Gendering Violence in Early Modern Irish Poetry

3 credit hours · Undergraduate

This course uses early modern Irish poetry (1540 - 1650) to study the symbolic violence of colonial discourse. The course is a case study in the gendered violence of colonial projects and the anticolonial resistance movements they engender. Native Irish and early settler writings both use violent tropes of emasculation and feminization that recur in early accounts of the colonization of the New World. The final report of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls tribunal is used as a lens through which to study how gendered discourses of violence travelled from Europe to the New World with devastating effects that are still felt today.