Irish Women Evicted: The Rural Home and the Gendered Politics of Economic Morality in Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At first glance Claire Keegan’s collection of short stories Walk the Blue Fields, published during the tail end of the Celtic Tiger, seems out of place. While her contemporaries situate their counter-narratives of wealth disparity, gender identity crisis, and familial demise within urban high-rises, impoverished slums, and brooding cityscapes, Keegan’s priests, farmers, and housewives inhabit a seemingly timeless rural Ireland filled with sprawling farmlands, Protestant estates, and ancient cliffs. However, Keegan destabilises and re-appropriates traditional Ireland, making the rural a resource for challenging the gendered hierarchy of spatial, and by extension, economic relations in contemporary Ireland through the image of the home. In both ‘The Parting Gift’ and ‘Night of the Quicken Trees’, not only does Keegan position women in precarious relationships to land, property, and the rural home to identify the unequal social impact of economic morality for women, but also to illuminate the ways in which the continuing dependence on traditional precepts of gender and national belonging are employed to regulate what the prevailing power structures of the state conceive as a threatening femininity in contemporary Ireland. Underneath the rhetoric of hostile femininity, Keegan reveals the regressive and unequal gendered moral logic present within a neoliberal ‘new’ Ireland.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".