Locked in the Family Cell: Gender, Sexuality and Political Agency in Irish National Discourse. By Kathryn A. Conrad. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Pp. xiii + 179, illustrations, index, ISBN: 0-299-19650-X, cloth.)

Anyone familiar with recent Irish history will know how often disputes about nation, state and social order have been conducted on the ground of sexual politics. Abortion, declared unconstitutional in the Irish Republic in 1983, has featured prominently in debates about Ireland’s relationship to Europe. The 1980s and 1990s saw a series of high-profile cases involving infanticide, the death of an adolescent in the Marian grotto where she went to give birth, and disputes about whether a suicidal fourteen-year-old rape victim should be allowed to travel to England for an abortion. In Northern Ireland, homosexuality was decriminalised considerably later than in the rest of the United Kingdom and only after resistance in the form of a “Save Ulster from Sodomy” campaign. The jurisdiction remains exempt from British abortion law, with politicians across the unionist-nationalist divide determined to keep it that way. For Kathryn Conrad, these phenomena are inseparable from a conviction that national integrity rests on the heterosexual family and a clear public/private dichotomy. Locked in the Family Cell sets out to provide a focused examination of how this equation has played out on both sides of the Irish border. On the most immediate level then, the work speaks to questions of critical concern to feminists, gay activists and scholars of (Northern) Irish politics and culture. It also addresses theoretical questions about gender, sexuality and nation, public and private that, as Conrad notes, should be of wide interest beyond Irish studies. The title of her introduction, “Informing on the Irish Family Cell,” incorporates two of her key conceptual hooks. “Cell” suggests an analogy between prison, biological, and paramilitary cells and the family as fundamental social unit (the Republic’s constitution enshrines it thus). In each case, emphasis is on self-regulation and enclosure. For order to prevail, anything destabilising must be neutralised by containment or expulsion. The consequences are most obvious for those who do not fit the model, but even the seemingly privileged are “trapped within the family cell” (4). “Informing” likewise carries multiple inflections: communicating knowledge, influencing, and divulging evidence against another. In a national or insurgent context, informers — those who disclose intelligence proper to the cell — are seen as traitors or spies, disloyal or alien elements who endanger the nation or nation-in-waiting. As Conrad argues in a later chapter, this helps explain why homosexuality has so often figured as foreign in Irish (and other) national discourses. But this negative sense of informing requires a clear division between public and private Conrad says, for otherwise “subjects can move freely in the public sphere, offering alternatives to a nationalist discourse based on a limited and limiting notion of the family cell” (16). Thus, Conrad argues, those who inform against the family cell, exposing its inner (dys)functions, offer the best hope for liberation and an invigorated public sphere. She develops her case in three substantive chapters. Chapter one deals with representations of homosexuality in Irish political discourse, from the trial of Roger Casement through the history of gay rights activism and legislative reform in Britain, Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. It winds up with the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organisation’s exclusion from New York’s St. Patrick’s Day parade and a brief reflection on the relative openness of the Celtic Tiger climate. Chapter two examines abortion debates on both sides of the border, as well as a number of high-profile individual cases. Conrad ends with a chapter connecting her arguments about the family cell to Northern Ireland’s conflicted political status. In particular, she suggests that the dominance of the “two communities” framework for Northern politics is both based on and …