Sexual/Liberation addresses the paradoxes of sexual freedom in contemporary neoliberal Ireland. It invites readers to imagine a revolutionary form of sexual liberation beyond the present objective of achieving equality within a grossly unequal social order. Centrally, the book offers a critical meditation on images of gay men circulating in post-marriage equality Irish culture. Such images tell us little about the actual lives of gay men but offer us considerable insight into the political imaginary - the values, norms, anxieties and contradictions - of the society in which those images circulate. The images of gay men, male bodies and male intimacy discussed are drawn from varied sources: Leo Varadkar's media profile; digital portraits curated by men engaged in sex work; Irish Queer Archives; media, scholarly and artistic commemorations of Declan Flynn and Roger Casement; Joe Caslin's murals. Taking inspiration from the ideas of Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Herbert Marcuse, Sexual/Liberation encourages us to re-think the political as sexual - to reflect on how our political perspectives are shaped by desires, needs, vulnerabilities and hopes. Above all, this book challenges us to move beyond a politics of identities and injuries and strive instead for a politics universal and radically humanist in its imaginative scope, anti-capitalist and revolutionary in its objectives.

About the Author
Michael G. Cronin is Lecturer in English at Maynooth University. He is the author of Impure Thoughts: sexuality, Catholicism and literature in twentieth-century Ireland (Manchester UP, 2013) and Revolutionary Bodies: homoeroticism and the political imagination in Irish writing (Manchester UP, 2022)


Book Information
ISBN 9781782055235
Author Michael G. Cronin
Format Paperback
Page Count 166
Imprint Cork University Press
Publisher Cork University Press