"The Practice of Politics: Feminism, Activism and Social Change in Ireland" by Jennifer Kathleen DeWan

Jennifer Kathleen DeWan

Deposited 2008

Abstract
The Irish women's movement in all its historical and political variations has been one of the most successful social movements in modern Irish history. The subjectivities and practices of women's activisms to make their lives better, both explicitly feminist and otherwise, have undergone several shifts in relation to larger structural change. Most recently, the women's movement has experienced a generational shift where feminist activism within a cohesive and autonomous 'women's movement' no longer fully defines the practices and subjectivities women employ to transform their lives. This shift is situated in the context of dramatic social changes in Ireland over the past few decades that are characteristic of the effects of late capitalism and globalization in a European postcolonial nation-state, including membership in the European Union, the recent neoliberal economic restructuring and growth termed the 'Celtic Tiger', and rapid modernization and secularization of the predominantly Catholic population. This study explores the complexities of this generational shift, including its relationship to social, political and economic change, its ties to the emergence of new forms of power and governmentality, and the effects of these conditions on the practices and subjectivities of feminist activism. However, political agency cannot be read entirely as the effects of subjectification as a result of large structural changes; people continue to 'practice politics' in a complex relationship to the conditions that construct, enable and constrain those actions - making their subjectivity as much as it is being made. If the effects of late capitalism have altered the relationship of the state to its citizens, these processes have also potentially opened up many new opportunities for actors and practices to emerge and transform the traditional fields of political engagement. Struggles over and for social change are being constituted in new arenas, both traditionally 'political' and not, by political subjects that theories of the contemporary 'condition' cannot fully account for without the benefits of ethnographic 'thickness'. An ethnographic and historical examination of one way that people 'practice politics', in this case a study of feminist political activisms in Ireland, can function as a means to explore the specificities and particularities of the effects of these processes on the late capitalist state.