The work of representation and representations of work: the feminist experimental poetries of Catherine Walsh and Ellen Dillon

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses how Catherine Walsh and Ellen Dillon employ a shared feminist experimental poetics to address notions of female labour in contemporary Ireland. It argues that both subscribe to a contemporary feminist consensus, outlined in Angela McRobbie’s The Aftermath of Feminism, that neoliberalism has co-opted the ideals of second-wave feminism, and redeployed them as spurious evidence that “there is no longer any place for feminism in contemporary political culture.” Both poets challenge this latter assertion, positioning a distinctly female form of traditional Irish labour – butter-making – as a site in which to reclaim lost feminist ideals and forms of social solidarity. Beginning with an account of how Ireland has transitioned to the logic of capital while paradoxically exploiting the ideals of the social movements it necessarily suppresses, it then shows how Walsh uses a feminist experimental poetics in Optic Verve (2009) to simulate the experience of the Irish female subject in a harsh “post-feminist” neoliberal landscape, while gesturing towards lost female forms of labour and commoning. It then posits that Dillon’s Butter Intervention (2022) seeks to expose the neoliberal erasure of feminist labour struggles from Irish history, as well as present ways to repatriate them within a contemporary social consciousness.