In this episode, Rosie talks with Michael G Cronin, Lecturer in English at Maynooth University, about his new book, Sexual/Liberation, published by Cork University Press, as part of the Síreacht series. Michael’s book critically reflects upon cultural images of and ideas about sexuality, desire, and the gay man that circulate within contemporary Irish society, and it explores what they might tell us about both dominant and alternative political imaginaries.Michael and Rosie discussed the keywords – equality, vulnerability, revolution, liberation and hope – around which the book’s arguments are organised; responses to Leo Varadkar’s election as Taoiseach in 2017 and the figure of the ’homohero’; distinctions between ‘liberation’ and sexual equality or freedom; what a materialist understanding of sexuality looks like; how readings of cultural images and texts can contribute to political and social analysis; the contradictory politics of marriage equality; the paradoxes of identity and identity politics; and how an acknowledgement of our shared vulnerability might generate new possibilities for hope.
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