Abstract
While many critics of Ní Dhomhnaill have recognized that she stages Irish women’s subjectivity through cartographic metaphors, in Chapter 3 on the poet’s “Traumatic/Erotic Mapping” Mulligan argues that Ní Dhomhnaill also uses them to consider the positive potentiality of the historically abjected aspects of the feminine erotic. Mulligan demonstrates how geography can thereby both mark scenes of violence and create new spaces outside of traditional atlases of womanhood. The female speakers in Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems find jouissance/sámhas by engaging with the difficult but fascinating history of women’s marginalization while simultaneously embracing embodiment, locatedness, and vernacular Catholic devotions as a means of surpassing it.
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Mulligan, C.M. (2019). Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Traumatic/Erotic Map: Transubstantiating the Body of Ireland. In: Geofeminism in Irish and Diasporic Culture. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19215-0_3
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