The silence that keeps: lesbian mourning, closet and archive in Emma Donoghue’s "Hood" and Lucy Caldwell’s "These days"
This master’s thesis examines how lesbian grief is narrated, silenced, and reclaimed in Emma Donoghue’s "Hood" (1995) and Lucy Caldwell’s "These Days" (2022). By placing both novels within the cultural and historical framework of twentieth-century Ireland and Northern Ireland, th...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis de maestría |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2025 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad de Alcalá (UAH) |
| Repositorio: | e_Buah Biblioteca Digital Universidad de Alcalá |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ebuah.uah.es:10017/67068 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10017/67068 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Lesbian grief Closet Queer silences Irish queer literature Archives of feeling Grievability |
| Sumario: | This master’s thesis examines how lesbian grief is narrated, silenced, and reclaimed in Emma Donoghue’s "Hood" (1995) and Lucy Caldwell’s "These Days" (2022). By placing both novels within the cultural and historical framework of twentieth-century Ireland and Northern Ireland, this project explores how silence, secrecy, and heteronormativity shape the conditions of lesbian mourning. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory (Freud’s mourning and melancholia, Doka’s disenfranchised grief, and Butler’s grievability), queer theory (Sedgwick’s epistemology of the closet and Ahmed’s affect and orientation), and queer feminist approaches to archives of feeling (Cvetkovich’s idea of the archive and Ahmed’s concept of comfort), this study conceptualises lesbian grief as both a private process and a political act. This project argues that both novels portray mourning not as closure but as survival, sustained through objects, bodies, and private relics that resist cultural erasure. This master’s thesis reclaims lesbian mourning as central rather than marginal, reframing silence not as absence but as a site of resistance, survival, and fight for recognition. |
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