Derived from my forthcoming monograph, Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health, in this paper I examine how figurations of venereal disease, accounts of its aetiology, and campaigns for its regulation were used by Joyce and his literary and political contemporaries to construct and contest models of Irish identity in the first decades of the twentieth century. Surveying the political culture of early twentieth-century Ireland in conversation with Dubliners and Ulysses, I trace the ways in which references to venereal disease were employed in the anti-enlisting campaigns of groups such as the Irish Transvaal Committee, Inghinidhe na hÉireann, and Sinn Féin to offer an explanatory metaphor for the malign impact of British imperial rule in Ireland, and illustrate the ways in which authors such as Joyce and Oliver Gogarty echoed these positions in their literary critiques of British militarism. At the same time, focussing on the “Cyclops” and “Circe” episodes of Ulysses, I also demonstrate the ways in which Joyce was to distance himself from the more chauvinistic deployments of this rhetoric, particularly where they concerned Ireland’s Jewish population. Ultimately, turning my attention to “Eumaeus”, I trace the contours of an emerging weariness in Joyce’s rendering of the entire question of sexual health as the grounds for conceptualizing Irish national identity, and sketch its influence on later authors such as Flann O’Brien.
A non-binary academic, writer, and activist from the North of Ireland, Dr Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston is SSHRC – CIHR Banting Post-Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of Alberta in Canada. Their research explores the cultural politics of sexual health, queer history and culture, and the history of erotica and obscenity, and has appeared in publications such as the Review of English Studies, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Irish Times. Their first monograph, Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.
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