Justine McDonnell

Redaction and the Mother’s Tongue: Writing Against Erasure

“I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do.” - Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa.

To redact is to erase, to strike through, to leave only the trace of a presence denied. It is not just concealment but control, language turned to silence, history rewritten through omission. In the records of Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes, redaction enacts a double erasure: first, the women confined within these institutions were stripped of autonomy, their voices smothered beneath layers of secrecy and shame; now, their histories are further obscured, locked away in state archives, their names blacked out, their testimonies methodically excised. The act of redaction is not neutral. It is the afterlife of silence.

Yet, as Hélène Cixous writes, “woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies.” This is not just about inscription but about survival, about reclaiming a space in language that has been structurally denied. Judith Butler, too, reminds us that not all speech is recognized as legible, that power dictates who may speak and who is heard. The women in these institutions were not simply erased, they were made unspeakable. Writing, then, is not only an act of memory but of disruption, a way to rupture the logic of redaction and to insist that their histories refuse containment.

Cixous speaks of the mother’s tongue, a writing that emerges from the body, from experience, from what official language seeks to repress. “There is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink.” White ink is the opposite of blacked-out text, not erasure but excess, a form of writing that resists containment. The women in Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes were deprived of the right to name, to narrate their own stories. Their children were taken and renamed, their testimonies locked away, their own identities reduced to institutional records that have since been struck through. The archive, then, is not a neutral repository of history but an active agent of forgetting.

Butler’s notion of grievability, the idea that some lives are deemed worthy of mourning while others are institutionally unacknowledged adds another dimension to this erasure. If a name is struck through, if a voice is silenced, does it mean that life was never meant to be grieved? Redaction functions as a refusal of recognition, an insistence that these women’s experiences do not belong to history in the first place. To write them back in is not simply an act of retrieval, it is an assertion that their lives were always worthy of being seen, heard, and remembered.

If redaction is an attempt to seal off the past, then voice is its undoing. Cixous transforms the figure of Medusa, traditionally cast as monstrous, silenced, feared, into one who laughs back at the structures that seek to contain her. “You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”

The state archive speaks in the language of authority, structured, official, absolute. It demands reverence. But what if the response to redaction is not just grief or rage, but excess? What if the refusal to be erased does not manifest as solemn reconstruction but as something more unruly, more fluid? What if the women who lived within these institutions refuse to remain quiet, their histories refusing to sit neatly within the confines of state records?

Here, Butler’s theory of performativity becomes essential. If identity, like language, is produced through repetition, then redaction is an attempt to fix meaning, to make silence permanent. But just as gender can be performed otherwise, so too can history be rewritten otherwise. Cixous calls for a writing that overflows, that disrupts, that breaks form. In this, she offers a model of resistance that does not merely seek entry into the archive but instead refuses to play by its rules.

Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes attempted to regulate not just women’s bodies but their speech, their futures, their very capacity for self-definition. The state’s insistence on withholding records is a continuation of this logic. But the voice, like écriture feminine, is unpredictable, excessive, resistant to control. If the archive is structured around the logic of redaction, then the response must be a form of writing that resists containment, not neat restoration but chaotic, defiant, insistent speech.

If the official archive is a place of erasure, then a feminine archive must be something else entirely: a living testament to those who have been silenced, a site of reclamation and resilience. Cixous reminds us that “writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought.” Butler, too, speaks of language as a site of potential, where meaning is never fully fixed and where power can be resisted through acts of re-signification.

The institutions that sought to disappear these women can never fully erase their existence; disappearance is not forgetting. Each act of redaction creates a space for resistance, a crack through which we can pour forth the uncontainable stories of those who endured the Mother and Baby Homes. If the state insists on striking through their names, we will write them back in, reclaiming their identities with every stroke of white ink.

This is not merely a corrective measure; it is a transformative act that reshapes the narrative. By embracing the fluidity of écriture féminine, we challenge the very structures that attempted to confine these women to silence. Through laughter, through embodiment, through the act of writing itself, we shatter the archive’s rigid boundaries.

The redacted becomes illuminated. The forgotten emerges vibrant. The silenced rise up—no longer mere shadows of history but powerful voices shaping their own narratives. For, as Cixous tells us, “there is no room for her if she is not a he.” And so she must write.

The Other Side

Operating from the 18th to the late 20th century with the last one closing its doors in 1996 women became slaves to a society that "sought to negate and render invisible their challenges" to the conceived notions of a moral order. Deemed as Irelands “fallen women” their lives and voices were silenced.

With abortion first outlawed under British rule in Ireland in 1861 we saw the emergence of protests filling the streets to repeal the 8th amendment. Protestors collectively chanted “My Body My Choice” and “A Right to Choose” holding banners stating “Rise and Repeal” along with a hashtag of #VoicesForChoice circulating on social media - only to finally break the wall of silence in 2018.

The history of silence under patriarchy is of course long and multifaceted. Tradition becomes authoritative holding a force of collective silence. There is an unspoken rule throughout this history where we learn how sweet devotion can be to serve domination - a long battle of obstruction and denial.

A struggle for recognition however first implies a claim to be recognised as a voice that has the right to be heard, but not every voice has a “choice”. Now taking place in the historical architectural streets of De Wallen, home to Amsterdam’s Red light District, we again face the political and social implications of silence and the importance of refocusing our attention on structures of power.

Serving conservative Catholic church values, a powerful and feared force, it is amongst the most traumatic eras of Irish history where we find coercion towards invisibility shaped by a system of regime and power. Home to the notorious Magdalene Laundries, women were confined for decades under the promiscuous image of Mary Magdalene - a sensual temptress, turned a repentant prostitute to pay for her “sins”. Due to the religious institutions "policy of secrecy” for almost a full century, women incarcerated now constitute the nation's disappeared.

Famed for its diversity and individual freedom, control seems an anti-thesis to Amsterdam's identity. As early as the 15th century sex work has existed with prostitution being legalised in the Netherlands since a licensing system was implemented in the year 2000. Throughout the narrow streets with its red neon-lined windows we bear witness to the rhythm of a fierce intimacy that resists invisibility. In light of what can be perceived as freedom, there can be a dark undertone to what is deemed to be believed as a liberal system. Designed to withstand shifts in cultural domination and exclusion - sex workers fight an inseparable force from the oppressive structures of politics and their society.

Overwhelmed by its own popularity with its “go wild” and “no rules” image sweeping the city sex workers tackle their safety and respect against the continued de-humanised eye in their own place of work – a devils playground to some. In order to gain social control and moral order sex workers have continued to be silenced into the shadows and pay the consequences in favour of the ‘other’.

In the echo of this constraint the city has learned nothing from the decade of Project 1012, launched in 2015 in a bid to ‘clean up’ Amsterdam’s red light district. It’s force instead discretely affected the safety and livelihoods of sex workers with the closure of approximately 126 windows – forcing some workers underground. The first female mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, has set off outrage and heavy resistance across the city, giving a momentum for a growing call for change. Her proposal to abolish the red light district in favour of an ‘erotic centre’ alongside earlier closing times risks physical exclusion continuing the stigma and intensifying the marginalization of sex workers.

The secret of Helsemas power is dependent only upon the truth of its illusion. Inspired by the seductive imagery in the Bas Luhrmann film Moulin Rouge, the female body is a glamourous commodity, painting sex workers under the constraints of feathers and fantasy. Although claiming to curb human trafficking, and that’s a meaningful victory - but vulnerability should not face discrimination nor stigmatisation in the process of rights for change. Institutionalised away from public view, Helsemas imposed proposal promise that fails to create structural change nor a breakthrough in criminal infrastructure and holds a false control.

Highlighting the resilience and the desire to escape a division in society sex workers of the Red Light District continue a unified struggle for recognition. Wearing masks to hide their identity, holding red umbrellas and banners stating "Save the Red Light", “Stop Project 1012, 2.0” and “Rights Not Rescue” they continue to voice concerns for their safety – yet go denied and unheard with no response.

The human need and political demand for recognition is a central focus in contemporary socio-political movements. The voice of the oppressed continues to rise, who’s lived experiences is unacknowledged by the state or a complex society - in which they are ultimately not mere observers, but essential to its moral message, protagonists themselves.

The rule of silence and resistance is not only about the past but the continued oppression traced within the power that is translated up in society. While sex workers continue to be excluded from legality conversations they will remain fragmented rather than collective, and stigmatization will abound. Refusing to unmask sex workers existence holds them in a position of the invisible.

“One wants you gone, and the other doesn’t want to let you in.” -Felicia Anna, sex worker and Chair of Red Light United