“Mother Ireland, get off our backs”: Gender, Republicanism and State Politics in Prison Short Stories by Northern Irish Women Writers

Looking into prison short fiction, this article discusses how a number of Northern Irish women writers have challenged male-centred narratives of the Troubles. Mary Beckett, Frances Molloy and Brenda Murphy have created alternative discourses of political violence which differ from the dominant narratives of incarceration. They confront established discourses of masculinity and femininity by subverting social constructs of gender, particularly the models of the rebel-hero and Mother Ireland ingrained in the nationalist/republican traditions. Their prison short stories are excellent examples of how state politics is superseded by gender politics in women’s writing and they are also proof of an emerging gender consciousness that challenged dominant readings of the Troubles in the last decades of the twentieth century