The days of wearing your heart on your sleeve are done; embrace the time of wearing your sleeve on your heart.
The days of wearing your heart on your sleeve are done; embrace the time of wearing your sleeve on your heart.
Aside from the fact that the overwhelming majority of sexual violence is committed against Muslim people in Europe (primarily by policing and border control agents) and that in general most sexual violence is a result of intimate partner violence regardless of a person’s cultural or religious background, there’s something so weirdly insidious about being angry about Muslim men “bringing sexual violence” to Europe when you look at the overwhelming centuries of European soldiers bringing sexual violence to the Muslim world.
Anyway, I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, but I think your request for Muslim feminist perspectives is absolutely the right move. So here’s some recommendations, and I’ve added a bit of a focus on Palestine since you mentioned they were sympathetic to Palestinian liberation (including queer perspectives, which is intrinsically tied to feminism):
Do Muslim Women Need Saving? - Lila Abu-Lughod (this one specifically addresses interventionist Western “feminism”)
Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine - Nada Elia (look at feminist movements in Palestine, and the women’s intifada)
Palestinian Women’s Activism: Nationalism, Secularism, Islamism - Islah Jad
Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality - Sara Ahmed (this is about the way that culture creates the stranger, and touches on exactly the issue you’re dealing with: a repetition of myth-building about the dangers of a specific out-group. I also recommend a lot of Sara Ahmed’s other books, like Living a Feminist Life, Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, Differences That Matter: Feminist Theory and Post-modernism).
Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique - Saed Atshan
Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times - Jasbir Puar (examination of the leveraging of “progressive” Western values in creating the terrorist body subject to Western violence and dehumanization, and how “feminism” was used as a primary tool in the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan)
Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon - Nicola Pratt
Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures - Gul Ozyegin
Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature - Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe (kind of an old ethnography, but interesting nonetheless)
Gender and Colonialism: A Psychological Analysis of Oppression and Liberation - Geraldine Moane
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror - Mahmood Mamdani (this one isn’t about feminism, but rather about the way that Islamaphobia has been inserted throughout western society and the shaping of western discourse on Islam. Mamdani has a lot of great books)
Anti-Veiling Campaigns in the Muslim World: Gender, Modernism, and the Politics of Dress - Stephanie Cronin
Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society - Lila Abu-Lughod (this one is more about getting to know the cultural feelings of womanhood in bedouin society)
Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories - Lila Abu-Lughod
Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian Case Study - Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (This one is about the weaponization of sexual violence, which is an important piece of understanding how the West are the largest perpetrators of sexual violence against Muslim women, not Muslim men)
Israel/Palestine and the Queer International - Sarah Schulman
Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel-Aviv: Transgender Subjects, Wounded Attachments, and the Zionist Economy of Gratitude - Saffo Papantonopoulou (quick essay on how Israeli “progressiveness” is leveraged to oppress queer Palestinians and pinkwash Israeli violence)
Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism - Harsha Walia (not specifically what you were asking for, but has a lot of great information about how militarized borders are one of the largest vectors for sexual violence against women; anyone arguing about keeping certain people from immigrating is, de facto, arguing for supporting the funding of militarized borders to keep those people out, and thus adding to the amount of sexual violence)
Working at the (state-owned media) CBC is fine and raises no questions, but working for the (state-owned media) RT naturally casts a propagandistic shadow. Care to comment?
Supporting rebellion in the DRC and wanting the people of the DRC to achieve a revolutionary success is not even remotely in the same category as supporting US-backed militias from Rwanda doing mass murder and the displacement and death of the millions of people whose emancipation Cuba believed in. People aren’t chess pieces in some grand strategy game. Revolution comes from the masses and is to free the masses. Revolution doesn’t come from imperial militias doing murder and everyone starving and dying because the whole place is being ravaged for its mines. And there’s nothing revolutionary about dismissing the deaths of the very people you supposedly believe should have a revolution as inconsequential because Rwanda has “valid reasons” for fucking killing them all.
Supporting American-instigated forever wars because an exploited people aren’t revolutionary is certainly an interesting stance.
My comment was not in defense of China (though bringing up the Khmer Rouge as if that has any bearing on current Chinese foreign policy is wild), my comment is on the material benefit to the US for M23 to be attacking the DRC, which seems a rather important piece of information for understanding how a militia that is armed by the US and Israel and is attacking people to the US’s benefit might be worth criticizing.
But then you made it immediately clear that you believe in collective punishment, as if the millions of people of the DRC should continue to be ravaged by US imperialism because of some nebulous connection that they have as an entire people to the Rwandan genocide, which, frankly, is a troubling viewpoint to take.
May you expand on what reasons would validate taking weapons from the US and Israel and arming militias to attack a neighbouring nation where 7 million people are displaced and twenty years of war and have famine have resulted in millions of deaths?
And do these valid reasons take into consideration that China became the largest stakeholder in the DRC’s mineral mines about a decade ago, which coincides with the rise of said militias using US and Israeli supplied weaponry to murder people there? Or is it somehow coincidence that at a time when China is dominating the EV and green energy market (which relies heavily on imports from the DRC) and the US is openly asserting that they will crush Chinese EV and green energy markets, that US and Israeli supplied militias are just so happening to target the mining operations in the DRC?
Just a funny little quirk that is worth commenting on: my very argument that people are often unable to self-identify because the larger mainstream has decided that their personal identifiers are “offensive” has been demonstrated by the website’s slur-filter.
Transgender, in its conception, was a coalitional term designed as an umbrella for all sorts of people who transgressed against cisheteronormative gender roles. This included transsexual people, but it also included crossdressers, drag queens/kings, stone butches, fairies, dykes, aggressives, removeds, and a whole slew of other identities (many of which would, in our current terminology, be considered “cis”).
It was only in the late nineties and into the early aughts that the term transgender started being viewed as synonymous with transsexual. This has led to a lot of interesting (though often inflammatory) shifts in the language used in queer communities. In the anglosphere, the language of institutionalized queer organizing gained prominence, and street-level identifiers fell by the wayside. There were lots of reasons for this: some identities were considered too niche, or too difficult to parse for cishetero audiences. For some, the terms that were symbols of self-realization in some communities were often considered slurs in others (and this is especially true of identifiers used by racialized and otherwise marginalized communities, as able-bodied, educated, wealthy white queer people became a focus for deciding which language was acceptable and which was “offensive”).
With the prominence of the coalitional term “transgender,” which offered an opportunity to bridge the gap between a lot of different marginalized groups under a cohesive banner, transsexual came into a specific sort of cross-fire. On the one hand, you had a new wave of self-identified transgender people making arguments that transsexual as a term was “binary” and “reinforcing gender norms,” which you may recognize as a parallel to arguments that “bisexual” as a term “reinforces the binary.” (This is also a bit of a rehashing of the old lesbian movement’s arguments that androgyny is the “correct” way to do lesbian feminism, and that femininity “reinforces the patriarchy.” Turns out political movements are often doomed to recycle the same tired and divisive rhetoric).
On the other hand, you had transsexual people who did struggle with accepting or understanding the larger coalitional movement, for a variety of reasons. For instance, there are transsexual people who were resistant to the idea that they could be “lumped in” with crossdressers, or queens, because (especially at the time) many people who were openly transsexual lived “straight” lives, and couldn’t agree with the fact of their manhood or womanhood being conflated with queer sexual practices. There were transsexual people who considered themselves to have a medical issue unrelated to queer activism, or who desired to live lives of stealth. There were transsexual people who saw their very identity as transsexual get villainized by other queer activists as “reinforcing the binary,” as though some identities could be inherently radical/more radical than others. There were transsexual people who were having their very specific transsexual needs sidelined under wider discussions of transgender activism and transgender rights.
These were all very real and interlaced conflicts of language, the type that will come up in any coalitional organizing, by the way. Coalitions are great for getting people swinging together, but they can easily end up replicating systems of hierarchy and invisibilize the differing needs of the members within that coalition (check out Viviane K. Namaste’s Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People and Julia Serano’s Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive).
This is all to say that there has been a very deep interplay of competing ideas of what it even means to be transsexual and transgender, that there is no consensus and that there can be no consensus because any consensus would at its heart replicate the very systems of assignment of identity and gender role that transgender activism erupted to combat. There is a very real effort by the bourgeois institutions of queer theory to create a containing and hegemonic ideal of queer identity that can be easily captured and consumed in the commodity market, and this has coloured the way that queer identity is understood and discussed at large. There is no “correct” term for anyone to use, and you simply cannot judge a person based on what words they use to relate to their personal experiences. Language is always in motion, and while often that motion is being directed by the institutions of power, those on the margins will always carve their own linguistic space, and it is incumbent on us to allow people the opportunity to self-describe.
Judith Butlerian Jihad
Tá fáilte romhat! Hope you find something in there that you enjoy, or that resonates. Whipping Girl is one that I bought after reading because after so many years of Stoller’s sex/gender distinction permeating queer theory to the point that it’s often uncritically presented as fact, it was so amazing to read Serrano’s theory of intrinsic inclinations (which she fleshed out further in subsequent writings) which jives much more with my own experiences and works better to apply across different experiences and cultural manifestations of gender
I sort of fell into it by accident. I am the education coordinator for a small grassroots org, and as part of that I started volunteering as a tutor at a local nonprofit that teaches adult literacy. Then that nonprofit started piloting a programme to help adults get their high school diplomas (a thing that no other organization in the city helps with, and until recently was impossible for anyone over the age of 25 as they were considered to have aged out of the high school system). I tutored through the pilot year, and started helping with curriculum stuff, so when the educational authority approved the programme permanently and decided they wanted to roll it out everywhere, this nonprofit became the only place in the city adults can get their diplomas. They contracted me after that to help build the curriculum, and I’ve been working on that and with students ever since.
So basically: if you’re already in education, I recommend looking into whatever organizations in your area actually provide supports for adults attempting to learn. These organizations tend to be overlooked even more than the school districts, and while early childhood education and adult education are not the same, many of the skills are transferable, and a desire to actually be there is already a huge point in your favour. Lots of schools offer certifications (distance courses, diploma additions, professional development) that you can do to bridge the gap in your credentials if necessary, though depending on the organizations needs, that is not always essential to have upfront.
I’ve noticed a couple people mentioning a desire to getting into more reading. I have some recommendations (and am always open to discussing books) that focus primarily on trans/intersex and queergender theory. I also think feministgender theory (absent specifically queer lenses) is an important backbone to queer gender theory, as early feminist writers describing the gender-class distinction paved the way for understanding queerness’s place in the gender-class distinction, but this list would be way too long then. Hit me up if you want some recommendations though. Some of these ethnographs rather than theory, or historical, or a bit more personal.
Julia Serrano - Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, which can be followed up with Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, and Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back, and Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism
Emi Koyama - The Transfeminist Manifesto and Transfeminism: A Collection
Leslie Feinberg - Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink Or Blue, and Lavender and Red, and Transgender Warriors: Making History From Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (a great read and interesting for its time, but be wary of accepting Feinberg’s premise that contemporary concepts of identity can be broadly applied to cultural contexts across space and time)
Kate Bornstein - Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us and Gender Outlaws: the Next Generation
Riki Wilchins - Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender
Susan Stryker - My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage (which is a fantastic essay) and Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution
Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (editors) - The Transgender Studies Reader and The Transgender Studies Reader 2 (this one is edited with Aren Aizura rather than Whittle)
Viviane K. Namaste - Invisible Lives : The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People and Sex Change, Social Change: Reflections on Identity, Institutions, and Imperialism
Esther Newton - Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America and Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas and Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian Town
And this one isn’t so much a classic as it is essential reading for trans studies for Marxists:
Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke (editors) - Transgender Marxism (I also recommend Gleeson’s essay Transition and Abolition: Notes on Marxism and Trans Politics)
Jay Prosser - Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality
Joanne Meyerowitz - How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States
Angela Pattatuchi Aragón - Challenging Lesbian Norms: Intersex, Transgender, Intersectional, and Queer Perspectives
Rita Santos - Beyond Gender Binaries: The History of Trans, Intersex, and Third-Gender Individuals
Marjorie Garber - Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety
Larry Nuttbrock (ed.) - Transgender Sex Work and Society
Andrea Abi-Karam, Kay Gabriel - We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (this is poems, more than theory, but so worth it)
Mark Thompson, Dorothy Allison, Guy Baldwin, Joseph W. Bean, Michael Bronski, Pat Califia, Jack Fritscher, Geoff Mains, Gayle Rubin – Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice
Hil Malatino - Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad
Merrick Daniel Pilling - Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice
Morty Diamond, Julia Serano, Shawna Virago, Sassafras Lowrey, Silas Howard, Cooper Lee Bombardier – Trans/Love: Radical Sex, Love & Relationships Beyond the Gender Binary
Hilary Malatino - Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience
Alice Domurat Dreger - Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex
Anne Fausto-Sterling - Myths Of Gender: Biological Theories About Women And Men and Sex/Gender: Biology in a Social World and Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality
Catherine Harper - Intersex
Morgan Holmes - Critical Intersex
Nikoletta Pikramenou - Intersex Rights: Living Between Sexes
Julia Epstein, Kristina Straub - Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity
David A. Rubin - Intersex Matters: Biomedical Embodiment, Gender Regulation, and Transnational Activism
Georgiann Davis - Contesting Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis
Katrina Karkazis - Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience
Brandy L. Simula, J.E. Sumerau, Andrea Miller (editors) - Expanding the Rainbow: Exploring the Relationships of Bi+, Polyamorous, Kinky, Ace, Intersex, and Trans People
Elizabeth Reis - Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex
Hida Vilori, Maria Nieto - The Spectrum of Sex: The Science of Male, Female, and Intersex
Stefan Horlacher (eds.) - Transgender and Intersex: Theoretical, Practical, and Artistic Perspectives
Hilary Manette Klein - The Problematics of Heterosexuality: Marxism, Psychoanalysis, and Mother Nature
Holly Lewis - The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection
Gayle S. Rubin – Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader
Sara Ahmed - Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others
Judith Butler - Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of “Sex” and Undoing Gender
Andrew Parker, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - Performativity and Performance
Also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - Epistemology of the Closet and Tendencies
Carla Freccero, Michèle Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - Queer/Early/Modern
Monique Wittig - The Straight Mind And Other Essays
Mary McAuliffe (editor) - Sapphists and Sexologists: Histories of Sexualities
Chrysanthi Nigianni, Merl Storr - Deleuze and Queer Theory
Suzanne J. Kessler, Wendy McKenna – Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach
Thomas Walter Laqueur - Making Sex, Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, Kay Whitlock - Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States
Dean Spade - Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law
Eric A. Stanley - Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex
Jasbir Puar - Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times
Adnan Hossain - Beyond Emasculation: Pleasure and Power in the Making of hijra in Bangladesh and Badhai: Hijra-Khwaja Sira-Trans Performance Across Borders in South Asia (with Claire Pamment)
Xianyong Bai, Hans Tao-Ming Huang- Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan
Denise Tse-Shang Tang - Conditional Spaces: Hong Kong Lesbian Desires and Everyday Life
Elisabeth L. Engebretsen, William F. Schroeder, Hongwei Bao (editors) - Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures
Eli Coleman, Chou Wah-Shan – Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies
Howard Chiang (eds.) - Transgender China
Hongwei Bao - Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture Under Postsocialism
Francisca Yuenki Lai - Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires
Don Kulick – Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes
Gloria Anzaldua - Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Eunjung Kim - Curative Violence: Rehabilitating Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Korea
Hwasook Nam - Women in the Sky: Gender and Labor in the Making of Modern Korea
Fintan Walsh - Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation
Páraic Kerrigan - LGBTQ Visibility, Media and Sexuality in Ireland
Patrick R. Mullen - The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History
Gul Ozyegin (ed.) - Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures
Stephen O. Murray, Will Roscoe (editors) - Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature
Saed Atshan - Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique
Sarah Schulman - Israel/Palestine and the Queer International
Stephen O. Murray, Will Roscoe (editors) - Boy-wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities
Will Roscoe - Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America
I can’t say whether this would be a good decision for you to make, and I doubt anyone here could.
However, if education is something you’re passionate about, I might recommend looking into adult education to see if it’s right for you.
I love my job. It’s hard. It’s emotionally difficult. My students have been failed by society at every level: they are in prisons, they live in tents, they are parents, they are addicts, they have learning disabilities, they are adults who cannot read full sentences or do basic arithmetic. They are people who have had every opportunity taken from them, but they are showing up, not because parents are forcing them to, but because they want to learn and grow.
Also, there is much less oversight about curriculum, so I have been able to build a curriculum that favours abolitionist viewpoints (which resonates, obviously, with many of my students who have been criminalized since childhood), Indigenous perspectives, queer ideas, and even Marxist teachings. Who will stop me? The schoolboards truly do not give a shit about these people and have already given up on them, and the educational authority of the state (not being specific so as not to dox myself) is not willing to invest the time and resources into actually providing and enforcing guidelines on my curriculum.
What I do is heartbreaking, and tiring, and deeply rewarding. I just helped a woman get her high school diploma in her eighties, who was a grandmother that believed dropping out of school to work and raise her kids had meant that she would never have that opportunity.
Not trying to proselytize, but education is truly such a powerful part of growing communities, and so if you have a feeling that it might be for you, it’s at least worth looking into.
Thank you for sharing, I enjoyed that
Gramsci for sure, but also Theodor Adorno (especially enjoyed Jargon of Authenticity) and Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed for understanding the ways that oppressive ideology self-reproduces; Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized and Decolonization and the Decolonized;
and, more specifically for ways that “dominant queer theory” can erase identities within even domestic movements, Julia Serrano’s Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, Angela Pattatuchi Aragón’s Challenging Lesbian Norms: Intersex, Transgender, Intersectional and Queer Perspectives, Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects and Others, and Viviane K. Namaste’s Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People
For explorations of this type of Western-progressive imperialism: Lila Abu-Lughod’s Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, Nada Elia’s Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine, Saffo Papantanopoulou’s Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel Aviv: Transgender Subjects, Wounded Attachments, and the Zionist Economy of Gratitude, and one I massively recommend, Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times.
These three are a bit more of a tangent, but Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock’s Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, Dean Spade’s Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, and Eric A. Stanley’s Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex are all great ways to really get at the heart of how American calls for “trans rights/protections” are often channeled towards increased policing, surveillance, militarized borders, and, ultimately, violence against racialized minorities and especially racialized queer people. From within America, it is essential for analyses of queer rights, and for calls for queer safety, to maintain a deeply rigid and principled stance against co-optation for furthering state violence, which is why any such calls from within the US to examine queerphobia abroad not only minimizes the violence faced domestically, but also serves to strengthen imperialist narratives of the necessity of aggression/destabilization of the state’s enemies.
The West doesn’t even have “not being arrested on sight” if you’re racialized. Black trans women get arrested on sight for presumptive involvement in sex work so much that they say they got picked up for “walking while trans.”
“In one American study, the largest-ever survey of transgender and gender non-conforming people, 41 percent of Black trans women reported having been arrested or jailed because of their gender identity” - Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives
It’s even worse if you’re found with condoms on your person, that becomes “evidence” that you are engaged in sex work. So trans sexuality is inherently criminalized, as of course no one would choose to have sex with trans people if it wasn’t some sort of illegal transaction.
Truly the amount that economically secure, educated white queers are disconnected from the realities of further marginalized queer people domestically is astounding, and the fact that this disconnect allows them to position whatever colonial monstrosity they call home as being more “progressive” than the victims of imperialism that they castigate as being queerphobic is endlessly frustrating. But of course, having a vector of oppression such as queerness is seen to render them as pure victim, as completely divorced from the way they personally participate in and benefit from imperialism. As if queerness can wash away the blood that stains our hands.
Endlessly tired of imperial core queer “solidarity” being based around nebulous demands for “human rights” that, to no one’s surprise, often results in siding with the state against its enemies because they’re just so backwards while people in the core are languishing in jail/detention centres and those queers abroad that are supposedly in need of saving get delivered aid missiles and IMF austerity.
I love to recommend books, and so here is a smattering of books about Ireland from a variety of subjects and perspectives (largely focused on feminism as per my area of study).
Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales, Alwyn and Brinley Rees
Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland, Anthony Bradley, Maryann Gialanella Valiulis
LGBTQ Visibility, Media and Sexuality in Ireland, Páraic Kerrigan
Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women, Bronwen Walter
Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries: A Campaign for Justice, Claire McGettrick, Katherine O’Donnell, Maeve O’Rourke, James M. Smith, Mari Steed
The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History, Patrick R. Mullen
Philosophical Perspectives on Contemporary Ireland, Clara Fischer, Áine Mahon
Women and the Irish Nation: Gender, Culture, and Irish Identity 1890–1914, D. A. J. MacPherson
Positioning Gender and Race in (Post)colonial Plantation Space: Connecting Ireland and the Caribbean, Eve Walsh Stoddard
Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation, Fintan Walsh
Gender and Colonialism: A Psychological Analysis of Oppression and Liberation, Geraldine Moane
Dedication and Leadership: Learning from the Communists, Hyde Douglas
The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies, and Power, Jennifer M. Jeffers
Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women’s Fiction: Gender, Desire and Power, Linden Peach
Literature, Partition, and Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine, Joe Cleary
Weaving Transnational Solidarity, Katherine O’Donnell
Palgrave Advances in Irish History, Katherine O’Donnell, Mary McAuliffe, Leeann Lane
Sapphists and Sexologists: Histories of Sexualities, Mary McAuliffe (not specifically Irish, but by an Irish author and it does explore lesbian desire in colonial Ireland)
Trad Nation: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Irish Traditional Music, Tes Slominski
The James Connolly Reader, Shaun Harkin, James Connolly, Mike Davis (a great collection of Connolly’s works including a few that are out of print or hard to find elsewhere, like Labour in Irish History though I think that’s not so hard to get anymore with eBooks)
Revolutionary Works, Seamus Costello
A Literary History of Ireland, Hyde Douglas
Myths and Folklore of Ireland, Jeremiah Curtin
Early Irish Literature, Myles Dillon (also The Cycles of Kings and Irish Sagas)
Celtic Women: Women in Celtic Society and Literature, Peter Beresford Ellis
A Brief History of the Celts, Peter Beresford Ellis (also The Druids and Celtic Myths and Legends and A Dictionary of Irish Mythology)
Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, Thomas Crofton Croker
If you’re looking for someone who is doing some really interesting scholarship on Irish indigeneity, coalition building with colonized Indigenous people globally, and preserving/resurrecting obscure and regional Irish-language terms and idioms, I recommend Manchán Magan.
The trans person in question here had his name and gender markers changed in Britain (where it is legal) before Brexit, which is why the court has upheld his right to have that recognized in his home country of Romania.