`Nomadic Subjects': Katherine Cecil Thurston's Max

Over the past ten years, a number of major scholarly projects based in Ireland have sought by original research to make visible women’s contribution to culture and society, and have focused critical attention on the importance of feminist research for the field of Irish Studies.1 As part of the Irish Women’s Movement Project at NUI Cork, we analysed the wealth of documentary material available relating to the Irish women’s movement in the 1970s and 80s.2 Intrinsic to the activism and writing which went on within these feminist groups, as well as in related activist projects of the period (such as the lesbian and gay rights movement) was the opening up of social and cultural discourses relating to gender identities and sexualities. Implicit in the cultural and social work of the 1970s and 80s was the assumption that the contemporary generation of activists were the first to explore these taboo areas in their work and their writing. However, as a result of the kind of work ongoing in scholarly projects mentioned above, this assumption has been questioned, as we begin to make connections between the kinds of ideological challenges posed by recent generations of feminists and others involved in the struggle for women’s rights in earlier periods of Irish history.