Description
The political apology has become a key method by which states have come to acknowledge historical violence and political victimhood since the 1990s. The affective and gendering function of political apology has, however, been marginalised within scholarly literature on the topic. This paper connects the politics of recognition performed through state apology to the implicitly gendered and gendering operation of shame as a collective emotion. It therefore furthers the work of Ahmed (2004) by applying this framework to two official apologies delivered by the government of the Republic of Ireland to the victims of the Magdalene Laundries in 2013 and 2018, the second of which was embedded within a national service of commemoration and celebration. This paper makes an enquiry into the ethics and effects of invoking the victimhood of these ‘fallen women’ through a politics of national shame and argues that the apologies operate not only to re-make Irish national identity through notions of feminine purity (Fischer, 2016), but also to re-negotiate gender and victim subjectivities in relation to shame. Political apology as a mode of acknowledging and making others visible, this analysis suggests, has ambivalent effects upon those it addresses.
