The queer experience in Irish writing can be described as an experience of estrangement from the nation. Disillusion and migration have been the keynotes of the queer literary imagination, preoccupations that are still visible in the contemporary work of writers such as Naoise Dolan and Darragh Martin. In the first half of the twentieth century, the pursuit of national consolidation in the precariously legitimate Irish Free State was a project of entrenching heterosexism and silencing disruptive erotic possibilities. Queer identifications were exiled, constructed as foreign, polluting influences in the rigidly bordered nation.1 Feminist and queer ways of thinking thus pose a potent challenge to the heteronormativity of the modern Irish nation-state; however, the constitutive role of transnational modes of thought has been overlooked. In myriad ways, the transnational is interwoven with queer imaginaries; they cannot be thought without one another. This dualistic contestation of hegemonic sex/gender conventions can be helpfully drawn together in the term ‘the queer transnational.’