Claire Keegan is one of the most prominent voices within the contemporary Irish short story panorama. Internationally acclaimed, her prose has been praised for its frank and bitter portrayal of a rural world, whose outdated values, no matter how anchored in the past they might be, still prevail in a modern milieu. Keegan’s unsympathetic views on society, mainly on the Catholic Church and the family, are the main targets of her harsh criticism. Issues like gender and sexuality, two social constructs with which to validate an uneven distribution of power, constitute the pillars of most of her plots. Bearing these aspects in mind, my proposal focuses on the analysis of Keegan’s first collection of short stories,