Séance du séminaire de l'aire Irlande (axe 5)

Séance du séminaire de l'aire Irlande le jeudi 21 novembre 2024 de 17h à 18h30 en mode hybride (Bât B - salle B0.619): Helen Penet (Université de Lille - CECILLE) pour une conférence intitulée: "

“Representations of consent in Irish YA (young adult) fiction after #MeToo*”

On October 5 2017, the New York Times broke the Harvey Weinstein story. Just ten days later Alyssa Milano re-launched the #MeToo hashtag, which had first been used by Tarana Burke on the Myspace social network in 2006 to help women of colour who had been sexually abused. Since 2017, almost no sector has been spared revelations of historic sexual abuse and a number of literary texts across the globe have addressed the issue. Ireland has been no exception to this trend, with a number of novels since 2017 exploring issues of consent.

In Ireland, as elsewhere, much attention has been paid to ensuring that young people understand about asking for and giving consent, especially as recent research has shown that 50% of Irish students use pornography as a primary source of information about sex, including about consent. It is therefore, perhaps, unsurprising that a number of authors of YA literature (broadly defined as texts written or produced for adolescents and marketed directly to teens) have broached the subject in recent novels.

This has certainly been the case internationally, as YA texts tend to “increasingly tackle weighty cultural issues and complex socio-political concerns” (Mooney, 2023: 26), but Irish children’s writing, until recently “still tends to shy away from anything radical in theme, style or ideology” (Coghlan, 2009: 101).

This has begun to change in recent years, and this paper will explore two Irish YA texts which explore the issue: Louise O’Neill’s Asking for It and C.G. Moore’s Trigger.

*This paper will contain material of a highly sensitive nature including references to non-consensual sex, sexual abuse and rape, that may be triggering for some individuals.

Helen Penet obtained a PhD on Samuel Beckett’s self-translations from Université Paris 7 in 2002. Since 2003, she has been a lecturer in English at Université de Lille. Her research focuses on contemporary Irish literature and photography, and she has published articles on Hugo Hamilton, Dermot Bolger and Henrietta McKervey in Etudes Irlandaises, L’entre-deux, Polysèmes and Imaginaires. She is a member of the editorial board of Etudes Irlandaises and a regular host on the New Books in Irish Studies podcast.