‘He’s a Good Soldier, He Cares About the Future’: Post-Feminist Masculinities, the IRA Man and ‘Peace’ in Northern Ireland

Abstract

The period of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland began in the 1960s (growing from a desire to challenge nationalist/Catholic inequality and led by the Civil Rights movement) and is now perceived as being ‘over’ as a consequence of the peace process and the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. As the peace process has begun to ‘bed down’ a number of theorists have turned their attention to critically examining the role that mass media representations played, and are still playing, in securing its success. Most studies¹ have identified how the peace process had an economic imperative (connected to economic stability in Europe and the rise of neoliberalism), an analysis with which I would concur. However, much of my own research up to now has considered the role that mass media representations played in this process from a slightly different perspective. Drawing on contemporary feminist research, my concern has been to examine the reimaginings of national identity at the heart of the peace process from a feminist perspective, within the context of a ‘post-feminist’ popular culture. This work has prioritized the ways in which such shifts have impacted on contemporary understandings of both masculinity and femininity within Northern Ireland and correspondingly how, through a process of recuperation, such discourses have functioned to ‘exclude’ women from the peace process.