Introduction

RISE 5.1 is the first of a two-volume issue dedicated to the study of Irish sexual liberation and its literatures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This first volume, entitled ‘Speaking out / when it’s dangerous’, brings together six scholars whose critically attentive articles equally interrogate not only the material and political practices of the heteropatriarchal state in its attempt to codify the sexual and moral script of the nation, but also the historiographic conventions of state-centred narratives revised and recovered in academic scholarship on sexuality and sexual identity. One of the most important contributions of this collection, however, is the range of forms of literary and cultural production addressed: from the traditional literary forms of novels, short stories, and dramas, to the cultural forms of periodicals, trial records, and sports entertainment, these articles offer compelling and innovative frameworks through which scholars of Irish Studies can continue to imagine and reimagine the relationship between sexual politics and social transformation in Ireland.