Spektakularni chłopcy i ciche dziewczyny
Spectacular Boys and Quiet Girls

Summary/Abstract: In recent years, Irish actors have gained enormous global popularity – Cillian Murphy, Michael Fassbender, Paul Mescal, and Barry Keoghan can be seen as the cinematic embodiment of new Irish masculinity. Always emphasising their Irishness, they combine physicality and spectacularity to suggest a transformation of masculinity models in Irish culture. This physicality can be expressive and dominant, oppressive and demonic, but also delicate, uncertain, tormented, and exposing vulnerability. At the same time, Irish female writers reveal a need to explore Irish femininity in its contemporary, post-traumatic form. The works of Anna Burns, Eimear McBride, Claire Keegan, and Sally Rooney focus on the materiality of women’s bodies, their interrelationships and sexuality, primarily through the prism of violence, trauma, guilt, abuse, and the crossing of boundaries. Their language stumbles, stutters, searches for new words, phraseological structures, and appropriate grammar to give shape to conflicted identities traumatized by pervasive violence (usually sexual and gendered) and to enable them to regain control over their bodies. The article focuses on these two phenomena as interrelated: when the female body resists visualisation and becomes the subject of a discourse created by women themselves, it is replaced by the male body, revealing its spectacular character. The author analyses this shift in two contexts: through the prism of Irish masculinity in cinema (with reference to Debbie Ging’s reflections), and through the mode of “stubborn modernism” which, according to Paige Reynolds, describes the strategies of contemporary Irish women writers.

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