Elisa Haf, Research Area 1: "Competing Communities"
Doctoral Research Project

This project compares the representation of bisexuality in the novels of four Irish women writers: Sally Rooney, Emma Donoghue, Naoise Dolan and Mary Dorcey. Aligning itself with a Felskian approach to literary analysis which is particularly interested in literature's capacity to generate affective attachments, both towards and beyond itself, its exploration is organised around the question of how these texts make readers feel about the different sexual, relationship and lifestyle possibilities which bisexuality allows – or might allow – to be explored. It also seeks to draw out the relationship between the possibilities towards which the texts solicit affect, the kinds of affect they solicit, and the literary means by which they do so. In contextualising this analysis in light of the texts' specifically Irish cultural background, the dissertation also problematises the homonationalist discourses which attach to the Rooney texts in particular, and seeks to complicate a straightforward 'progress' narrative of Irish sexual liberalisation. Identifying a contemporary trend for bisexual protagonists in anglophone women's writing more broadly, and offering a queer, feminist critique of what might be called the dominant model of bisexual representation embodied in the Rooney texts, the dissertation draws on the work of the other writers in its corpus to argue that the literary 'uses' to which bisexuality may be put are as varied as the possibilities of bisexuality itself, and calls for this to be celebrated. The project examines the evolving place of "queer community" in the representations of bisexuality under discussion, especially in the face of growing queer accommodation or seeming accommodation by the "imagined community" of the nation. In seeking to better understand the terms of this rapprochement, the tensions still latent within it, and the role literature can play in masking, mediating, exposing or sustaining these, it makes a particular contribution to Research Area 1: "Competing Communities".