Rewriting the Troubles: Language, gender and agency in contemporary plays by women in Northern Ireland.
Item
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Title
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Rewriting the Troubles: Language, gender and agency in contemporary plays by women in Northern Ireland.
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Identifier
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AAI3169959
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identifier
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3169959
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Creator
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O'Leary, Deirdre J.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Marvin Carlson
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Date
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2005
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Theater | Women's Studies | Literature, English
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines three Northern Irish playwrights and one Belfast women's theatre company whose work consciously addresses and interrogates nationalist allegory informing both republicanism and loyalism. Employing postcolonial theory and theories of gender and sexuality, I explore the shifting networks of power that emerge when gender, nationalism, violence and the construction of state and home converge.;Anne Devlin, Christina Reid, Marie Jones and the Charabanc Theatre Company, offer pointed political and cultural critique of both the phallocentric discourse of the Troubles, as well as the theatrical conventions dictating the frames through which cultural nationalism is viewed, in order to suggest new types of representational strategies to include rather than occlude women's voices. The term representation is not meant to suggest a mirror that fiction is holding up to reflect what already exists. Rather I am intending a form of representation within which and by which women are being constituted as new kinds of subjects.;I argue that these playwrights challenge the masculine meta narratives of nationalism, which are largely informed by the postcolonial construction of Ireland as a woman. Chapter One applies Julia Kristeva's theories of semiotic language to a study of the full length plays of Anne Devlin and suggests Kristeva's chora as a possible site of experimentation and opportunity for women attempting to find a language more appropriate to describing their identity and condition in Northern Ireland. Chapter Two employs Walter Benjamin's analysis of language and social memory in an examination of Christina Reid's plays to illustrate her commentary on the male performance traditions of Ulster loyalism as they construct a nostalgic, gendered history of myth. Chapter Three interrogates the Charabanc Theatre Company's commitment to farce to offer commentary on the Troubles and the degree to which, within the genre, the plays create theatricalized agency for women onstage. Chapter four examines the post Charabanc playwriting career of Marie Jones. Using Pierre Bourdieu's theories on material culture and fields of cultural production, I argue that Jones posits gender identity and ethnicity in post Celtic Tiger Northern Ireland as interchangeable economic commodities.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.