Theory on the Edge / Breaking Feminist Waves (PDF)

Olga Cox Cameron, St Vincent's University Hospital and Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Noreen Giffney, University College Dublin, Ireland
Breda Gray, University of Limerick, Ireland
Sandra McAvoy, University College Cork, Ireland
Gerardine Meaney, University College Dublin, Ireland
Anne Mulhall, University College Dublin, Ireland
Aideen Quilty, University College Dublin, Ireland
Medb Ruane, University College Dublin, Ireland
Margrit Shildrick, Linköping University, Sweden
Edith Shillue, independent scholar
Ailbhe Smyth, University College Dublin, Ireland
Moynagh Sullivan, NUI Maynooth, Ireland
Fintan Walsh, Queen Mary College, University of London, UK
Margaret Ward, Director of the Women's Resource and Development Agency, Northern Ireland
Ivana Bacik, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Eithne Luibhéid, University of Arizona, USA
Debbie Ging, Dublin City University, Ireland
Lisa Fingleton, artist and filmmaker
Paula Burns, civil servant

"This landmark and invaluable collection of essays shows how the shape of Irish Studies has been changed for the better by the substantial interventions that feminist and queer practices have made. It historicizes feminist and queer activism in Ireland and its diasporas, as well as showing how critically important it is to centralize perspectives that emphasize embodiment, sexuality, and gender for reading Ireland now and into the future." - Mike Cronin, Professor, Boston College, Ireland

"Irish feminism, activist, and academic, has supplied impetus for virtually all of the most remarkable social transformations that we have observed in Ireland over the past three decades, while nurturing and cross-pollinating with an array of other distinct movements vastly influential in their own right. This collection is indispensable to our understanding of a particularly dynamic, heterogeneous, and theoretically sophisticated feminist movement." - Margot Backus, Professor, University of Houston, USA

"This collection is a fitting tribute to and extension of the work of Ailbhe Smyth and her vigorous, indefatigable and lifelong commitment to feminist theory and activism. As a public intellectual, essayist, poet and feminist Smyth has been instrumental in integrating sexual difference into the Irish context and the essays here are equally engaged and curious about this persistent question for our time. Each of the contributors shares Smyth's mischievousness, passion, and her genuine and uncompromising fidelity to feminist thinking. Giffney and Shildrick have generously repaid the debts owed to Smyth politically, poetically, and philosophically and produced a volume which ensures that the edge-work she made possible can continue on far into the future." - Michael O'Rourke, Independent College, Dublin, Ireland