Irish Traveller Girlhoods in Text: Representations, Challenges and Resistance in the Plays by Rosaleen McDonagh

Irish Traveller Girlhoods in Text: Representations, Challenges and Resistance in the Plays by Rosaleen McDonagh

Belén Martín Lucas

Within the PhD project I analyse literary representations of Irish Traveller girls in contemporary literary texts. Irish Travellers constitute an indigenous ethnic minority group in the Republic of Ireland and have distinctive traditions, identity and culture based on the nomadic mindset. In my research I focus on representations of Traveller girlhood and use the methodology of feminism and postcolonialism, considering the experiences and identities of Travellers, particularly Traveller girls, an example of internal colonialism.  Employing the key concepts of feminist and postcolonial theories, gender studies and disability studies, I conduct intersectional analysis of representations of girlhood in terms of gender, age, ethnicity, (dis)ability and class. In doing so I also analyse power relations and the way they operate in addressing the issue of continuing discrimination of Travellers by the sedentary majority.The corpus includes texts by Traveller authors such as Rosaleen McDonagh, Nan Joyce and Sean Maher, as well as John Millington Synge, John Banville, Bryan MacMahon, Maeve Kelly, Peter Brady and Niall Williams, who write from a sedentary perspective. While representations of Travellers in literary works by non-Traveller authors have been subject to research, there is not much research done regarding Traveller literary self-representation, as well as representations of Traveller girlhood, so my research largely focuses on texts written by Travellers.