Dogs in the Picture: Restoring the Queer History of the Irish Family

Taking the Irish pianist and music teacher Dorothy Stokes as a case study, this article explores alternative formulations of kinship in independent Ireland. It analyzes Stokes’s family life from two perspectives. The first is through her articulation of dogs as family within her abundant archive of photograph albums. The second is through her uneasy relationship to marriage as revealed in her correspondence with her lovers. The article argues that Stokes used the language and visual economy of marriage and family to claim her own ability to be a partner and a parent, despite her legal status as an umarried women. In a legal and social context that emphasized marriage as the sole legitimate basis for family life, Stokes’s alternative kinships are all the more striking and significant. They indicate the need to think differently, and more queerly, about the history of the twentieth-century Irish family. While recognizing the extraordinarily rigid and violent family norm promulgated by the state, the churches, and society in Ireland, this article seeks to explore how to write histories of the Irish family that are not tethered to that norm, recognising instead the diversity of ways that Irish people practiced kinship in real life. The alternative visions of kinship that Stokes created never mapped neatly or consistently on to the normative categories they echoed – wife, husband, mother – and, in their potential to escape the logics of those norms, they could be understood as what Harlan Weaver has called ‘queer affiliations.’ They were never utopian or antinormative escapes from the family, but instead that should direct our attention to the messy abundance of family as it was lived in twentieth-century Ireland.