"No Parentage in Love": The Queer Victorian Roots of Modern Irish Nationalism

Abstract: This essay considers a strain of queer nationalist thinking that was central to the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland through and against the more familiar model associated with Oscar Wilde. Where Wilde's politics were grounded in Oxford Hellenism's advocacy of spiritual procreation (in a discursive space that, as Linda Dowling has suggested, was opened by Malthusian projections of overcrowding), nationalists such as Patrick Pearse and Roger Casement traced a different trajectory. Post-Famine underpopulation demanded a regenerative approach in which the emphasis falls upon the reiterative production of rebellious Irish subjects, one I suggest was equally—but differently—queer as Wilde's.