This landmark collection addresses the memories and legacies of Ireland's Magdalen Laundries. It brings together for the first time a range of critical voices to consider the cultural and social context of the laundries, the responses by official agencies and the pioneering importance of artists and writers in bringing these institutions to the public eye.

The volume places these histories in dialogue with those of other carceral institutions, including Mother and Child Institutions, Industrial Schools and, in the twenty-first century, refugee Direct Provision Centres. Finally, the analysis extends to the structures and histories which regulate bodily autonomy, in particular, the criminalisation of abortion and prostitution.

The collection adopts a multi-disciplinary approach to build a feminist, historical and cultural analysis of the ways in which the postcolonial carceral state has operated over the past century. It also considers the centrality of gender and class in how power was structured and operated in the Irish State, from its foundation, and how the legacies of those hierarchies of power remain central to policies and politics of the body, race and class, today. The collection in particular considers how artistic interventions have changed social attitudes to these institutions and how commemoration may create cultural and social spaces for survivors' voices and rights to be recognised.

Taken as a whole this collection represents an alternate narrative of historical and present-day Ireland.