Gendering Resistance within an Irish Republican Prisoner Community: A Conversation with Laurence McKeown

This conversation centers primarily on a paper Laurence McKeown presented at the International Studies Association (ISA) conference in Washington DC in February 1999. The paper titled ‘Gender and the Social Construction of an Irish Republican Prisoner Community’ and Laurence’s presentation generated much discussion during the session and since then. Rather than publish the paper as is, we thought that it would be more appropriate to use it as a springboard for a critical conversation of such issues as gendered constructions of identity and conflict, practices of resistance, political violence, and representation. The conversation is reconstructed from bits and pieces of insightful exchanges in Belfast, Washington DC and in cyberspace woven together with extensive excerpts from Laurence’s original paper. In many ways, it feels artifcial to piece together what is supposed to be a naturally flowing, semi-coherent conversation between two people, as this conversation does not take place in ‘real’ time and space. At the same time, when we truly engage someone’s work, we continue to converse with him or her in our minds, imagining what they would say if they were here now. In terms of process, I wrote the first draft of what follows. It was full of question marks which Laurence answered and blank spaces, which he filled in. The finished product is therefore very much a collaborative piece of work and may serve as a good example of a more imaginative method of text production, than is generally produced.