Dying to be seen: AIDS, diaspora and the queer Irish novel

Literary narratives that explore queer identities within the Irish diaspora have garnered critical attention over the last decade in Irish studies. Focusing upon queer subjects in women’s migrant literature, Tina O’Toole has explored the “ways in which queer kinship and migrant affinities unsettle the fixities of family and place in Irish culture.” Moreover, Ed Madden has argued that the study of queer Irish sexualities constitutes a diasporic project in and of itself. This article builds upon O’Toole’s and Madden’s important readings of the queer Irish diaspora to demonstrate how writers like Colm Tóibín and Katherine O’Donnell differently foreground death and dying in ways that queer the Irish diasporic tale. For both Tóibín and O’Donnell, death unfolds queer diasporic temporalities, which confuse past and present to uncover the homophobic machineries of silence and forgetting that structure queer life.