequency of practice is lower in women than men during the working days, but not during the weekend. Girls give up practicing leisure activities that they like much more than boys do. Regarding the social dimension of the practice, both groups practice mostly with people of their age, but girls score lower in this response option. Gender affects sports leisure of Spanish youth, differences being found in the frequency and preferences of practice, and in waivering leisure activities that they like.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Strange

Abstract In May 2018, voters in the Republic of Ireland passed a referendum proposal to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, lifting the Irish state’s near-total ban on abortion. Scholars have argued that Ireland’s abortion ban has historically played a key role in the construction of Irish national identity along Catholic, traditional, and heteronormative lines, meaning the lead-up to the vote allowed for key insights into the discursive construction of national identity and gender in Ireland. Drawing on theoretical discussions in both the nationalism and Linguistic Landscape (LL) literature and adopting a qualitative, multimodal approach to analyse the referendum campaign’s LL, I argue that there was a dominant understanding of the relationship between women and Irish national identity, predicated on a positive stance towards Irish identity, while any dissenting voices which questioned whether advancing gender equality was compatible with nationalist ideology were confined to the margins of the debate.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-39
Author(s):  
Long Bui

This article considers state-funded films in contemporary Vietnam and the legacy of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), which fell to communist forces in 1975. From a close reading of films produced on the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the war, the article deciphers complicated meanings about national identity, history, and gender. In this new political economic context, the possibilities for remembering the southern regime—including its people and veterans—remains open and closed. Through the framework of heteroglossia of history, the co-presence of competing viewpoints within cinematic texts points to the complexity of an ever-changing Vietnam.


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