Seminar series: Law, citizenship and female representation

Dr. Caroline Derry - Time, law, and the masculine citizen

Drawing on Caroline’s forthcoming book Legal Temporalities of Sexual Consent (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), this presentation considers why, despite a century of transformative advances in women’s citizenship, law’s paradigm subject stubbornly remains the heterosexual, middle-class white man. It explores how the courts have been able to perpetuate this, focusing upon legal temporalities as a key tool for reproducing the masculine legal subject, before arguing that they also offer a fruitful area of challenge. It focuses upon sexual consent under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, a particularly controversial area where the statute’s promise has been frustrated, and highlights how changing the law’s times could transform the legal subject.

Dr. Sophie Doherty - Mary Ann McCracken and Winifred Carney: representing social justice activists in Ireland 

This presentation discusses the recent unveiling of statues of social justice activists, Mary Ann McCracken and Winifred Carney, at Belfast City Hall in March 2024. The statues were revealed as part of Belfast City Council’s International Women’s Day celebrations. Drawing on literature and statistics of monuments in Ireland and beyond, it is argued that the relevant absence of women in monuments is a political, cultural, institutional and feminist question. While the new representations of Carney and McCracken go some way in addressing this, much more can be done to address the ‘representation gap’ in Ireland’s public spaces. 

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