Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

designate the people ìas oneîí.^42 This demands a reading of ëdouble
temporalityí or attending to what is in-between the ëpedagogicalí and
the ëperformativeí. Identity is thought of as in process or as ëper-
formativeí ñ as critically differential rather than pluralist. This reading
of identity as ëperformativeí or unfixed goes beyond a liberal politics
of multicultural pluralism, and it is a most important statement for
post-colonial and feminist criticism, since it abandons the pathos for
authenticity that has informed first generation nationalist and feminist
projects.
Bhabhaís theorization is also evocative of the tensions played out
in Bolandís poems as she negotiates between national and feminist
demands, whilst noticing how the supplementary nature of gendered
and national identities cannot be contained. Bhabha comments that

In place of the polarity of a prefigurative self-generating nation ëin-itselfí and

extrinsic other nations, the performative introduces a temporality of the

ëinbetween.í The boundary that marks the nationís selfhood interrupts the self-

generating time of national production and disrupts the signification of the

people as homogeneous.^43

He insists that this liminal space is resistant to the terrors of
essentialism:

The space of cultural signification that I have attempted to open up through the

intervention of the performative, would meet this important precondition. The

liminal figure of the nation-space would ensure that no political ideologies

could claim transcendent or metaphysical authority for themselves. This is

because of the discursive ambivalence that emerges in the contest of narrative

authority between the pedagogical and the performative.^44

Boland writes from a place of liminality or ëmenial inbetweensí:
ëFrom the place of the ìmeanwhileî, where cultural homogeneity and
democratic anonymity articulate the national community, there
emerges a more instantaneous and subaltern voice of the people,
minority discourses that speak betwixt and between times and

42 Ibid., p.153.
43 Ibid., p.148.
44 Ibid.