Spektakularni chłopcy i ciche dziewczyny

Karolina Kosińska

doi:10.36744/k.4426

Spectacular Boys and Quiet Girls

Peer-reviewed article, Submitted 24.04.2025, Accepted 4.06.2025

Karolina Kosińska

karolina.kosinska@ispan.pl
Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1096-878X

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36744/k.4426

Abstract

In recent years, Irish actors have gained enormous global popularity – Cillian Murphy, Michael Fassbender, Paul Mescal, and Barry Keoghan can be seen as the cinematic embodiment of new Irish masculinity. Always emphasising their Irishness, they combine physicality and spectacularity to suggest a transformation of masculinity models in Irish culture. This physicality can be expressive and dominant, oppressive and demonic, but also delicate, uncertain, tormented, and exposing vulnerability. At the same time, Irish female writers reveal a need to explore Irish femininity in its contemporary, post-traumatic form. The works of Anna Burns, Eimear McBride, Claire Keegan, and Sally Rooney focus on the materiality of women’s bodies, their interrelationships and sexuality, primarily through the prism of violence, trauma, guilt, abuse, and the crossing of boundaries. Their language stumbles, stutters, searches for new words, phraseological structures, and appropriate grammar to give shape to conflicted identities traumatized by pervasive violence (usually sexual and gendered) and to enable them to regain control over their bodies. The article focuses on these two phenomena as interrelated: when the female body resists visualisation and becomes the subject of a discourse created by women themselves, it is replaced by the male body, revealing its spectacular character. The author analyses this shift in two contexts: through the prism of Irish masculinity in cinema (with reference to Debbie Ging’s reflections), and through the mode of “stubborn modernism” which, according to Paige Reynolds, describes the strategies of contemporary Irish women writers.

Keywords:

Irish masculinity, Irish femininity, Irish literature, corporeality, trauma

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Published

2025-09-10

Cited by

Kosińska, K. (2025) “Spectacular Boys and Quiet Girls”, Konteksty, 349(2), pp. 63–74. doi: 10.36744/k.4426.

Authors

Karolina Kosińska
karolina.kosinska@ispan.pl
Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1096-878X

Assistant Professor in the Department of Film Studies, Audiovisual Arts and Anthropology of Culture at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IS PAN). She is the editor-in-chief of the academic film journal Kwartalnik Filmowy, published by IS PAN. Her book based on her doctoral thesis, Androgyn. Tożsamość, tęsknota, pragnienie [Androgyne: Identity, Longing and Desire] (2015), has been awarded the Bolesław Michałek Award as the best film studies publication of 2014-2015. She is interested in British cinema, especially in the history and aesthetics of British social realism.