INTRODUCTION

In 1912, Shaw prepared a special edition of John Bull's Other Island with a new preface conclusively demonstrating the inevitability of Home Rule in Ireland. A draft preserved in the British Library shows Shaw assuring his readers that everyone in Ireland really wants Home Rule. When he finally acknowledges the existence of militant unionists, Shaw disables sympathy for them by conflating political orientation with sexual orientation:

Superficially this may look like an ordinary instance of Victorian homophobia: Shaw deploys the ‘perversion’ trope to render militant unionism loathsome and wrong. By aligning it with heterosexuality, Shaw seeks to render Home Rule inevitable – as inevitable as what Malthus called ‘passion between the sexes’ and what Lee Edelman calls ‘reproductive futurism’.

But this analogy also shows how strongly the rhetoric of inversion and perversion generated by the sexual revolution we examined in the previous chapter conditioned Shaw's ambivalence about Ireland's alterity. We perceive in this passage a certain shame about the way the paradox of militant unionism – a physical-force resistance movement whose members assert their loyalty to England by threatening to rebel against it, and their political autonomy by fighting not to be free – queers the campaign for Home Rule, which could otherwise present as ‘national and normal’.