RT Journal Article
T1 Disciplined bodies : the Magdalene spectacle in contemporary irish cultural texts
A1 Pérez Vides, María Auxiliadora
AB This article explores women’s corporeal repression in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries as represented in Marita Conlon-McKenna’s novel The Magdalen (1999) and Aisling Walsh’s film Sinners (2002). Women were sent to those institutions, which operated in Ireland until the mid 1990s under the rule of several religious orders, for a variety of reasons: showing dissolute manners, becoming pregnant out of wedlock, being victims of rape, having a mental disability or simply extremely good looks, among others. To expiate their “sins”, the inmates suffered various schemes of corporal mortification that revealed an intricate ethos of national, religious and gender elements. My contention is that the two texts describe how the different assaults upon the Magdalenes’ corporeality entailed the corruption of a system that exploited their bodies as the apparatus of expiation of wider social fears and bigoted understandings of female virtue and justice.
PB Universidad de La Laguna
SN 0211-5913
YR 2016
FD 2016
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10272/15465
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10272/15465
LA eng
NO Pérez Vides, A. (2016): “Disciplined Bodies : the Magdalene Spectacle in Contemporary Irish Cultural Texts”. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 73: 15-30. ISSN: 0211-5913
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Huelva
RD 30 may 2026