Abstract
Woods places contemporary drag performance in Ireland within the historical context of dissident, subversive elements of Irish popular culture. The chapter examines drag performance within the Irish LGBT movement as a performative practice that queers dominant and intersecting discourses on gender, sexuality and national identity while also reinflecting Bakhtin’s conception of the carnivalesque. In exploring traditional wake games, Woods highlights resonances between critical drag performance and aspects of traditional Irish popular culture. The chapter illustrates that—in their re-imagination of social, sexual and gender identities—the traditional Irish wake and contemporary drag practice constitute parallel aspects of Irish popular culture, serving as performative expressions issuing from the margins that destabilise dominant understandings of dominant social, gender and sexual subjectivities.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
From the AMI website http://www.alternativemissireland.com/. This website is no longer live, but archival material relating to the pageant, including promotional material, is held in the Irish Queer Archive located in the National Library of Ireland: http://www.nli.ie/pdfs/mss%20lists/151_IQA.pdf.
- 3.
Briquettes are compacted bricks of shredded peat used as a solid fuel. The semi-state company Bord na Móna was established under de Valera’s government in 1946 to commercially harvest peat from Ireland’s bogs as part of de Valera’s mission to develop Ireland as a self-sufficient economy.
- 4.
See Nancy Fraser (1995).
- 5.
- 6.
The video of “AMI goes Diddly Sci-Fi” is available on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm3a5Vz7xMQ, accessed 17 October 2015.
- 7.
- 8.
See http://www.abbeytheatre.ie/behind-the-scenes/backstage-blogs/the-risen-people-blog/the-noble-call/, accessed 12 November 2015.
- 9.
- 10.
For a critical analysis of discourses on marriage equality as bound up with normalisation and assimilationist imperatives, see Neary (2016).
- 11.
See http://www.peopleoftheyear.com/Inspirational-People/2014-People-of-the-Year.aspx, accessed 17 November 2015. For media coverage of the award, see Zhuang (2014).
- 12.
See Somerville’s “Queer” (2007).
- 13.
See Binchy (1958).
- 14.
See Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977).
- 15.
Focused on legitimating its claims to independent nationhood within the terms of empire, nationalism retained, while sometimes inverting, the binarisms of colonial ideology in relation to gender, culture and civility. As David Lloyd points out, ‘nationalist monologism is a dialogic inversion of imperial ideology, caught willy-nilly in the position of a parody, antagonistic but dependent’ (1993, p. 112).
- 16.
The Queen of Ireland (dir. Conor Horgan 2015).
Works Cited
Anon. “Alphabet Soup: Labels and Empowerment.” Thinking About Now (weblog), 1 February 2010. https://thinkingaboutnow.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/alphabet-soup-labels-and-empowerment/, accessed 7 November 2015.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 547–66.
Binchy, Daniel A. “The Fair of Tailtiu and the Feast of Tara.” Ériu 18 (1958): 113–38.
Bliss, Panti. “‘Noble Call’ Speech.” Abbey Theatre, 1 February 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXayhUzWnl0, accessed 5 November 2015.
Bourke, Angela. “The Irish Traditional Lament and the Grieving Process.” Women’s Studies International Forum 11, no. 4 (1988): 287–91.
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge, 1993.
———. “Merely Cultural.” Social Text 52–3 (1997): 265–77.
———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Cohen, Cathy. “Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?.” In Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, eds. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae Henderson, 21–51. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
Elkink, Johan A., et al. “Understanding the 2015 Marriage Referendum in Ireland: Context, Campaign, and Conservative Ireland.” Irish Political Studies 31, no. 3 (2016): 1–21.
Fortier, Anne-Marie. “Re-Membering Places and the Performance of Belonging(s).” In Performativity and Belonging, ed. Vikki Bell, 41–64. London: Sage, 1999.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Vintage, 1977.
Fraser, Nancy. “Pragmatism, Feminism and the Linguistic Turn.” In Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, eds. Seyla Benhabib, et al., 157–72. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Ging, Debbie. “All-Consuming Images: New Gender Formations in Post-Celtic-Tiger Ireland.” In Transforming Ireland: Challenges, Critiques and Resources, eds. Debbie Ging, Peadar Kirby and Michael Cronin, 52–72. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009.
Horgan, Conor, Dir. The Queen of Ireland. Blinder Films, 2015.
Lee, Marti D., and Ed Madden, eds. Irish Studies: Geographies and Genders. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008.
Lloyd, David. Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Postcolonial Movement. Dublin: Lilliput, 1993.
Luibhéid, Eithne. “Nationalist Heterosexuality, Migrant (Il)legality and Irish Citizenship Law.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 1 (2011): 179–204.
Magennis, Caroline, and Raymond Mullen, eds. Irish Masculinities: Reflections on Literature and Culture. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011.
Murphy, Yvonne. “The Marriage Equality Referendum 2015.” Irish Political Studies 31, no. 2 (2016): 315–30.
Neary, Aoife. “Civil Partnership and Marriage: LGBT-Q Political Pragmatism and the Normalization Imperative.” Sexualities 19, no. 7 (2016): 757–79.
Ó Crualaoich, Gearóid. “The Merry Wake.” In Irish Popular Culture 1650–1850, eds. James S. Donnelly and Kerby A. Miller, 173–200. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998.
Ó Dónaill, Niall. Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla/Irish-English Dictionary. Baile Átha Cliath: An Gúm, 1998. http://www.teanglann.ie/en/fgb/ait, accessed 15 November 2015.
Ó Laoire, Lillis. On a Rock in the Middle of the Ocean: Songs and Singers on Tory Island. Conamara: ClóIar-Chonnachta, 2005.
Ó Súilleabháin, Seán. Irish Wake Amusements. Cork: Mercier, 1967.
Prim, John G.A. “Olden Popular Pastimes in Kilkenny.” Transactions of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society 2, no. 2 (1853): 319–35.
Somerville, Siobhan. “Queer.” In Keywords for American Cultural Studies, eds. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. New York: New York University Press, 2007. http://keywords.nyupress.org/american-cultural-studies/essay/queer/, accessed 15 November 2015.
Wood-Martin, William Gregory. Traces of the Elder Faiths of Ireland: A Folklore Sketch, a Handbook of Irish Pre-Christian Traditions. Vol. 1. London: Kennikat, 1902.
Zhuang, Zara. “Panti Bliss, Garda Whistleblowers Named People of the Year.” The Irish Times, 8 December 2014. http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/panti-bliss-garda-whistleblowers-named-people-of-the-year-1.2028917, accessed 17 November 2015.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Woods, J. (2018). Dragging up the Past: Subversive Performance of Gender and Sexual Identities in Traditional and Contemporary Irish Culture. In: Villar-Argáiz, P. (eds) Irishness on the Margins. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74567-1_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74567-1_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-74566-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-74567-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)