Othering Masculinity in the Multicultural Irish Thriller

This essay explores issues of race and gender in a number of Irish thrillers produced between 2004 and 2009. The films under discussion centralize the position of men in a New Ireland, at a time when categories of Irishness and masculinity became manifest in varying formulations. While these films explore Irish manhood as a contested category during the economic boom, questions of national and personal identity had come under serious scrutiny since the emergence in the late 1990s of not only a significant immigrant culture in Ireland, but also new understandings of what it meant to be Irish. 1 During this period of what has come to be referred to as post-feminism, ideas of gender moved away from traditional concepts towards a more cosmopolitan, metrosexual, fluctuating state, as hegemonic structures shifted. 2 This chapter examines constructions of Irish masculinity in three films which assert its diversity, non-fixity and instability: Ciarán O’Connor’s Trafficked (2009, first released as Capital Letters in 2004), Brendan Muldowney’s Savage (2009) and Neil Jordan’s Ondine (2009). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.