Gendering Irish History on Film: A Feminist Geopolitics of Ryan's Daughter (1970)

This article considers how history and film intersect with gender and ethnicity in Ryan's Daughter. Taking feminist geopolitics as its theoretical framework, this article examines how gender informs the past as depicted in this film and at the time of its release through the feminisation of space, including through the tourist gaze it elicits. Central to geopolitics is cartography, employed to plot the location of resources, bringing boundaries into existence and often assisting with the strategic planning of invasions. This article analyses Ryan's Daughter through a feminist geopolitical lens in order to explore how films act as maps, both in their guise of ideological tools and as cognitive schemata to orientate action, and in so doing illuminates its narrative and visual geopolitical gendering of Ireland, both in 1970 and through its construction of 1916.