Sexual/Liberation

Sexual/Liberation addresses the paradoxes of sexual freedom in contemporary neoliberal Ireland. It invites readers to imagine a revolutionary form of sexual liberation beyond the present objective of achieving equality within a grossly unequal social order. Centrally, the book offers a critical meditation on images of gay men circulating in post-marriage equality Irish culture. Such images tell us little about the actual lives of gay men but offer us considerable insight into the political imaginary - the values, norms, anxieties and contradictions - of the society in which those images circulate. The images of gay men, male bodies and male intimacy discussed are drawn from varied sources: Leo Varadkar's media profile
digital portraits curated by men engaged in sex work
Irish Queer Archives
media, scholarly and artistic commemorations of Declan Flynn and Roger Casement
Joe Caslin's murals. Taking inspiration from the ideas of Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Herbert Marcuse, Sexual/Liberation encourages us to re-think the political as sexual - to reflect on how our political perspectives are shaped by desires, needs, vulnerabilities and hopes. Above all, this book challenges us to move beyond a politics of identities and injuries and strive instead for a politics universal and radically humanist in its imaginative scope, anti-capitalist and revolutionary in its objectives.