Pérez-Vides, Auxiliadora

Auxiliadora Pérez-Vides lectures in English at the University of Huelva, Spain. She is the author of Sólo ellas: Familia y feminismo en la novela irlandesca contemporánea (2003) and is an active researcher within the Women’s Studies group at the University of Huelva.

Single Motherhood in 20th Century Ireland

2006 0-7734-5621-X
This book explores the cultural representations of unmarried motherhood in 20th-century Ireland from a variety of perspectives (literary and film studies, applied sociology and history) in order to analyze different discourses of femininity and motherhood. The book analyzes cultural artifacts in which the central theme is unmarried motherhood in an Irish context in order to outline and describe the different strategies at play in the representation, negotiation and contestation of traditional discourses of femininity which marginalize and, in some cases, erase women’s experience of lone parenthood.

This book emerges as a unique and up-to-date collaborative work of international scholars which contributes to the study of the aforementioned discourse. The collection achieves a detailed study of cultural practices from a variety of perspectives which include not only close literary analysis in the light of post-colonial and feminist theory but explorations in feminist history, sociology, film studies and cultural studies. The book examines how the discourse of deviance progressively becomes dominant in post-famine Ireland to refer to any sort of deviation from the female norm, and it explores the representation and denunciation of this discourse in a wide range of cultural artifacts in order to show their value as contributions to the re-inscription of women in social history.