Research seminar: Rachel Gough on “Woman of the House: Patriarchy as Land Management Practice”, Tue 21 Jan @4.15pm, FSM Auditorium, Kane Building B10.B

15 Jan 2025

This paper will demonstrate how operations relating to land ownership and management are problematically informed by patriarchal ideological discourses, which have endured in Ireland for centuries and have been variously co-opted by both colonial powers and the Irish State. 

This dialogical relationship problematically reinforces both systems of oppression and systems of representation, enshrining both within a cultural hegemony of patriarchal dominance and control. These are manifestly set out and perennially reinvigorated and ensure the dispossession of women from property ownership and ensuring the oppressive management of female social participants. This, in turn, contributes to and maintains a productivist system of agriculture which has critically damaged biodiversity across rural Ireland all of which come to establish patterns of expectation making certain territories and psycho-ecologies all the more susceptible and vulnerable to external (neocolonial) exploitation. A direct causal link can be observed between the patriarchal tendencies of Irish cinema and the degradation of rural ecologies.

Four internationally acclaimed “Irish” films serve as excellent case studies to set this scene; The Quiet Man, The Field, The Secret of Roan Inish and The Hole in the Ground. Presenting these films as case studies, this paper will expose a common representational trope which has informed cultural representations of women’s lives in rural Ireland since the establishment of the Free State.

Rachel Gough is a writer, filmmaker and PhD candidate at the Department of Film and Screen Media at University College Cork. Her research focuses on representations of rural Ireland’s ecologies. She is co-founder of Haunted Futures. In 2023 she was
awarded the Lord Puttnam Scholarship. In 2024 she was an awardee of the CACSSS Creative Connections Fund.