Queer/Cuir Poetry Now: launch of new reading group

At the heart of the ‘Queer Irish Poetry Now’ symposium which took place at the Trinity Long Room Hub on 25 January 2025 was an exploration of what exactly it means for a poem to be queer. This was a memorable day of discussion, with highlights including a keynote address from Professor Ed Madden (University of South Carolina), a keynote conversation with Dr Paul Maddern, editor of poetry anthology Queering the Green and panel discussions whose topics ranged from queerness in Irish-language poetry and lesbianism in 18th century verse to the future of queer Irish poetry. This symposium, organised in collaboration with the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, began and ended with poetry from the North: with an introduction that paid tribute to the late Michael Longley and a closing poetry reading featuring Zara Meadows and Padraig Regan.

If we are to interrogate what it is that makes a poem queer, we must admit the limitations of the term ‘queer’ itself, whose language reveals its Anglophone, and indeed, colonial contexts; we might put pressure on what is Irish about this queer poetry. For example, the emphasis on Irish language poetry resulting from the call for papers, is indicative of how reading queerness in, or into, Irish poetry is in many ways a language issue: what is, for example, the relation of lesbian and gay identities and cultures to Irish language writing, and how does the English-language term ‘queer’ fall short in relation to questions of ‘Irishness’?

These questions are at the heart of the follow-up reading group that we will lead over the next couple of months in the Trinity Long Room Hub. This reading group will read queer poetry from Ireland and Latin America, with a mind to the complex relationship between queerness and language. What happens, for example, when a word that begins as a slur becomes a tool of empowerment? And what about when we look outside of Anglophone culture: how does the shift from ‘queer’ to ‘cuir’ in Latin America reveal the colonial limits of the former?

We define ‘cuir’ as Sayak Valencia does, as ‘a defamiliarisation of the term queer, that is, a de-automation of the reader’s gaze and registers a geopolitical inflexion towards the south, a locus of enunciation with a decolonial inflexion, both playfully and critically’ (2015). As such, to say cuir is to dissent from hegemonic identitarian discourses and expose and challenge the coloniality of power. The first session will read Susan Stryker’s discussion of monstrosity in “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” (2006) alongside the poem Yo Monstruo Mío (I, Monster Mine), by Susy Shock (2021), an Argentinian poet, critic, and trans activist. In Yo Monstruo Mio, Shock seems to follow Stryker’s claim that the trans community must ‘embrace’ and ‘accept’ the term monster until it loses its capacity to harm these individuals, writing her lines:

‘Yo, reinvindico mi derecho a ser un monstruo / ni varón ni mujer ni / XXY ni H2o’

[‘I claim my right to be a monster. / Neither man nor woman. / neither XXY nor H₂O.’]

This reading group will consider how Latin American ‘cuir’ studies, which centres de-colonial practice, might inform ‘queer studies’ here in Ireland. For example, how the emergence of the term ‘cuir’ in the Global South, might shed light on Ireland’s complicated relationship to colonialism, by reading together the introduction of Queering the Green, and a selection of poems from the anthology.

This project received funding from the Hub’s pilot Interdisciplinary Graduate Funding Scheme, designed for Early Career Researchers with the idea of challenging their disciplinary boundaries, thereby expanding the way they approach their research topics. Part of this expansion will come from the perspectives brought by the different participants of the Reading Group, and there are still a couple of spots to fill! The group is open to all, aimed at those with an interest in poetry and/or Women and Gender Studies. These sessions will take place from 6-8 on Tuesday February 4th and 18th, with a final session up in the Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast, in early March. If you are interested in taking part in this free group, please email queercuirpoetry@gmail.com