Ireland's Magdalen laundries and the nation's architecture of containment

This volume connects Ireland’s Magdalen laundries and the nation-state’s nativist politics in the post-independence era, while critically evaluating cultural representations of the Magdalen laundries that have, over the past fifteen years, recovered these institutions from the amnesia at the centre of state politics.

The book interrogates available archival resources, including government reports, legislative debates, and court cases, to assert that the state was always an active agent in the operation and function of the nation’s Magdalen homes.  The second half of the book considers a wide range of creative works that help imagine and give narrative form to the Magdalen experience: commercial, independent documentaries, photography and literary representations.  Ultimately, the book contends that Ireland’s Magdalen institutions chiefly exist in the public mind at the level of story (cultural representation and survivor testimony) rather than history (archival history and documentation).

This fascinating study will be invaluable to those interested in Irish History, Gender History and Social History.
 

Contents:
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: The politics of sexual knowledge: The origins of Ireland’s containment culture and the Carrigan Report (1931)
Part I: The Magdalen Asylum and history: Mining the archive
1. The Magdalen in nineteenth-century Ireland
2. The Magdalen Asylum and the State in twentieth-century Ireland
Part II :The Magdalen Laundry in cultural representation: Memory and storytelling in contemporary Ireland
3. Remembering Ireland’s architecture of containment: “Telling” stories on stage, Patricia Burke Brogan’s Eclipsed and Stained Glass at Samhain
4. (Ef)facing Ireland’s Magdalen survivors: Visual representations and documentary testimony
5. The Magdalene Sisters: Film, fact, and fiction
6. Monuments, Magdalens, memorials: Art installations and cultural memory
Conclusion: History, cultural representation, ... action?
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index