10 - Medbh McGuckian: The Lyric of Gendered Space

Summary

The Postmodern

Medbh McGuckian has devoted her entire career not only to re-imagining women's relation to the female body, to the domestic environment, and to the wider world of society, politics, religion and culture, but to re-constituting the very basis of female subjectivity and self-expression. She explains the demoralising state of affairs that prompts such a revolutionary enterprise:

I know being a woman for me for a long time was being less, being excluded, being somehow cheap, being inferior, being sub. I associated being a woman with being a Catholic and being Irish with being from the North, and all of these things being not what you wanted to be. If you were a woman, it would have been better to be a man; if you were Catholic, it would have been a lot easier to be Protestant; if you were from the North, it was much easier to be from the South; if you were Irish, it was much easier to be English. So it was like everything that I was was wrong; everything that I was was hard, difficult, and a punishment.

McGuckian's confession of feelings of comprehensive lack – an ironic revision of the ‘hierarchy of values’ that Hewitt delineated in his attempt at an assertion of confident (male) Protestant identity – may be understood in Lacanian psychoanalytic terms. According to Lacan, and also to psychoanalytic French feminist thought, personal, social and cultural identity is acquired within a network of social and symbolic discourses organised in and through language.