the English tongue is imagined as not only imperialist but also male,
thus evading the ways in which Irish culture is also plagued by
patriarchal domination and the problems involved with gendering
Ireland as a female victim.
Gerardine Meaney indicates that due to the unfortunate
dwindling of Irish as a national language, the notion of the Irish
language as mother tongue provides a narrow space of resistance for
Irish women, excluding those who are non-Irish speaking and the
Anglo-Irish.^26 In this way, Meaney moves from ethnic to cultural
nationalism. A further problem aside from the gendering of Ireland is
how Irish can be conceived of as a mother or feminine tongue, when
the bardic tradition is predominantly male. It can also be contended
that the notion of a feminine tongue risks forming another straight-
jacket which does not allow for the diversity and differences between
female writers. In this way, feminist promotion of an Ècriture fÈminine
becomes a globalizing gesture. The demand remains for women to
assert their different identities in a move towards a politics of
difference yet still to retain enough of a group identity ëas womení so
as to resist patriarchal subjugation. In this way, the identity politics of
feminism and post-colonialism face comparable difficulties as they are
readjusted by postmodern strategies which move towards a politics of
difference by way of drawing attention to the limitations of essen-
tialism.^27 However, postmodern strategies also threaten the potential
resistance of marginalized groups as essentialist notions of group
identity are deconstructed and undermined.^28
In ëWomenís Timeí Kristeva celebrates the revolt of a new
generation of female artists who attempt ëto break the code, to shatter
language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and emotions,
to the unamenable repressed by the social contractí.^29 In doing this,
Kristeva touches on eighteenth-century Romanticism as she draws a
26 Meaney, Sex and Nation, p.21.
27 Cf. Jean-FranÁois Lyotard, ëOne Of The Things At Stake In Womenís
Strugglesí, The Lyotard Reader, ed., Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell,
1989), pp.111ñ22.
28 Cf. Linda Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1990) and
Sabina Lovibond, ëFeminism and Postmodernismí, Postmodernism: A Reader,
ed., Thomas Docherty (London: Harvester, 1993), pp.390ñ415.
29 Kristeva, ëWomenís Timeí, p.199.