Fall 2026 Colloquium - Marion Quirici

Title: “Degeneration Theory and Disability Panic in Early Irish Sports Journalism”

 

Abstract: This talk explores the central significance of degeneration theory, an idea propagated by nineteenth-century psychiatrists and criminologists suggesting the human race was in evolutionary decline, in the early sports journalism of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). Founded by athlete and newspaperman Michael Cusack in the 1880s, the GAA aimed to revive native Irish sports and pastimes, such as hurling and Gaelic football, and to diminish the influence of foreign games. The Association had a profound and lasting impact on the project of the Irish Revival, not least because its production of athletes and ideals of athleticism proved useful for the recruitment of soldiers into the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). The GAA maintained a print culture that has been largely overlooked, including Cusack’s own Celtic Times newspaper, the Gaelic Athletic Annual journal, and a number of books. 

 

My archival research examines the organization’s journalism and promotional literature to trace the GAA’s roots in fears of racial degeneration, and to expose its articulation of a eugenic body politic. GAA nationalists made a conscious effort to invert stereotypes of Irish weakness, unruliness, drunkenness, laziness, and uncleanliness with a specific code of conduct for Irish men, and to a lesser extent, Irish women. They imagined their task—building up the nation’s “inherited manliness”—to be a matter of racial preservation. The degeneration paranoia endemic to Irish nationalism influenced not only the creative responses of modernist authors, but also the biopolitical regime in Ireland after independence.

Marion Quirici is Assistant Professor of Disability Studies and Global Anglophone Literature at Kennesaw State University, and the author of Fitness for Freedom: Disability, Degeneration, and Modern Irish Writing, published in 2026 with Syracuse University Press. She has published in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, BMJ's Medical Humanities, The Journal of Pediatric Rehabilitation Medicine, Éire-Ireland, and the Joyce Studies Annual.