Publish your work on single, unmarried, widowed, asexual, queer or otherwise celibate Irish actvists, authors, characters, or collaborative networks, in an open-access journal with NO charge to the author!

In the popular imagination, the practice of celibacy in Ireland evokes images of male priests, Catholic moral values, and conservative, even reactionary, politics concerning women and sexuality. This Open-Access Special Issue of Humanities wants to detail a different history that centres on less familiar feminist, queer, and activist versions of celibacy in Irish women’s movements and literature. We are looking for contributions from scholars working in the fields of Irish studies and sexuality studies, that will interrogate the historical emergence and disappearance of the female celibate as a political and cultural figure in an Irish context. The Special Issue's primary goal is to learn more about historical collaborations and the bonds formed between differently celibate Irish women—whether in friendships, romantic relationships, creative collaborations or forms of political and revolutionary organisation—and to explore celibacy’s imbrications with feminist politics, patterns of queer kinship, and Irish literature from diverse periods.

The articles collected in this Special Issue will draw on a range of methodological and theoretical approaches that build on Benjamin Kahan’s pioneering work on modernist celibacies and the debates it has engendered in queer theory, gender studies, and singles studies. Across the issue, this framework will be applied to novels, short fiction, plays, poems, essays, and correspondence by Irish women writers - for example, in texts by figures such as Frances Power Cobbe, Anna Haslam, L. T. Meade, Sarah Grand, George Egerton, Ethel Colburn Mayne, Margaret Cousins, Hannah Lynch, Eva Gore-Booth, Esther Roper, Teresa Deevy, Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O’Brien, Norah Hoult, Mary Lavin, Janet McNeill, and Edna O’Brien, among others. Particular attention will be paid to the emergence of new literary genres to express feminist political desires, emergent forms of queer kinship, and post-patriarchal ideals, from the all-women ‘celibate utopias’ of first-wave feminist science fiction to the emergence of the ‘celibate plot’ as an alternative to the marriage plot.

These textual close readings are complemented by historical approaches that foreground the legal and political circumstances that made celibacy a desirable, even necessary, form of political expression for women in 19th and 20th century Ireland, including the legal doctrine of coverture, the marriage bar, divorce laws, and birth control restrictions. The issue proposes to cast new light on the diverse movements that facilitated collaboration and organisation between celibate women, including labour and women’s suffrage political organisations; social purity campaigns; vegetarianism and anti-vivisection animal rights activism; and occultist movements, such as theosophy. This historicising work sets the ground also for new understandings of the reemergence of feminist celibate politics in 21st-century Irish literature and digital culture, from the online influence of international movements such as 4B in Korea to representations of asexuality in YA and contemporary fiction.

Finally, by historicising the changing meanings of unmarried and nonsexual life, this Special Issue explores celibacy as a non-normative sexual identity and practice between women in Ireland that enables a form of queer kinship that centres on non-marital partnerships. In their recent study of ‘Homosexuality and Lesbianism in Irish Newspapers’, Catherine Lawless and Ciara Breathnach note that the documented existence of ‘financially independent female households’ in Ireland between the period 1861–1922 opens up ‘the possibility of situating celibate lives in a queer space, outside the heteronormativity of marital life and reproduction of labour’. Indeed, many of the authors that this Special Issue proposes to explore remained unmarried while sharing their lives with other women, while others lived in celibate marriages of convenience in which intimacies with other women were possible. In order to address this gap, these articles explore expressions of queer celibacy in several staples of Irish writing, from nuns, spinsters, and widows to lavender marriages of convenience and so-called ‘Boston marriages’ between cohabiting unmarried women.

We are grateful to Research Ireland for funding the project upon which this Special Issue is based (GOIPD/2022/634) and to Humanities for hosting an open access space for sustained consideration of this largely overlooked aspect of Irish social, sexual, and literary history, and we hope with these essays to lay the ground for further future work on celibate politics, aesthetics, and sexualities in Irish Women’s Writing.

Interested contributors should contact the Guest Editor, Dr. Paul Fagan (LMU Munich), directly at  paul.fagan@lmu.de to discuss submisisions - all ideas and suggestions are welcome!

Once agreed upon, manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by the deadline 3 November 2025. All submissions that pass pre-check are refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the Special Issue as soon as accepted. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page: Humanities | Instructions for Authors. Submissions are expected to be in the range of 5,000-7,000 words, but given the fact that the issue is open-access, there is scope to go longer of the subject demands it.

This Open-Access Special issue involves NO charge to the author!