Writing the intersections: representing gender and class in Troubles fiction

This chapter reflects on how both literature and literary studies in Northern Ireland have responded to the Troubles and focus particularly on how feminist literary criticism and working-class studies have driven an intersectional approach that requires revisiting the past. In order to do so, it is first important to sketch the dominant trends in representations of gender and class in Troubles fiction. Given the sheer multitude of representations of men in Troubles fiction, however, the authors might have expected to see a wider range of scholarship on masculinity's relationship with violence, nationalism, unionism, ethnicity, class, or sexuality. They can learn from the scholarship that has been done already and take new theoretical frameworks forward, but it is equally important to reinterrogate what has come before through the lenses afforded by these new paradigms, and this involves exploring the relationship between gender and class.