Máiréad Enright

Girl Interrupted: Citizenship and the Irish Hijab Debate

This article discusses the case of Shekinah Egan, an Irish Muslim girl who asked to be allowed to wear the hijab to school. It traces the media and government response to her demand, and frames that demand as a citizenship claim. It focuses in particular on a peculiarity of the Irish response; that the government was disinclined to legislate for the headscarf in the classroom. It argues that – perhaps counter-intuitively – the refusal to make law around the hijab operated to silence the citizenship claims at the heart of the Egan case. To this extent, it was a very particular instance of a broader and ongoing pattern of exclusion of the children of migrants from the Irish public sphere.

‘On the Perimeter of the Lawful’: Enduring Illegality in the Irish Family Planning Movement, 1972-1985

Between 1935 and 1985, Irish law criminalized the sale and importation of condoms. Activists established illegal markets to challenge the law and alleviate its social consequences. They distributed condoms through postal services, shops, stalls, clinics, and machines. Though they largely operated in the open, their activities attracted little direct punishment from the state, and they were able to build a stable network of medical and commercial family planning services. We use 30 interviews conducted with former activists to explore this history. In doing so, we also examine the limits of ‘illegality’ in describing acts of everyday resistance to law, arguing that the boundaries between legal and illegal, in the discourses and practices of those who sought to challenge the state, were shifting and uncertain. In turn, we revisit ‘illegality’, characterizing it as an assemblage of varying selectively-performed political practices, shaped by complex choreographies of negotiation between state and non-state actors.

The beginning of the sharpness: loyalty, citizenship and Muslim divorce practice

Muslim divorce practice is a feminist issue, insofar as it often departs from core principles of Anglo-American divorce law. When legal feminists have examined the reception of Muslim divorce practice in common-law courts, they have tended to measure those departures in terms of financial outcome. There is a danger that, in consequence, our theory of Muslim womens legal agency is reduced to pragmatic matters of choice, money and advantage-taking. That theory seems hugely impoverished when read against the political background in Britain, where Muslims‘ legal agency upon divorce is bound up with deeper questions of belonging and allegiance. Feminist work ought to be able to advance a theory of citizens’ commitment to civil law in litigation which can give a complex account even of the unsettling litigation of Muslim divorce disputes in civil courts. This article draws on existing work in feminist multiculturalism to sketch the beginnings of that theory.