In 2010, when the first Women and Music in Ireland conference was held at Maynooth University, the study of Irish women musicians, composers and intellectuals was not new. But it was sparse enough within both the academy and in the various performance scenes that comprise ‘Irish music’ that an historiography of the topic would have felt unsatisfying – enraging, even. My indignant rage about the marginalisation of women in Irish traditional music impelled me to embark on the archival research that I brought to the first Women and Music in Ireland conference. I suspect my fellow authors in this volume recognise this kind of rage – it is, after all, a rage that has fuelled women’s history in a dizzying array of contexts. I believe that this rage is one of the reasons that women’s history has so often been damned as ‘merely recuperative’: as a feeling, rage is one motivation among many that directly challenges the fallacy of ‘objectivity’ in historical research.

The feelings I bring to this piece are more complicated than mere rage, though. Today, I have different theoretical and personal investments in the idea of ‘woman’ than I had in 2010. As the feminist adage goes, ‘the personal is political’ – but the ‘personal’ is (ideally) never static, and thus neither is the ‘political’. When I wrote my paper for the 2010 conference, I had been out of the closet as a lesbian for six years, but still passed as straight and relatively gender normative. Over the past decade or so – years that also mark transitions from graduate student to tenure-track professor and then to post-academic – my gender presentation has shifted along with my identity from lesbian to queer. The political is also personal, and for me, embracing a queer identity is one means of resisting both homonormativity and heteronormativity – of resisting a late capitalist biopolitics that privileges nuclear families (whether heterosexual or same-sex) in its economies, social structures and imaginations, making it very difficult for anyone to live outside this fever dream of two-ness. It is this concern with the unliveability of existing epistemologies and social structures that leads me to call for a liberation movement within Irish traditional music.