Excavatory Art: A transnational reading of cultural activism in creative responses to Ireland’s architecture of containment
Published in Interventions, January 2026.
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Abstract
The value of a reproductive justice framework within an Irish context was recently highlighted in a special issue of the journal Éire-Ireland, “Women’s Health and Reproductive Justice in Ireland” (2021). In their introduction the editors describe how their experience of living and working in the United States has influenced their understanding of the material conditions of abortion access in Ireland and its links to histories of healthcare, institutional racism and the treatment of migrants. In this essay I shift the transnational gaze southwards, to consider how the terrain of Latin American feminist materialism – a vibrant and influential space of feminist activism and theory – can help elucidate the excavatory practices of contemporary Irish women writers and artists responding to Ireland’s histories of reproductive oppression. More precisely, I explore how the cultural critique of the Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza can theoretically inform a reading of Irish materialist poetics in the wake of Mother and Baby Homes and Magdalene Laundries. The critical framework outlined by Rivera Garza underlines the resonances between contemporary cultural production in Mexico and Ireland, consequently spotlighting a shared struggle against gender-based violence and for reproductive justice. In so bridging the distance between Rivera Garza’s writing and the work of artists and poets in Ireland, this essay seeks to further internationalist understanding of the cultural dimensions for struggles for reproductive justice.