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List of contents
1. Introduction: Survivor Narratives and Unfinished Histories
2. Epistemic Injustice and Credible Subjects
3. Silence, Voice and the Ethics of Communication
4. Inside the Institution: Discipline and Penance
5. Fractured Endings and New Meanings: Religion and Respectability
6. Public Silence and Official Voice: Inquiry, Apology and Redress
7. Conclusion: Challenging a Lingering Silence
Appendix A: List of Magdalene Institutions
Appendix B: List of interviews
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Chloe K. Gott is an independent scholar in the UK.
Summary
How are the identities of women shaped by religious disciplinary processes in Magdalene laundries and how do women re-engage with their sense of self after leaving the institutions? Chloë K. Gott situates these questions within the current cultural climate in which the institutions now sit, considering how they fit into Ireland’s present as well as its past.
This book represents the first significant secondary analysis to be conducted of 81 oral history interviews recorded as part of the Government of Ireland Collaborative Research project, ‘Magdalene Institutions: Recording an Archival and Oral History’, funded by the Irish Research Council. These were taken with women formerly incarcerated in these institutions, as well as others associated with this history.
Grounded in qualitative analysis of this archive, the book is structured around the voices and words of survivors themselves. With a strong focus on how the experience of being incarcerated in a Magdalene laundry impacted on the gendered religious selves of the women, this book tracks the process of entering, working in and leaving a laundry, explored through the lens of epistemic injustice.
Foreword
A qualitative engagement with women’s experiences of incarceration in 20th-century Irish Magdalene institutions, focusing on identity and knowledge production, through analysis of oral histories taken with survivors.
Additional text
This book offers a fascinating analysis of survivors’ own stories of the Magdalene system, including pertinent insights of life after the laundries. The stories are immensely powerful. Chloë K. Gott expertly theorizes the narratives through concepts such as respectability, silencing, bodily discipline and epistemic injustice, ultimately arguing that this was a form of vicious paternalism. An essential read for anyone interested in religion, gender, sexual regulation, power and inequality.
