Debbie Ging

Peadar Kirby

Michael Cronin

This is the first sustained and broad-ranging critique of the legacies of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger boom. Contributors identify the damaging impact that the free market has had on a wide range of areas of public life such as the media and the pharmaceutical industry and also examine its influence on health, education, state surveillance, immigrants, the welfare state, consumerism and the Irish language. Challenging the notion that there is no alternative for Ireland but the present economic and political dispensation, experts map out an alternative politics that could create spaces for hope and renewal in contemporary Ireland. In a society whose public debates have been largely dominated by the instrumentalist logic of stockbroker economists and the regressive populism of talk-radio shock jocks, Transforming Ireland offers a more substantial and considered analysis, uncovering the hidden sides of everyday aspects of Irish life. It reveals that, virtually unnoticed by the media, there exist lively debates in today’s Ireland which draw on international insights about globalization to probe how it is reshaping Irish society. Covering four principal topics -- culture and society, media and social change, social control and power and politics -- this impressive volume opens new and hopeful perspectives for students and the general reader.

Challenges, Critiques, Resources

Transforming Ireland

Spanning a broad trajectory, from the New Gaelic Man of post-independence Ireland to the slick urban gangsters of contemporary productions, this study traces a significant shift from idealistic images of Irish manhood to a much more diverse and gender-politically ambiguous range of male identities on the Irish screen. Ging argues that Irish filmmakers have been instrumental to identifying critical flashpoints and fissures in the 'masculinity' debate, sometimes long before sociologists, psychologists and the news media. She tracks evolving cinematic discourses on manhood, from the early period of nationalist filmmaking through the First Wave's unusually anti-patriarchal and anti-nationalist interventions, to post-Celtic Tiger cinema's engagements with postfeminism, New Laddism and Raunch Culture. This is a compelling and insightful story about the development of male identities in Irish cinema over the past century.

Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema

Eugenia Siapera

Gender Hate Online addresses the dynamic nature of misogyny: how it travels, what technological and cultural affordances support or obstruct this and what impact reappropriated expressions of misogyny have in other cultures. It adds significantly to an emergent body of scholarship on this topic by bringing together a variety of theoretical approaches, while also including reflections on the past, present, and future of feminism and its interconnections with technologies and media. It also addresses the fact that most work on this area has been focused on the Global North, by including perspectives from Pakistan, India and Russia as well as intersectional and transcultural analyses. Finally, it addresses ways in which women fight back and reclaim online spaces, offering practical applications as well as critical analyses. This edited collection therefore addresses a substantial gap in scholarship by bringing together a body of work exclusively devoted to this topic. With perspectives from a variety of disciplines and geographic bases, the volume will be of major interest to scholars and students in the fields of gender, new media and hate speech.

Debbie Ging

Books

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