Magdalene Voices: Epistemic Injustice and Knowledge Production in Ireland's Magdalene Laundries

Institutions commonly referred to as Magdalene laundries, or Magdalene asylums, have existed globally, from the eighteenth century until the late twentieth century. In Ireland, they operated from the mid-eighteenth century until 1996, when the last institution closed in Dublin. Initially understood as refuges for women engaged in transactional sex or vulnerable to sexual exploitation, in post-independence Ireland these institutions took on a more carceral role, forming part of a wider 'architecture of containment' for people judged to fall outside the social norms of the emerging Catholic Irish State. Although a growing literature on the Magdalene institutions has developed over the past twenty years, across a range of disciplinary approaches, this work has focused on describing or situating these institutions in wider historical, cultural and religious contexts, with less attention paid to women incarcerated in these institutions as producers of knowledge on their own experiences.

To address this gap, this thesis undertakes the first secondary analysis to be conducted of eighty-one oral history interviews recorded by Justice for Magdalenes, as part of the Irish Research Council-Funded project, 'Magdalene Institutions: Recording an Archival and Oral History'. These were taken with women formerly incarcerated in these institutions, as well as others associated with this history. Situating its analysis of these interviews in relation to Miranda Fricker's theory of epistemic injustice, the thesis argues that women incarcerated in Magdalene institutions underwent processes of religiously-motivated discipline and penance intended to produce a particular type of religious, gendered subjectivity - a docile, productive body which no longer threatened the moral or social life of the newly formed Irish State. After leaving the institutions, these processes were replicated and maintained by wider cultural systems of symbolic and moral meaning, reflecting the powerful cultural form of the Catholic Church in post-Independence Ireland. As a result of this, women suffered a deep fear of making their highly stigmatised identities visible, and many existed in a state of silence and shame for decades. However, some were also able to draw on forms of agency which enabled them to construct knowledge of themselves and their experiences that were not defined in this way. Ways in which such agency found expression included a renegotiation of their identities through processes of respectability, and inhabiting 'caring' roles; as well as through the re-negotiation of their faith and involvement with the institutional Church. Alongside these oral history interviews, this thesis also examined more contemporary public responses to this history, to establish the extent to which processes such as inquiries, apologies, redress schemes and listening exercises address epistemic injustice experienced by these women.

The thesis concludes by considering the value of this research for further work on the formation of religious subjectivity in other religious carceral institutions, such as religiously- run children's homes and reformatories in the UK and Australia, Mother and Baby homes in Ireland, and native assimilationist boarding schools in the USA and Canada. I also demonstrate the ways it contributes to work on epistemic injustice in religious contexts, asking how questions of power and communication impact on the nature of religious relationships. In paying close attention to the question of how institutions can develop epistemic virtues, I suggest that we must think in more collective terms and promote the development of epistemic communities of resistance if we are to meaningfully address the harms of epistemic injustice in these contexts.