Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture

Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture Edited by

Wanda Balzano, Anne Mulhall and Moynagh Sullivan

Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture

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Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture Edited by Wanda Balzano Wake Forest University

Anne Mulhall University College Dublin and

Moynagh Sullivan NUI, Maynooth

Selection and editorial matter © Wanda Balzano, Anne Mulhall and Moynagh Sullivan 2007 Chapters © their authors 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-00870-0 ISBN-10: 0-230-00870-4

hardback hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Irish postmodernisms and popular culture / edited by Wanda Balzano, Anne Mulhall, Moynagh Sullivan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: Race — Space — Diaspora — Aporia. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-00870-0 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-230-00870-4 (cloth) 1. Popular culture—Ireland. 2. Postmodernism—Ireland. I. Balzano, Wanda II. Mulhall, Anne III. Sullivan, Moynagh DA925.I7435 2007 306.09417—dc22 2006048787 10 16

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

This book is dedicated with thanks to all the wonderful women in our lives: mothers, aunts, daughters, sisters and friends; teachers, students and colleagues

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Contents Acknowledgements

ix

Notes on Contributors

x

Introduction

Part I 1

2

3

4

6

7

Race

Not Irish Enough? Masculinity and Ethnicity in The Wire and Rescue Me Gerardine Meaney

3

Reading and Writing Race in Ireland: Roddy Doyle and Metro Eireann Maureen T. Reddy

15

Marching, Minstrelsy, Masquerade: Parading White Loyalist Masculinity as ‘Blackness’ Suzanna Chan

26

‘Is it for the Glamour?’: Masculinity, Nationhood and Amateurism in Contemporary Projections of the Gaelic Athletic Association Mike Cronin

Part II 5

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39

Space

‘Our Nuns are not a Nation’: Politicizing the Convent in Irish Literature and Film Elizabeth Butler Cullingford

55

Fanfic in Ireland: No Country, No Sex, No Money, No Name Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka

74

Widening the Frame: the Politics of Mural Photography in Northern Ireland Kathryn Conrad

85

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Tracking the Luas between the Human and the Inhuman Wanda Balzano and Jefferson Holdridge

Part III 9

10

11

12

14

Diaspora

Cinematic Constructions of Irish Musical Ethnicity Christopher Smith

115

St Patrick’s Day Expulsions: Race and Homophobia in New York’s Parade Katherine O’Donnell

128

Fantasy, Celebrity and ‘Family Values’ in High-End and Special Event Tourism in Ireland Diane Negra

141

A Mirror up to Irishness: Hollywood Hard Men and Witty Women Claire Bracken and Emma Radley

157

Part IV 13

100

Aporia

‘Let’s Get Killed’: Culture and Peace in Northern Ireland Colin Graham

171

Boyz to Men: Irish Boy Bands and Mothering the Nation Moynagh Sullivan

184

15

Quare Theory Noreen Giffney

16

Camping up the Emerald Aisle: ‘Queerness’ in Irish Popular Culture Anne Mulhall

Index

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210 225

Acknowledgements We are grateful to our friends, families, teachers and students for sharing ideas, inspiration, commitment, support, advice and good humour with us in the process of editing this book and over the years. Thanks to all our colleagues, past and present, at NUI Maynooth, University College Dublin, Wake Forest University, NUI Galway, and University College Cork. We should like to thank in particular Marie-Louise Coolahan, Patricia Coughlan, Colin Graham, Selina Guinness, Jeff Holdridge, Margaret Kelleher, Gerardine Meaney and Cliona O Gallchóir. Amanda Bent’s organizational magic was invaluable, as was her assistance with the cover design. The editors and the publishers wish to thank the following for permission to reprint material: Éire-Ireland for a revised version of Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, ‘“Our Nuns Are Not a Nation”: Politicizing the Convent in Irish Literature and Film’; Irish University Review for Maureen Reddy, ‘Reading and Writing Race in Ireland: Roddy Doyle and Metro Eireann’; and The Irish Review for a revised version of Moynagh Sullivan, ‘Boyz to Men’. In the event that any copyright holders have been inadvertently overlooked, the authors and publishers will make amends at the earliest opportunity. Thanks to the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Publications Scheme for Research and Graduate Studies for an award to assist with publishing costs; thanks also to Simon Coury, our indexer, and to Melanie Blair, Jill Lake and Barbara Slater at Palgrave Macmillan for kind and helpful support.

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Notes on Contributors Wanda Balzano is Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Wake Forest University, USA. She has published essays on Beckett, Joyce and Irish women’s writing. She co-edited, with Moynagh Sullivan, the special issue of The Irish Review on Irish Feminisms. Claire Bracken is an IRCHSS (Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences) doctoral candidate at the School of English and Drama, University College Dublin, Republic of Ireland, where she also teaches. She is researching postmodern feminisms in contemporary Irish women’s writing and film. Elizabeth Butler Cullingford is Jane and Roland Blumberg Centennial Professor in English Literature and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. Her publications include Ireland’s Others: Ethnicity and Gender in Irish Literature and Popular Culture (2001), Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (1993) and Yeats, Ireland and Fascism (1981). She is currently writing a book on literary representations of the only child. Suzanna Chan is Research Associate at the School of Art and Design, University of Ulster, UK. In addition to several catalogue essays to accompany exhibitions in Belfast and Derry, her publications have appeared in the Irish Studies Review, 11.3 (2003), Cities of Belfast (2003) and New Voices in Irish Criticism (2003). Kathryn Conrad is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kansas, USA, and author of Locked in the Family Cell: Gender, Sexuality, and Political Agency in Irish National Discourse (2004). Her current research focuses on the politics of space and the public sphere in Northern Ireland. She is also a photographer and printmaker. Her photographs of Northern Ireland have appeared in several publications, including Human Rights Dialogue and Radical History Review. Mike Cronin is the Academic Director of the Centre for Irish Programmes at Boston College in Dublin, Republic of Ireland. He is the author of Sport and Nationalism in Ireland: Gaelic Games, Soccer and National x

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Identity since 1884 (1999) and co-editor of Wearing the Green: a History of St Patrick’s Day (2002) and Sport and Postcolonialism (2003). He is currently working on a history of major state spectacles staged in Ireland since independence. Noreen Giffney is Faculty of Arts Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Social Justice at University College Dublin, Republic of Ireland. Her publications concentrate on queer theory, lesbian studies, cultural studies and medieval studies. Colin Graham lectures in English at NUI Maynooth, Republic of Ireland. He is author of Ideologies of Epic (1998) and Deconstructing Ireland (2001) and co-editor of Ireland and Cultural Theory (1999), Irish and Postcolonial Writing (2002) and Ireland and Europe in the Nineteenth Century (2006). He is also co-editor of The Irish Review. Jefferson Holdridge teaches Irish literature in the English Department at Wake Forest University, USA, where he is also Director of WFU Press, the premier publisher of Irish poetry in North America. In addition to essays on Irish and American literature, he is the author of Those Mingled Seas: the Poetry of W.B. Yeats, the Beautiful and the Sublime (2000), and is preparing a book on landscape in Irish literature. He is also a published poet. Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka is an IRCHSS scholar in the School of English at University College Dublin, Republic of Ireland. She has published on popular culture as well as Irish literature, particularly on the work of Kate O’Brien. Gerardine Meaney is Director of the Institute for Irish Studies at University College, Dublin, Republic of Ireland. She is author of (Un)Like Subjects: Women, Theory, Fiction (Routledge, 1993) and Nora (‘Ireland into Film’ series) (2004), co-editor of Volumes IV and V of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (2002) and is currently engaged in the ‘Women in Public and Cultural Life in Twentieth-century Ireland’ research project in association with the School of History, Queen’s University, Belfast and the Department of History, University of Limerick. Anne Mulhall is Lecturer in Irish Studies, School of English and Drama, University College Dublin, Republic of Ireland. She researches in the areas of queer theory, popular culture, women’s writing in Ireland, and seventeenth-century literature and culture.

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Diane Negra is Senior Lecturer in the School of Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. She is author of Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom (2001), editor of The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity and Popular Culture (2006), co-editor of A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (2002) and the forthcoming Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Katherine O’Donnell is Head of Women’s Studies in the School of Social Justice at University College Dublin, Republic of Ireland, and has published widely on Eighteenth-Century Studies, Irish literature and Queer Studies. She is co-editor of Queer Masculinities 1550–1800 (2006), Love, Sex, Intimacy and Friendship between Men (2003), and the forthcoming Palgrave Guide to Irish History: Twenty-First Century Lesbian Studies (2007). Emma Radley is a doctoral candidate at the School of English and Drama, University College Dublin, Republic of Ireland, where she also teaches. She is researching constructions of subjectivity in postmodern genre cinema. Maureen T. Reddy is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Rhode Island College, USA, where she was awarded the Mary Tucker Thorp College Professorship for 2005–06. She has written Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction (2002), Crossing the Color Line: Race, Parenting, and Culture (1996), and is co-editor of Race in the College Classroom: Pedagogy and Politics (2002). Christopher Smith is Associate Professor of Musicology/Ethnomusicology and Director of the Vernacular Music Center at Texas Tech University, USA. He has written several books and many chapters and essays on topics in jazz, classical and world music. He records and tours internationally with Altramar medieval music ensemble, leads the Irish traditional band Last Night’s Fun, and has lectured and performed around the world. He is also a published poet. Moynagh Sullivan is Lecturer in the Department of English (NUI), Maynooth, Republic of Ireland. She has published a number of articles on gender, women’s writing and Irish studies, and co-edited (with Wanda Balzano) the special issue of The Irish Review on Irish Feminisms, and (with Borbola Farago) Facing the Other: Interdisciplinary Studies on Race, Gender and Social Justice in Ireland.

Introduction Wanda Balzano, Anne Mulhall and Moynagh Sullivan

Not all of Irish culture arranges itself neatly under the heading ‘Irish’. A great many things have happened and are happening on the island that are not primarily concerned with nationality and its discontents: great swathes of contemporary popular culture, multinational capitalism, migrants and refugee seekers, all participate in and are moved by global forces that traverse this island of Ireland, blind to the intricate complexities of its past.1 Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture seeks to examine not only the postmodern in popular culture, but also the postmodern and popular culture. The distinction draws on Jean-François Lyotard’s definition of the postmodern as an ahistorical pre-modern event, intuitively feeling for its fitting form, seeking the rules with which it will be understood, and thus modernized in Lyotard’s sense. The distinction also draws in the broadly understood usage of postmodernity as epochal, a historical period, and the related symptomology of postmodernity as a global (or first-world) cultural dominant tied, as Jameson argues, to late capitalism. From such extended horizons, the collection looks at popular culture as the vernacular practice of a postmodern dominant, with the potential, like the subcultural, to be both complicit and resistant: complicit in its appropriation to a global cultural economy, but also, importantly, with the potential to resist the fatalistic conclusions of Jameson’s argument which concludes that all experimentalism is inevitably recuperated to the market without effect. In so doing, the collection calls the reifications of the global market into question, while witnessing the possibilities of innovative cultural practices to exceed its terms. The essays focus primarily on the ‘great swathes’ of contemporary popular culture, which, as Claire Connolly remarks, are not necessarily ‘concerned with nationality and xiii

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its discontents’, but which intersect with some dimensions of the critical debates in public and intellectual life about the reinscriptions of the boundaries of Irishness, quickened by the presence of ‘multinational capitalism, migrants and refugee seekers’. The book is divided into four sections – Race, Space, Diaspora and Aporia – although, mirroring the current porousness of Irish borders and cultural life, the divisions are permeable, confirming how the discourses that traverse space, and that shape practices, intersect in critical ways.

Race The essays in ‘Race’ move beyond the codifications of ‘Irishness’ in Irish, British and North American contexts to consider the racialization of nonwhite and ‘non-national’ people in Irish culture and society. Addressing these contemporary issues in the context of the growth of ‘non-national’, ‘migrant’, diasporic communities in Ireland, the essays in this section elaborate the interactions between such new social and cultural formations and traditional modes of encoding differences between historical groups in Ireland, and in national and international conceptions of ‘Irishness’. Maureen T. Reddy’s and Suzanna Chan’s essays explore the complexities of race in Ireland and Northern Ireland respectively. While Reddy analyses Roddy Doyle’s fiction serialized in Metro Eireann – ‘Ireland’s Only Multicultural Newspaper’ established in 2000 by two Nigerian immigrants, Abel Ubga and Chinedu Onyejelem – Chan studies marching practices in Northern Ireland, and exposes how a particular mode of territorializing masculinity is intimately connected to discourses of race and racial positioning. Gerardine Meaney reads the ethnicity of Irish American masculinity against the backdrop of the September 11 attacks, noting how its troubles reflect the wider woes of white male American society. She analyses how Irish masculinity functions as a repository of a bellicose, blue-collar, phobic masculinity in popular United States television shows. Ending the section, Mike Cronin reflects on how gender, an exclusive nationalism, and the Gaelic Athletic Association, are inextricably bound together in a subject construction of nationalism as masculinity.

Space The ‘postmoderning’ of space, always a problematic concept in Irish cultures, is examined in essays that consider a number of different strategies in the redefinition of borders and boundaries. Bodies, cyberspace, public spaces and enclosed spaces are all examined in terms of

Introduction

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how current figurations, uses and explorations challenge and subvert older and over-determined notions of Irish spaces to suggest Irelands that exceed or make porous the borders of the imagined community of ‘Ireland’. Wanda Balzano and Jefferson Holdridge examine the Luas light-rail as an intersection of technology, the human, nature, and the inhuman in Dublin’s cultural identifications, from layered national struggles of the past to the transnational confrontations of the present. In a different vein, seeking to complicate the easy politicization and demonization of the convents, Elizabeth Butler Cullingford asserts the space of the convent as a republic of letters for women, a place of flight and contest, while problematizing a diverse religious and political discourse in Gothic narrative and film. Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka sees cyberspace, and in particular fanfic communities, as sites that reconfigure traditional inscriptions of gendered, sexual, racial and national identity: national space is deterritorialized in the transnational space of the cyber community. Kathryn Conrad, on the other hand, investigates the politics of representation, considering how murals in Northern Ireland are represented and circulated as the subject of the work of others, in photography, tourism or the classroom, and offers suggestions about the ways in which the representation of images can engage creatively, intelligently and honestly in a discourse about Northern Irish visual culture.

Diaspora ‘Diaspora’ looks at the values of Irishness and Irish practices in international contexts, most especially that of the United States. ‘Diaspora’ reveals Irish history as in large part a history of diaspora; this section reads contemporary representations and social practices of Ireland and Irishness in an international and intercultural frame, and analyses the ways in which diasporic identities reframe and complicate representations and conceptions of ‘Irishness’. In particular, this section looks at the interrelations of ‘home’ and diaspora in the context of a largely Anglo-American global media industry and the images of ‘Irishness’ and ‘Ireland’ that this produces. Claire Bracken and Emma Radley discuss how Hollywood has historically packaged and unwrapped Irish gender, looking specifically at the value of the Irish boy in today’s Hollywood imaginary, while Christopher Smith traces the process whereby the complexities and sincerities of traditional music as a living, non-reified (indeed postmodern) mode of address and communitarianism are distorted by the simplifications and occlusions of Hollywood’s ethnic fetish. Diane Negra’s essay examines how Ireland plays a specific role in

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the increasingly extravagant and exhausted wedding market, analysing how normative gender and racial positions are reinscribed through popular cultural discourses that conceptualize Ireland as a national site in which one can re-make or fortify one’s ‘family values’ and access a consoling ‘authentic’ white ethnicity. The vexed intersections of race, class, ethnicity and sexuality in Irish-American identity are examined in Katherine O’Donnell’s chapter, which examines how Irish lesbians and gay men in (Irish) America, represented by the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization (ILGO), were banned from marching in the New York St Patrick’s Day Parade, on the basis that for them to do so would be ‘racist’. By linking the historical conditions under which Irish-American communities ‘became white’ in the United States with the construction of IrishAmerican identity as intrinsically racist and homophobic, O’Donnell unpicks the astounding contradictions that lie at the heart of the discourses invoked against ILGO, showing how white Irishness in New York functions to affirm that liberal middle-class America is free from the blights of bigotry.

Aporia ‘Aporia’ addresses the aporia – sites of contradiction – within Irish popular and subcultural production and practices. This section addresses the modes of thinking that embrace radical ambiguity (which approach a both/and dialectic as opposed to the either/or oppositionality often operative in discussions of Irish popular culture and subculture) as well as practices that are sites of seemingly irresolvable difference. Colin Graham examines the repression of sectarian tensions in cultural operations attached to the Northern Irish peace process, and examines subcultural sites in which these contradictions are metonymically explored; he concludes by compassionately suggesting that the cohabiting discourses in the aporia that structure peace process ideals need to be decoded, but more importantly honoured. Noreen Giffney counters the assumption that sexuality remains an aporia in Irish academic work, and forcefully reasserts the wealth of lesbian, feminist and queer scholarship ongoing in Irish academia. Elaborating ‘Quare’ theory as a queer discursive practice grounded in the collaboration of queer and lesbian feminism in University College Dublin’s Women’s Education Research and Resource Centre (WERRC) she argues for a methodology and practice in which irreducible realities and desires can be fruitfully contested and accommodated. Anne Mulhall looks at how the ‘blindspots’ in dominant critical discourses can repress the elided histories and identity formations that

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they invoke in their critical apparatus. Taking ‘kitsch’ and ‘camp’ as a starting-point, Mulhall explores the genealogical connections between queer subcultural performance in contemporary Ireland and the colonial and ‘postmodern’ formations of a ‘gay male’ subject, a genealogy that renders the queer problematic for postcolonial and neo-Marxist Irish cultural criticism. Moynagh Sullivan’s aim, central in many of the chapters, is to expose the rhetoric of masculinity in crisis, which it resolves by embodying those that it will contradictorily disincorporate from the national body defined on white masculine models. Her analysis traces how the phenomenon of the boy band depends on its being a site of visual and performative contradiction, from which the boy band is reproduced as a family value that constructs Others, particularly women and nonwhites, as adjunct citizens in Celtic Tiger Ireland.

The emperor’s new dress In having sidelined gender theory and with it any complex quotient of identity, in implicitly accepting a normalized version of Irish nationality and gender, Irish cultural studies is seen by many of the essays in this collection to be a protectionist enterprise, guarding the national conceptual borders against the forces of colonialism. This imbrication of the colonizing discourses of ‘imperialist’ theory with the global imperialism of the West is an effective rhetorical move. Ireland’s eager embrace of neoliberal economic policies, its complicity in the immiseration of the non-Western world that fuels economic and cultural globalization, is narrated, in influential corners of Irish Studies, as coterminous with a dependence on imported intellectual models, especially those of AngloAmerican provenance. Both are narrated as mechanisms of disavowal and disaffiliation: from our own colonial past and postcolonial present, from those non-Western peoples which are, it was once reasonably argued, our real international compatriots, if only we would be true to ourselves. To embrace ‘theory’ – issuing as it does from a Western epistemology that is the conceptual engine of imperial expansion – is to embrace the enemy, to bend yet again to an external authority. This connection is made forcibly by the editors of the important collection Reinventing Ireland (2002): One of the difficulties with progressive thinking in Ireland [. . .] is what might be termed ideological franchising. Basically, this involves the wholesale import of concepts and analyses from a powerful centre (usually the former colonial power) and their application in Procrustean fashion to the local society.2

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This is all the more confounding in light of how Irish Studies has itself been established. The Field Day project, inaugurating a powerfully influential, sophisticated and necessary analysis of Ireland within the frameworks of neo-Marxist and postcolonial theory, was not without its foreign influences; Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton and Edward Said were notable enabling figures for the initiative. Within this critique, however, it appears as if only certain theory can be legitimated, while other ‘theories’ are considered complicit with the corrupting influences of globalization itself. Although specifics are avoided in such denunciations, by a process of elimination it seems that what is in question are those versions of postmodernism, feminism and queer theory that have been influenced by psychoanalysis and poststructuralism. This suspicion is voiced by conservatives and radicals alike, and the most obvious casualties of this version of the tension between modernity and tradition are feminism and queer studies, and those analyses of racialization that refuse to appropriate the standpoint of the racially ‘other’ for ‘Irishness’ in the present tense. Because women and sexual minorities in particular occupy a problematic position in relation to ‘tradition’ in the Irish context, questions of gender and sexuality rub up against the variously Marxist and postcolonial critiques of modernity in ways that make such practices shift in their seats, but not enough to share them. Critical readings of race in Irish cultural criticism have for the most part been shaped by a history of analogizing between Irish and African peoples and peoples of African descent as (straight male) like with (straight male) like. Only recently has this relationship been deconstructed in the work of critics such as Steve Garner.3 The value and authenticity of contemporary Irish popular cultural production rests on whether or not it makes the analogies between Irish and non-Western/slavery experiences clearly visible, in a mode that chimes with the experiential analogies on which a ‘strong’ postcolonial cultural criticism proceeds. However, analogies based on a shared trauma rooted in the experience of colonization must of necessity be located in the past; they do not hold in the present, except as an embedded memory. For instance, the claim that Bono’s Irishness makes him ‘a white nigger’, breaks down in the context of contemporary Irish society, where the disjunctions between white middle-class Irish national and black African non-national, decouples any metaphorical or historical analogy.4 The subcultures that might unlock Ireland’s repressed identity will be found in the interstices, where they have lain unnoticed within the tradition–modernity binary. Likewise, because our different work does not tilt on this axis, we often found it without a ‘place’ in the occupational subculture of academic Irish

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Studies; and providing a place where contradictory and exploratory perspectives could come in from the cold was one of the motivating visions for this collection. On this prefatory note we end, in the hope that the collection will go some way to setting agendas and templates for future complex and just engagements in the difficult relations between the aporia of Irish popular culture and its postmodernisms in the global era.

Notes 1. Claire Connolly, ‘Introduction: Ireland in Theory’, in Theorizing Ireland, ed. Connolly (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 2–3. 2. Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin, ‘Reinventing Ireland: an Introduction’, in Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy, eds Kirby, Gibbons and Cronin (London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2002), p. 14. 3. Steve Garner, Racism in the Irish Experience (London: Pluto Press, 2004). 4. Paul Hewson, ‘The White Nigger’, in Across the Frontiers: Ireland in the 1990s, ed. Richard Kearney (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1988), p. 190. Cited in Lauren Onkey, ‘Ray Charles on Hyndord Street: Van Morrison’s Caledonian Soul’, in The Irish in Us, ed. Diane Negra (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 191.

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Part I Race

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1 Not Irish Enough? Masculinity and Ethnicity in The Wire and Rescue Me Gerardine Meaney

What is the value of ‘Irishness’ in the global economy of images? What are its uses? How does it work? Traditionally, Irish Studies defined itself in terms of the study of culture emanating from Ireland itself, defending the authenticity of its subject against the continuum of stage Irishry and Blarney characterized as first London’s, then Hollywood’s failure to represent either the complexities of Ireland’s history or the reality of its people. While there is a significant body of scholarship on the negative stereotyping of the Irish in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American media, there is relatively little on the production of positive (or at least attractive) stereotypes of Irish ethnicity and their functions in the discourses of race, gender and ‘homeland’.1 This chapter will examine critical elements within US popular culture, which engage with the construction of Irish-American masculinity as embodiment of patriotic, blue-collar masculinity. It seeks to extend the analysis of the way in which Irishness has been crucially deployed, postSeptember 11, 2001, in the articulation of white, working-class male identity. The 2006 New York St Patrick’s Day Parade was led by the 69th Infantry Regiment of the US army, recently returned from Iraq. The ceremony at the parade’s end, in which military medals were bestowed on members of the regiment, was accompanied by music from the Wolfe Tones. The regiment has a historical link with Irish America, as have the New York fire and police departments, which have achieved an iconic status in the representation of the 9/11 attacks. In some ways, the conjunction of militarism and republican balladry at the New York parade indicates the enormous gulf that separates the self-representation of Irish America and Ireland. The Dublin parade in the same year came in the aftermath of republican riots, and the sound of the Wolfe Tones would probably have cleared the streets of law-abiding citizens in ten minutes 3

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(a different strand of the ballad tradition was represented by the Dublin Grand Marshall, Ronnie Drew). The no doubt bemused Powder Springs High School marching band found itself marching in Dublin beside a lone protestor waving a ‘US troops out of Shannon’ banner. (The official antiwar protest was staged on 18 March 2006.) The relation between Ireland and Irish America is not that of easy contrasts and oppositions, from whichever side of the Atlantic it is viewed. US troops are in Shannon, after all. For, as the New York parade indicates, Irishness has become part of American self-representation.

Irishness in US media For the purposes of this chapter, I will concentrate on two television drama series featuring Irish-American characters. Rescue Me (2004–) has been a critical and ratings success while The Wire (2002–) is a prestigious HBO production that has won widespread critical acclaim, and features two well-known novelists among its screenwriters (George Pelecanos and, more recently, Denis Lehane).2 The main protagonist in Rescue Me is that epitome of Irish-American heroism, a New York fireman who has survived the 9/11 attacks, Tommy Gavin. He is also the epitome of all the major Irish stereotypes; hard drinking, impulsively brave but prone to violence, hopelessly in love with his ex-wife, self-destructively having sex with all the other women who find him fatally attractive. These stereotypes also attach to Jimmy McNulty, one of an ensemble of interlinked central characters in The Wire, though McNulty is practically an intellectual by comparison with the foul-mouthed Gavin. Unlike Gavin, McNulty also works well with strong, competent women. In fact his working relationships with women in general are much more successful than his sexual ones. Both characters are emotionally inept, but passionately committed to their work. Both have an intimacy with death which sets them apart from their colleagues. In Rescue Me, the central protagonist is literally haunted by his dead partner and by all of those whom, over the years, he has not succeeded in rescuing.3 Much of the first series concerns his conversations with these dead people. In a striking parallel, McNulty spends much of the second series of The Wire carrying around a photograph of a dead Eastern European woman whose body he has retrieved from the bay, seeking to identify her and get her a ‘proper’ burial. In both series, the relationship between Irishness and America is played out as the tension between the incompatible demands of modern masculinity.

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Abject heroism: masculine body anxiety in Rescue Me The pilot episode of Rescue Me appears to open with Tommy Gavin going to the bathroom.4 An overhead shot shows the toilet bowl from Gavin’s perspective as it fills with smoke. Just as he appears to be trapped inside the bathroom, Gavin wakes and we realize we have been inside his nightmare. The series repeatedly plays with the boundaries between dream and reality to the extent that it, like the main character, inhabits a psychotic space where such boundaries cannot be drawn. The location of the first such breakdown in the bathroom, at a site where the body separates itself from its waste, is telling. The abject vortex where boundaries between inside and outside, food and waste, life and death, are always in danger of breaking down is the very site of this narrative, which tells how difficult it is to maintain one’s own proper identity as the man in the heroic story. Tommy wakes from his dream and coughs, as if the smoke from it is still in his lungs. He drinks some juice, goes out the door, all of which is shot in close up with a rapid sequence of shot and counter-shot at eye level that puts us unsettlingly close to Tommy. The first words we hear Tommy Gavin speak are ‘Do you want to know how big my balls are?’ in voiceover over a panning shot of new recruits to the fire brigade lined up in a classic military formation, with a panoramic view of New York’s skyline visible across the river behind them. In the commentary on the DVD of the series, Dennis Leary maintains that the speech which follows was taken almost verbatim from one delivered by a drill instructor in the New York fire department of an acquaintance of his, whose brother, also a fire-fighter, died in the 9/11 attacks. (The additional features included on the DVD are very much concerned with authenticating the series, stressing its realism, the casting of actual or former firemen, and so on, in contrast to the series’ willingness to break the rules of conventional television realism.) The accuracy of this is not undermined by the familiarity of the scene, common to many other films featuring raw army recruits, tough sergeants and the relations of men in combat. The beautifully composed shot, which sets this quintessentially military exchange between men directly in front of the skyline which was changed forever on 9/11, leaves the viewer in no doubt that these men are on the front line of a new battlefield. Gavin’s macho speech, however, is somewhat at odds with the beauty of the scene and the heroic narrative implicit in it. ‘My balls are bigger than two of your heads duct-taped together. I’ve been in the middle of shit that would make you piss your pants’, he informs the new trainees. The purpose of their training, he tells them, is not to make heroes of them, but to find out cowards, because ‘if you can’t take the heat that’s

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what you are, you’re a pussy and there ain’t no room for pussies in the FDNY’. To be less than a man is to be that part of a woman that both threatens castration and promises life. Until this point the scene had effectively disconnected Tommy’s voice from his physical presence: the camera pans over the ranks of men so that we don’t see the speaker. Voice and body are re-united only in confrontation with a young man who dares to express amusement at all this macho excess, and we see Tommy in close up facing him and standing threateningly close to him until seriousness is restored. At this point the dead men whose photographs are displayed as examples for the recruits are used to validate the form of masculinity needed on this new frontier. ‘I knew sixty men who gave their lives at Ground Zero, sixty. Four of them from my house . . . Vito Costello, found him almost whole. Ricky Davis, found him almost whole hugging a civilian woman. Bobby Vincent, found his head. And my cousin, Jimmy Keefe, my best friend, know what they found of him? What they was able to bring back and give to his parents? A finger.’ Throughout this part of his speech the camera cuts back and forth between Tommy and the photographs of the dead men. The reaction shots, close ups, of the horrified and chastened recruits are kept until the reference to the finger, and then continue to the end of the speech as Tommy tells them: ‘these four men were better firemen and better human beings than any of you will ever be’.5 At this point the camera pulls back, and Tommy’s parting salute to the ranks of men heavily reinforces the military overtones. This pre-credit speech sets up the central conflicts of the series: the absolute necessity and simultaneous impossibility of emulating the heroes of 9/11; the fascination and horror of ‘pussy’; the erasure of the trauma of vulnerability in the emphasis on the men who ‘gave’ their lives, rather than having them taken. The language of the speech sets up the tone and atmosphere of the series. Its reliance on the kind of language completely unacceptable on primetime mainstream television is typical of the increasing sub-genre of amoral crime drama aimed at a predominantly male audience, such as Prison Breakout (2005–), The Shield (2002–) and 24 (2001–), which go far beyond the moral boundaries of traditional primetime fare. The credit sequence of Rescue Me features the rapid edits of urban scenes, handheld cameras and pounding rock soundtrack signatures of ‘hard-hitting’, that is, masculine, US television. However, the language of Tommy’s speech also reveals the extraordinary difficulty of ‘holding it together’ in the context of the grief, loss, paranoia and posttraumatic stress disorder these series normalize as the masculine condition. Tommy’s wife has left him because he can’t open up and is emotionally ‘unavailable’, but this extreme psychic closure is accompanied

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by the language of mental and physical disintegration. The references to the body indicate a crisis of boundaries. Tommy has been ‘in the middle of shit that would make you piss your pants’. The opening dream sequence features an attempt to make water which turns into smoke. A running joke through the first episode culminates in the closing scene when the fire station chief mistakenly drinks a urine sample. The men discuss at length medical tests which involve rectal examinations. These are not the hard bodies of the action movies of the eighties. On the contrary, they are porous, vulnerable to penetration, their fluids seeping from them, their boundaries unstable. Mortality stalks them. The ultimate expression as well as the explanation of this is in the precredit scene which validates archaic masculine values, but also catalogues the literal decomposition of men. The proud names of the fallen heroes are reduced to their body parts, some almost whole, others only a head or a finger. All that is left is not to be ‘pussy’. Yet even this is no longer viable. The band of men at the fire station will be penetrated and dispersed by the female therapist sent by the troublingly authoritative and alien ‘headquarters’ before the end of the episode. By the end of the series, there will actually be a woman fire-fighter among them. Ultimately, in this context, the aftermath of 9/11 is no more than a verification of the paranoia that pre-existed it. ‘Where have we already seen the same thing?’, asks Slavoj Zizek in ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’.6 In the nightmares of our competent men, answers Rescue Me. The phallic dilemma, where the masculine ego will never actualize its ideal, reaches crisis proportions in the guilt and anxiety of survivors who will never be the men their dead predecessors were. The pre-credit section of the first episode of Rescue Me has one more twist. After the military salute, Tommy gets back in his truck, which an establishing shot shows us is empty. A rapid shot/counter-shot then cuts from Tommy, unsurprised, to Jimmy Keefe, his cousin and friend killed at Ground Zero. ‘That was nice, what you said about me’, says Jimmy’s ghost, though he goes on to point out that they wouldn’t think Tommy so tough if they knew he was talking to dead people. When Tommy finally addresses Jimmy, he disappears. Tommy’s arrested grieving process and his communications from the dead are part of the way in which Rescue Me deploys the psychological framework its protagonists so strenuously resist. Since Tommy cannot talk about his feelings without becoming a ‘pussy’, without in effect being castrated, his feelings are externalized as ghosts and talk to him. (This takes an unexpected turn in the second season when giving up drink results in hallucinations of Jesus Christ who takes on the role of Tommy’s internal/external interlocutor.) The series’ actualization of

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Tommy’s ghosts goes a step further than the use of dream sequences as an indicator of buried trauma. The device breaks the convention of realist television drama, as do the use of techniques borrowed from body horror. Bobby Vincent’s head turns up in Tommy’s locker, for example, talking amiably. Rescue Me’s combination of such shock tactics, ghosts, humour and tragedy identifies it with postmodern Gothic television and especially with genre hybrids such as Twin Peaks (1990), The X Files (1993–2002) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003). Fred Botting commented on postmodern Gothic in 1995 that the horror at the heart of its narrative games was that there were only narrative games.7 In other words, postmodern Gothic was afraid there was ultimately nothing outside in the dark waiting to pounce. In Rescue Me, something has already pounced, but this only serves to make it more unnameable. The terrible other is no longer a luxury of the imagination but an enemy so alien that it cannot enter the narrative at all. For Rescue Me so relentlessly focuses on Ground Zero that it never refers to the sky above. What happened and who did it are absent from the narrative. Instead, the event impacts in the fragmentation of bodies and selves, the breakdown of the boundaries between inside and outside and the living and the dead. The extraordinary racial and sexual homogeneity of the fire station reflects a sense of tightly drawn boundaries and this community, like the men within it, is under pressure from the start to maintain itself against forces outside and beyond it. Even in this first episode, female therapists, bureaucrats at headquarters and dissatisfied citizens make demands which the characters and, to a large extent, the narrative deride, yet cannot resist. In an exchange which has gained considerably in irony since the series first broadcast, an African-American waylays the chief fire officer to complain that the rescue services would have responded much more quickly if it had been a white neighbourhood. The therapist’s arrival in the fire station clears the room. Tommy stays to tell her how little she understands, but ends up explaining himself and breaking down in tears. Women completely undermine the fragile masculine selves to which the characters cling in the series. Tommy’s ex-wife makes him feel inadequate in her obvious preference for far less macho men in her choice of new boyfriend. His daughter is almost killed when she goes out in a car with an unsuitable boy whom her father had warned her against. Beyond his daughter’s burgeoning sexuality, a much greater threat to Tommy’s definition of himself as father is his ex-wife’s desire to move and take the children away from him and from the scene of trauma. Tommy’s sexual relationships with women other than his wife are desperate; alcohol fuelled and, for most of the first season, short lived.

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The threat of impotence hovers over his investment in a dead relationship and dissatisfaction with sex outside his social role as husband. Jimmy’s ghost is banished in the course of the series when Tommy starts sleeping with his widow, but this sublimation of his unhealthy obsession with a dead man in relationship with a live woman is in fact considered perverse by his colleagues, who see it as an insult to Jimmy’s memory. The terms of identity through the homosocial bond at Rescue Me’s heart include the priority of the dead past over future living. The narrative circles around the originary trauma of 9/11 with the possibility of a different story in the future troped from the start as a form of betrayal, specifically of allowing the dead to be dead. At the end of the pilot episode, Tommy takes a trip to the ultimate liminal space, the edge of the ocean, accompanied by the ghosts of all those he failed to save. These include his fallen comrades and two children who perished in the more ordinary tragedies of fires in overcrowded apartment blocks. The scene is visually very striking, especially as Tommy leads the procession of ghosts back from the edge of the sea towards the land and ultimately the city. At its beginning and its end, the pilot episode of Rescue Me establishes Tommy Gavin as a haunted man and a liminal consciousness, neither mad nor sane, between the living and the dead, nature and the city, land and water. His particular link to the dead, the tragedy of his fidelity to the past, and his association with in-between spaces make Tommy Gavin typical of the new image of the Irish-American, embodying masculinity as something primal and atavistic, defined by discipline and self-sacrifice, but shadowed by its other, the experience of social and personal fragmentation, random violence and meaningless loss. In effect, Irishness is put to its old work of figuring liminality, while acquiring a new function of mediating death, transforming it from victimization to heroic choice.

Ritual, race and death: ethnicity in The Wire In the first season of The Wire, Jimmy McNulty is told by his superior that his dogged integrity indicates he is ‘not Irish enough’ for the Baltimore police force. However, in the course of the second season, McNulty’s Irish ethnicity becomes much more explicit as his professional identity temporarily breaks down. The narrative context for the foregrounding of McNulty’s Irishness is his exclusion from the ranks of detective as a punishment for what his immediate superior sees as insubordinate zeal in the pursuit of a case. Jimmy is consigned to the water, the harbour patrol of Baltimore City, an assignment which he hates. The Wire has a much

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more complex ensemble of central characters than Rescue Me, however, and McNulty’s Irishness is part of the season’s exploration of white, working-class, masculine identities in which ethnicity is linked to the experience of immigration and assimilation. The central investigation in the series is set in motion by rivalry between two sets of Polish workers, dockers and policemen. When the dockworkers’ union succeeds in getting a stained-glass window in their local church previously intended as a police memorial, a senior Polish policeman, out of spite, starts an investigation into where they got the money. The discovery of the bodies of 14 young women in a cargo container, where they had suffocated, makes the issue of immigration one of current desperation, not past heritage. The story’s focus on the docks makes it a story of how America was and is made at the point of intersection between it and its others. The anonymous stacks of containers offloaded in Baltimore Harbour make any hard and fast border almost impossible to maintain. The second season of The Wire was broadcast more than a year before the possibility of foreign control of US ports provoked a major political crisis, but it dissects the central dilemma that the ‘business’ by which the US defines itself inevitably makes it open to others. The waterfront setting insists on the history of this process. Yet, even here, openness and borders are a scene of terrible anxiety. The Polish dockworkers are becoming obsolete, a highly organized masculine labour force competing for work that is in increasingly short supply. They long for the work promised by a long-hoped-for granary, a source of employment linked to nurture, agriculture and to traditional modes of production, but must contend with increased mechanization and computerization, which means the docks require fewer and fewer men. In its dissection of the way in which global capital destroys traditional masculine and social roles, The Wire engages in an exploration of the causes of crime highly unusual in the television crime genre where good and evil, them and us, are more usually treated as explanatory categories in themselves. It shows the desperation that drives Sobotka’s nephew Nick to drug dealing, for example, in order to fulfil the traditional male role of providing a home for his girlfriend and child. While it is predominantly the male role which drives the no longer working class to crime, the women, who are strongly identified with ethnicity, are also incapable of surviving or providing for themselves in the brave new world. Sobotka’s wife has retreated into tranquillized non-entity as the moral universe collapses around her, and her role as ‘good Polish mother’ becomes meaningless. Nick’s girlfriend pressures him to create their mutual future, but she has none of her own, and the young Eastern European women who die in the container seem to indicate that an American

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future is no longer available to the new arrivals. When it becomes apparent that the women were suffocated deliberately, it turns out that this is because one of them refused to prostitute herself on board the ship when the ‘shepherd’, charged with getting them to the US, turns pimp. Refusing to be an object of exchange, this girl ends up as an unidentified subject. She is the floater, whom Jimmy McNulty pulls out of the bay, separated from the other girls, who enter the US as damaged goods. His unsuccessful attempts to identify her lead the narrative into an underworld of young women who cannot or will not communicate, moved around by pimps and immigration officers, with no apparent volition of their own, except their desperate desire to stay. These lone female immigrants destined for exploitation counter the history of the successful migration of families and generations of assimilation in Frank Sobotka’s stories of the old days and Jimmy McNulty’s Irish ballads. The INS tells Baltimore police that there are 50,000 such undocumented girls working in the US: ‘They need a whole new agency just to police ’em.’ Russell, a policewoman, responds: ‘What they need is a union.’8 Russell, the patrolwoman who investigates but eventually weeps for Frank Sobotka, has found police work to be a way out of the economic dead-end in which her husband’s departure left her, though we are shown that her prospects for the kind of detective work which she learns to enjoy are severely restricted by the fact that she is a responsible and competent parent. The incompatibility of work and family is a recurrent theme of The Wire and an implicit theme in a vast array of crime fiction. For the male characters the incompatibility of the demands of work and the demands of contemporary fatherhood mean that it is structurally impossible to fulfil the male role required of them. However, even McNulty’s eventual working partner, Kima, finds herself following in his dysfunctional footsteps when she becomes unfaithful and distant with her lesbian partner after she has a baby.9 Kima complains to McNulty, ‘they know you’re police when they hook up with you . . . And they know you’re police when they decide to start a family with you. And all that shit is fine until one day . . . “You should have a regular job” and “You need to be home at five o’clock”.’10 Only work confers identity in the society The Wire maps out, but the identity it confers is sterile, limited, itself deathly. In the character of Jimmy McNulty, as with Tommy Gavin, this is intensified to the point where fidelity to the dead prevents them from living. Other detectives in the series are strongly associated with new technologies: the series takes its name from wire-tapping after all, and Freamon, an African-American detective who shares a history of being punished for doing his job too honestly with McNulty, rediscovers himself as a

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detective through the application of technology to intelligence gathering. McNulty is a much more traditional detective. Like the dock workers whose sense of themselves is corrupted by lack of work and the traditional social networks it supports, McNulty disintegrates when his identity is not fixed by the job. He tells Bunk that he ‘needs to get off that boat. I need to do a case’.11 When he is not a detective, McNulty becomes much more stereotypically Irish. ‘Duck and Cover’ opens with him stumbling around a bar, trying to talk to his wife on the phone, failing, demanding more drink. He then drives away with The Pogues’ ‘Transmetropolitan’ blaring on the car stereo: . . . This town has done us dirty This town has bled us dry We’ve been here for a long time And we’ll be here ‘til we die So we’ll finish off the leavings Of blood and glue and beer And burn this bloody city down In the summer of the year . . .12 The song’s nihilism links Jimmy’s despair, his Irishness and self-destruction. He doesn’t burn the city down, but he does drive his car quite deliberately at a wall. As Bunk tells their captain to persuade him to take McNulty into his detail, ‘Jimmy McNulty, when he ain’t policing, he is a picture postcard of a drunken self-destructive fucker . . . but on a good case, that’s the closest the man comes to being right.’ The drunken selfdestruction is linked via the soundtrack to McNulty’s Irishness, though the choice of ‘Transmetropolitan’ hints that it is the migrant condition and not the accident of origin that defines Jimmy’s insecure identity. The phrase ‘homeland security’ is routinely derided by the police in The Wire, signifying a shift of resources away from regular policing: they are reduced to pretending a drug dealer’s first name is Ahmed in order to secure a wire tap on him. ‘Homeland’ transparently doesn’t include West Baltimore. Jimmy McNulty’s drunken driving spree is shown in a sequence of alternating close ups of Jimmy in his car with The Pogues blaring and long shots of his car driving at speed through deserted, broad and unmistakably American streets, which have been part of the visual repertoire of American alienation since film noir. His car hints more at the seventies than the forties, though, and the streetscape is more reminiscent of Taxi Driver than

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The Maltese Falcon. At the point when he is most forlornly Irish, Jimmy is most quintessentially American. Music works as an important signifier of ethnicity, and sometimes as commentary on the narrative throughout The Wire. McNulty’s soundtrack signature is the use of The Pogues, and their music signals the occasions when Irishness serves as metonym for blue-collar masculinity. In an extraordinary wake scene, in the third series of The Wire, the ritual mourning of a dead colleague involves laying him out at Kavanagh’s Irish Pub, an oration, a great deal of drink, and the singing of The Pogues’ ‘Body of an American’ by a group of colleagues, of whom at least half are AfricanAmerican officers. The scene mirrors the song’s mock heroic: the dead man, Ray Cole, has died not from a bullet but a heart attack in the gym. ‘We’re police’, says Landsman, ‘so no lies between us: he wasn’t the greatest detective and he wasn’t the worst. He put down some good cases and he dogged a few bad ones. But the motherfucker had his moments. Yes, he fucking did.’ Characteristically ambivalent, the scene both mocks and celebrates the archaic masculine values of heroic camaraderie. That this male bonding through shared work and experience is archaic is very clear. The second series of The Wire was declaredly an analysis of the ‘death of the American working class’, figured through those most masculine occupations of dockers and longshoremen, though often seen through the eyes of the policewoman, Russell.

Not-quite American heroes Gavin and McNulty configure Irish-American masculinity as a combination of heroic resistance and traumatized survival. The Irish inheritance of emigration and struggle is recruited to express both the sense of loss and the requirements of survival. Tommy Gavin and Jimmy McNulty bear the traces of troubled migration, not triumphant assimilation. The care both lavish on the dead identifies Irishness and the past: their failures as fathers indicate that they have more trouble connecting to the future.13 These characters tend to self-deconstruct. It is tempting to read their limitations and the failures of their attempts at heroic patriarchy as national allegories, with their Irishness functioning as a protective distance (they are not-quite American heroes). They certainly reflect a renewed preoccupation with ethnicity at a time when fear of terrorism is generating both a desire for closed borders and for clear lines of demarcation between ‘them’ and ‘us’ in the US. The two characters reflect different responses to this. Gavin cannot imagine working with Chinese, women or little

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green men:14 McNulty by contrast finds that the drowned immigrant girl he cannot name is turning up in his dreams. Because ethnicity is a matter of family, it is part of the fabric of domesticity, determining food, music and conversational practice (‘Four Polaks, six opinions’, Frank Sobotka reminisces fondly).15 As a result of this intimacy, ethnicity makes the history of immigration personal, immediate. It invokes the security of home(land), but reminds that homeland is always already lost in the process of becoming American. In this context, the figure of the tragically Irish-American expresses the desire for unity and the terror of disintegration in a divided nation.

Notes 1. See The Irish in US, ed. Diane Negra (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006). 2. Rescue Me (Sony Pictures Television, 2004–); The Wire (HBO, 2002–). 3. Unlike the ghostly partner in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (ITV, 1969–71; Universal Pictures, 2000–01), Tommy’s dead partner impedes his work rather than attempting to assist it. 4. Rescue Me, Season 1, Episode 1, ‘Guts’. 5. Rescue Me, ‘Guts’. 6. Slavoj Zizek, ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’, The Symptom: Online Journal for Lacan.com, 2 (Spring 2002), www.lacan.com/desertsymf.htm (accessed 1 April 2006). 7. Fred Botting, Gothic (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). 8. The Wire, Series 2, Episode 3, ‘Hot Shots’. 9. The Wire, Series 3, Episode 2, ‘All Due Respect’. 10. The Wire, Series 3, Episode 3, ‘Dead Soldiers’. 11. The Wire, Series 2, Episode 8, ‘Duck and Cover’. 12. The Pogues, ‘Transmetropolitan’, Red Roses For Me (Stiff Records, 1984) (cat. SEEZ55). In the US ‘duck and cover’ is, of course, synonymous with inadequate precautions against nuclear attack. 13. See Gerardine Meaney, ‘Dead, White, Male: Irishness in Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, in The Irish in US, ed. Negra, pp. 254–81. 14. Rescue me, Season 1, Episode 1, ‘Guts’. 15. The Wire, Series 2, Episode 6, ‘All Prologue’.

2 Reading and Writing Race in Ireland: Roddy Doyle and Metro Eireann Maureen T. Reddy

In this chapter, I examine one case of sustained intervention in discourses of race during a volatile period in Irish social life, focusing on Roddy Doyle’s fiction serialized in Metro Eireann between May 2000 and December 2004: ‘Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner’, ‘The Deportees’, ‘57% Irish’, ‘I Understand’ and ‘Home to Harlem’. In the first four of these texts, Doyle explores the shifting meanings of Irishness and the complex, fraught relation of race and nation in an Ireland whose population is changing rapidly due to immigration. With the fifth story, ‘Home to Harlem’ (titled after Claude McKay’s controversial 1928 novel), Doyle makes a move similar to the central conceit of his recent novel, Oh, Play That Thing (2004), moving his main character, a young Irish man, to the US and counterpointing Irish and American racial attitudes.1 The context in which Doyle’s work has appeared helps to shape its meaning, and so I shall first examine not the fictions themselves but their venue. Metro Eireann – whose slogan is ‘Many voices, one Ireland’ – bills itself as ‘Ireland’s Only Multicultural Newspaper’ and takes an anti-racist, pro-immigrant editorial position. The monthly was established in 2000 by two Nigerian immigrants, Abel Ubga and Chinedu Onyejelem, who had worked for the Irish Times (both print and online versions). The inaugural issue in April 2000 carried a front page, above-the-fold statement of purpose, headlined ‘Our Main Job’ that begins: Though from different backgrounds, immigrants and other persons who make up an ethnic minority in Ireland are united by one vital factor: the majority want to contribute to the development of Ireland, the country they now regard as their new home, and they want a free hand to do so. Our main job is to articulate this desire and help it become a reality. 15

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The statement goes on to decry the mainstream Irish media’s ‘spotty’ and sometimes ‘totally inaccurate’ coverage of immigrant issues, and asserts that such coverage has created ‘fear of difference’ in the majority (white Irish) population. It concludes: ‘we ask the help and cooperation of all good-minded people in and outside of Ireland’ in accomplishing Metro Eireann’s goals. The other front-page stories in that first issue share a similar tone and political perspective: a photo of three schoolchildren – two black, one white – is captioned ‘Straight into a Multicultural Ireland’; the headline below it reads, ‘O’Toole hits out at immigration policies’, with a story on the Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole’s position that the ‘Irish people are a step ahead of the Government in the march towards a multicultural Ireland’; and the third story on the page, headlined ‘A message from Bono’, is a report on Bono’s speech accepting the Freedom of the City of Dublin, in which he said: ‘We [presumably, white Irish] come from a tribe of refugees and now it’s our turn to welcome the refugees.’ From the start, then, Metro Eireann has positioned itself firmly within an integrationist, celebrate-difference racial discourse that is centrist and reformist, not radical or revolutionary.2 Multiculturalism is a pluralist philosophy that seeks to end racism not by challenging racialism itself but by revising the racial hierarchy through a process of adding in. In appealing to readers’ better natures – the sense of fairness shared by ‘good-minded people’ – the editors implicitly stake a claim for sameness despite apparent difference: immigrants are just like everyone else in wanting to help ‘develop’ Ireland, and all they’re asking is a ‘free hand’ to do so. The echoes of free-market capitalism here are significant, as is the absence of definition of what type of development – social? moral? cultural? economic? – is at stake. Ultimately, the editorial philosophy of Metro Eireann does not deeply challenge the status quo. Metro Eireann has remained remarkably true to its original purpose and philosophical position. When I spoke with Chinedu Onyejelem in March 2004, as the paper was entering its fifth year of publication, he described the audience he envisions as ‘anyone interested in diversity’, which he defined as a ‘live and let live’ attitude of tolerance and acceptance.3 Now, lest I be misunderstood as harshly critical of the newspaper, I want to make clear that I understand the constraints under which Onyejelem and his colleagues are operating. Of course there are the financial issues, which loom large for anyone trying to establish a periodical without a massive corporate purse to draw upon. Metro Eireann began with a twothousand pound loan and remains advertisement-driven and seeking investors; in other words, it cannot escape its status as a commodity peddling other commodities. Then, too, the mild challenge multiculturalism

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presents to the racial status quo may sometimes seem downright radical given the Irish social context. Onyejelem reminded me several times that various government officials and powerful pundits keep insisting there is no racism in Ireland, or, at most, they assert that racism is a new phenomenon that arrived with the wave of immigrants of colour, thereby subtly blaming racism on its targets. Onyejelem cited as typical a moment at the UN World Conference on Racism in South Africa in 2001, when the Irish Minister for Justice, John O’Donoghue, told a questioner that ‘Ireland will deal with racism when it comes’ – purveying the fantasy that there is no racism in Ireland. Roddy Doyle got involved in writing for Metro Eireann through his admiration for Abel Ubga and his sympathy with the aims of the paper.4 By being published in the milieu of Metro Eireann, Doyle’s stories are placed within a particular context for readers, often beginning on the same page as anti-racist columns by Ronit Lentin and Fintan O’Toole, and advertised on the front page with their columns under the heading ‘Choose What to Read’. The monthly’s news stories tend to focus on government policies and practices that negatively affect immigrants, such as the routine rejection of work permit applications from non-EU citizens and court decisions limiting the rights of parents of Irish-born children, with many calls to action. The audience addressed by Metro Eireann seems both particular and divided, despite Onyejelem’s view that he is appealing to ‘anyone interested in diversity’: on the one hand, recent immigrants in need of information and, on the other, Irish nationals sympathetic to the idea of multiculturalism. The former audience is interpellated as both citizens and consumers (the advertising aims almost exclusively at them), the latter as citizens first and consumers a distant second. I am using a standard division here, but ‘citizen’ is perhaps a misleading term in this context because the former group of readers’ citizenship is precisely what is at issue: it is as aspiring citizens, or as displaced non-citizens, that they are addressed by the editorial content and many of the advertisements. A look at the issue in which Doyle’s fiction began running in May 2000 illustrates this audience split. That issue contained twenty-four news stories, seven opinion pieces, three personal experience stories, four pieces on the arts, and the first installment of Doyle’s serial. Eight of the news stories focus on asylum or immigration problems, six are about international events (mainly human rights issues), and ten fall into a category I think of as ‘pro-diversity reportage’. That is, those ten stories look at the ways in which various people who do not fit into mainstream definitions of Irishness (white, settled and Christian, preferably Catholic) have enriched the country culturally or focus on efforts by white, settled,

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Christian Irish to build a more inclusive society. Stories in that third category, as well as the opinion and personal experience pieces, address both audiences, but seem more directly targeted at Irish nationals, seeking to inform them of experiences the mainstream news media tend not to cover. The advertisements in that issue, on the other hand, are clearly aimed at immigrants and asylum seekers. Of the sixteen advertisements, one is for money transfer services, three for international phone cards, four for legal services for immigrants, and six for both non-government and government organizations that aid immigrants. Only two advertisements address both groups, and these are for media (radio and print). That audience split persists across the monthly’s life, as an analysis of the May 2003 issue suggests: twenty-eight news stories, six opinion pieces, three personal experience stories, fourteen arts and cultural events reviews, and an instalment of a Doyle serial. Of the twenty-eight news stories, eight focus on asylum or immigration problems, ten on international events, and ten fit the pro-diversity reportage category. Again, the advertisements primarily target non-nationals: two for money transfer services, two for international phone cards, three for legal services for immigrants, nine for organizations aiding immigrants, and one for speciality retail (African food products). Of the ten other advertisements, six tiny ones are for courier services and four for media, which presumably address both constituencies. Advertisers evidently do not see Metro Eireann as a vehicle for them to reach Irish nationals, but mainly as one for recent immigrants and asylum seekers, perhaps particularly those from the African continent, judging from the wording of some of the advertisements. The advertisements that appear in Metro Eireann do not have direct counterparts in mainstream print media, such as the Irish Times, which may be a function of comparative cost but also underscores the demographic disparity in audience: the Irish Times is not for immigrants and asylum seekers. Given both the general development of racial discourses in Ireland and this audience split in Metro Eireann, the voice in which fiction speaks acquires deep significance. Many critics have argued that fiction allows imaginative access into consciousnesses and therefore worlds strange to individual readers. I find especially resonant and persuasive Martha Nussbaum’s argument that fiction can help to educate readers into deeper commitments to social justice by creating imaginative identifications across social divides, including the divide of race.5 Fiction, then, offers the possibility of direct intervention in racial discourses with potentially profound effects. In his stories for Metro Eireann – which are the only works of fiction that appear in the monthly – Roddy Doyle clearly has had this

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potential in mind from the outset, but has struggled to invent a voice that is up to the political task. The first of the stories Doyle has written for Metro Eireann is probably also the best known, as it was reprinted in the New Yorker and also turned into a play that ran for a number of performances in several Irish venues. Published in eight parts of about a thousand words each, ‘Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner?’ gently skewers Larry Linnane’s unintentional, ignorant racism, which is easily overcome by the end of the story. Larry, the white Irish father of adult daughters and a teenage son, imagines himself as ‘modern, successful, Irish’, unshockable, until one daughter, Stephanie, ‘brought home the black fella’, a Nigerian asylum-seeker named Ben whom Larry imagines is Stephanie’s boyfriend. Larry has for years worshipped Phil Lynott and Bob Marley, as well as some black sports figures, which is why he thinks ‘He wasn’t a racist. He was sure about that now, positive – he thought.’ Nonetheless, Larry associates refugees and asylum-seekers with AIDS, war and famine, and wants to say to Ben: ‘You’re welcome, but different; enjoy your stay, and stay away from my daughter.’ A few thousand words later, after a horribly awkward dinner, Larry discovers that Ben and Stephanie are friends, not a couple, and is downright disappointed. What causes such a remarkable turnaround? The story traces the shift to Ben’s telling of his own story, including a description of his sister, Jumi, a teacher who ‘spoke her mind’ and consequently ‘disappeared’ one day. The story ends with Larry wanting to be like Ben (symbolized by a comment on Ben’s cologne) and asking whether he would be welcome at an African shop on Parnell Street; in the story’s last line, ‘They smiled at each other.’ The story is reassuring: African immigrants do not want to marry your daughters; they just want to work and live in peace in Ireland. In this story, racism equates with prejudice and is entirely personal, not systemic or social, not intimately intertwined with all the basic conditions of daily life. Doyle surely knows on some level that this view of racism is fantastical and grossly oversimplified, as the resolution of the marriage plot into a fundamental misunderstanding suggests. We are left to wonder whether Larry would in fact accept Ben as his daughter’s fiancé, as of course Larry’s turnaround is not really tested. Indeed, Ben and Larry connect most convincingly not as fellow citizens or as potential father-in-law/ son-in-law, but as fellow consumers, as Ben knows where to shop and can guide Larry to the purchase he now wants to make. The object of exchange between the men shifts from a woman to a (far safer) cologne. While Doyle faults the government for their bungling of immigration and race issues, he believes that ‘there’s no ideological racism in Ireland.

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It’s just lazy . . . Stupid, lazy, knee-jerk reaction’ to the presence of people of colour in Ireland. Larry Linnane’s change, then, acts out what Doyle deeply believes about what is needed to end racism in Ireland; as he puts it, ‘contact is the key’. However, this view of racism misses the historical development of discourses of race and racialization in the country across centuries; contrary to the popular belief shared by Doyle, racism did not arrive with immigrants of colour in the 1990s and in fact is independent of any significant population of colour, as Steve Garner demonstrates conclusively in Racism in the Irish Experience.6 Further, in a pattern that can be observed worldwide, there is a hierarchy of race and therefore of racism in Ireland that is currently both shifting slightly and solidifying, with white, settled Irish at the top and recent African immigrants at the bottom, along with Irish Travellers and Roma immigrants, who are often lumped together in the popular imagination. Doyle’s stories tend to focus on the top and the bottom of that hierarchy, with only glancing attention to the stages in between. When Doyle and I met in April 2004 in New York to talk about his Metro Eireann stories, he said that he was inspired to write them by Metro Eireann itself. In early 2000, he read an Irish Times article about Abel Ubga’s plan for the paper and, ‘it struck me as an opportunity . . . the word “problem” was being used about immigrants and I was upset about that’. Doyle met with Ubga and came up with the basic idea for ‘Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner?’ while talking with him. Doyle says he ‘sent off the first part very quickly, but didn’t know what would come next’. That pattern has continued, with Doyle writing month to month; when each piece begins, ‘I never know where it’s going.’ However, he has a vision for all the stories: ‘from the word go’, as he says, ‘they were all going to be funny, optimistic stories that would bring people together’. Doyle says of writing these stories: ‘I suppose it’s my contribution’ to anti-racist work in Ireland. The second Metro Eireann story, ‘The Deportees’, which ran from March 2001 to May 2002, is more sophisticated and less formulaic than ‘Guess’, while incorporating the same ideological stance on race and ethnicity. This story features the return of Jimmy Rabbitte, the central character in Doyle’s first published novel, The Commitments. Here, Jimmy wants to put a new band together, but is uncertain what kind of band. Then, walking on Parnell Street in front of an African shop – which Dublin readers will recognize as the target of racist attacks and anti-racist counter-demonstrations, and which may be where Larry Linnane will purchase the cologne he admires on Ben – Jimmy is crashed into by a Romanian and his hand is run over by an Italian bike courier. ‘Jimmy had his group.’ He decides to

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put together ‘the world’s hardest working band’, and to use only so-called minorities. His advertisement for band members ends, ‘white Irish need not apply’, which he then reconsiders and deletes. Even so, at the first band rehearsal, Jimmy gets a call on his cell phone as an African band member, King Robert, sings ‘Many Rivers to Cross’. The anonymous caller whispers, ‘nigger lover’ and hangs up. Eleven of the story’s fifteen instalments focus on Jimmy’s putting together the band (which he calls the Deportees), leading them through rehearsals, and getting them their first paid gigs. Like the Commitments, the group is terrific, but apparently doomed by the band members’ many idiosyncrasies; as in that first novel, Doyle is expert at describing music and particularly at evoking the ineffable, haunting quality of certain pop songs. In a parallel plot to the band plot, Jimmy’s wife Aoife gives birth to a child – their fourth. As Jimmy walks home from the hospital, delighted with his new son’s good health, his cell phone rings, and again the anonymous voice says ‘nigger lover’. Jimmy is quite literally knocked down by the call; as he lies on the ground, crying, he thinks: ‘That evil out there, on a night like this.’ The band eventually plays a wild gig at a twenty-first birthday party, wins over all the young people, and even causes the host (the father of the birthday girl) to fall in love with Gilbert, an African in danger of deportation. The penultimate episode of the story ends with yet another anonymous call, with the same two words (‘nigger lover’) but this time Jimmy just laughs. That laughter – like the smile Ben and Larry share at the end of the first story – signals a triumph, however partial or temporary. In Jimmy’s case, that ‘evil out there’ has lost its power, as he and his multiracial band have succeeded in doing what they set out to do. Further, the music is more powerful than the nasty, hate-filled words; the anonymous caller is put in his place, so to speak, by the music that brings a hugely diverse group together – and that place is out on the margins. ‘The Deportees’ is certainly a feel-good story, conveying a hopefulness to the readers of Metro Eireann that multiracial cooperation and even love are possible despite the machinations of government agencies (the threatened deportation of Gilbert) and the racist hatred of what Doyle depicts as a tiny minority of Irish. The third story, ‘57% Irish’, directly satirizes the ruling class. Here, a graduate student, Ray Brady, has a research grant to work on answering the question, ‘How did you measure nationality?’ His theory is that responses to Robbie Keane’s 2002 World Cup goal are indicative of degree of Irishness (he has equipment to measure blood pressure, eye shifts and so on) and that football is the road to Irishness. When we meet Ray, he is estranged from his Russian girlfriend Darya (the mother of his son) and

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has lost interest in the project, which originally had a liberal bent, as he had ‘wanted them all in, all Irish, all more than welcome’. Ray is called in to meet the newly-appointed Minister for Arts and Ethnicity, who wants him to make it harder to be Irish but to make it look easier by devising individualized tests to be hidden inside the one official test for residency and citizenship (called the ‘Fáilte Score’). The Minister tells Ray to ‘go easy on the racial’ for appearance’s sake. Seduced by the money he’s offered, Ray creates a test on which 57 per cent is the average score achieved by white Irish. Ray reconciles with Darya, and loses his cynicism when he stays for several months with a Zimbabwean, Itayi, in the rooming house where Darya lives. Eventually, Ray subverts the test so that Eastern Europeans and Africans will score well. We hear that over the next few decades – the story ends somewhere around 2025 – Ray’s test grants citizenship to 800,000 Africans and Eastern Europeans, with only good results for Ireland. Doyle mentioned to me that he believed the audience for Metro Eireann to be mostly Africans in Ireland and ‘those who are already converted’, by which he evidently meant white Irish who see themselves as non- or antiracist. The first three stories he serialized in Metro Eireann seem aimed mainly at the latter part of the audience, with encouraging messages about the fundamental decency of ordinary Irish people. Africans in Ireland seem a secondary part of Doyle’s audience, as the stories do less to address them, with the central consciousnesses white Irish, and Africans (and other minorities) seen entirely from the outside. If we take Doyle’s expressed goal seriously – to create ‘funny, optimistic stories’ that serve to ‘bring people together’ – then one must wonder precisely which people are brought together and how that is meant to be accomplished. These first three stories do not effectively reach across the audience divide, as they do not demand that readers identify imaginatively with immigrant characters, whose subjectivity is never explored. We have no more idea what it might be like to be Ben or Gilbert or Itayi, strangers in a strange and frequently hostile land, at the end of the stories in which they appear than we do at the beginning. We do, however, know what it’s like to be Larry or Jimmy or Ray and to undergo a kind of conversion experience around issues of race and nationality through contact with immigrants, especially those from Africa. Since, as Doyle knows, the Irish portion of Metro Eireann’s audience is likely ‘already converted’, the stories do not encourage change in that audience but instead offer reinforcement of already-established views. For those Irish readers ideologically committed to an anti-racist perspective but lacking personal contact with people of colour, the stories operate as an imaginative bridge between political position and lived experience,

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as Larry and other white Irish characters negotiate, however awkwardly, such contact and survive it. The stories ask non-Irish readers to make a bigger leap of imagination, as the others remain other, but are asked to sympathize with those to whom they are other and to make allowances for them as they develop a more progressive racial consciousness. White Irish, then, remain firmly in charge of the racial discourse, setting its parameters by insisting that Africans do all the serious work of transracial analysis – in other words, the stories succeed best at explaining Irish racial attitudes to immigrants, so any ‘bringing together’ of people across the divides of race and nation involves movement from just one side of those divides. That perspective shifts in the fourth story, ‘I Understand’, which ran from May 2003 to January 2004. Here, the narrator/protagonist is an African asylum-seeker illegally holding two menial jobs – as an overnight cleaner at a department store and as a dishwasher in a Temple Bar restaurant – and determined not to run any more. He says of his future children: ‘They will be Irish.’ The story’s title comes from the narrator’s habit of saying ‘I understand’ whenever describing something peculiarly Irish, such as the idiomatic use of ‘grand’. The plot centres on our narrator’s attempts to deal with minor gangsters who want him to courier for them and who beat and threaten him to force his compliance. At the same time, he is forming tentative friendships with several co-workers and beginning a romance with a friend of one, Ailbhe. Although he is frightened, he eventually realizes that the man who has been harassing him is a fool, because ‘he has not seen me. He has not bothered to look.’ The man has seen not our narrator – who says he has many names, but can be called Tom – in all his individuality, but has seen only a generic type of his own imagination, an African asylum-seeker. With that realization, the narrator of ‘I Understand’ walks away from his tormentor, wanders around the city (in a very Bloom-like way, going even to Sandymount), and makes his way to Ailbhe’s house. Like Molly Bloom’s concluding monologue in Ulysses, this conclusion signals the choice of life, freedom, happiness, sex, love. It is a ‘yes’ to Ireland and to life, a ‘no’ to marginalization and fear. With this fourth story, Doyle decentralizes white Irish perspectives and consciousnesses, requiring his white Irish audience to imaginatively inhabit an African self. This shift in perspective is daring and politically significant, as here we have a fully-realized other who refuses the role. White Irish readers are asked to look at the Irish context differently, to move outside their comfort zone to a place where whiteness and Irishness are neither central or normative. For the first time, also, Doyle abandons the heavy irony that characterizes the first three Metro Eireann stories and tells this one sincerely – readers cannot refuse to share Tom’s perspective

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because there is nowhere else for them to stand. The African-in-Ireland readership Doyle rightly sees as a major part of the Metro Eireann audience with this story becomes the readership Doyle directly addresses; the ‘already converted’ white Irish are here asked to undergo a further conversion, then, in which they no longer get to dictate the terms of racial understanding. However, Doyle’s own positionality – white, Irish, settled, male and economically secure – cannot be ignored: he is the one ventriloquizing blackness, so to speak. In ‘I Understand’, an African speaks for himself but only through the good offices of a white Irishman. From that perspective, the other remains silent. The fifth story, ‘Home to Harlem’, opens with ‘He can’t find himself on the registration form.’ The ‘he’ is Declan, a young Irishman whose grandfather was a black American; the form on which he cannot ‘find himself’ is a New York City college registration form that asks for race. Declan, it develops, is having trouble finding himself at all, mainly because of his biraciality. He hopes to do research on what he fantasizes is the influence of the Harlem Renaissance on Irish literature and also to find his grandfather or other black American relatives, evidently believing that these two quests will give him a more solid identity, a home even. In this story, Doyle suggests parallels between race issues in the US in the early twentieth century and Ireland in the present century, as Declan repeatedly sees similarities between black American and black Irish experiences. For instance, Declan identifies strongly with a line from a Langston Hughes poem – ‘America never was America to me’ – that expresses how he has frequently felt about Ireland: ‘A great little country, all that shite, but not his.’ In the final instalment of this story, Declan spends an afternoon explaining Ireland to his black American professor. He tells her that there are ‘rules’, and that although she as a black person is no less American than her white fellow citizens, blacks are somehow ‘less Irish’ than whites. The professor does not dispute Declan’s analysis, so I am not sure whether the fundamental misunderstanding is the character’s or Doyle’s own, but blacks are indubitably ‘less American’ than whites in the eyes of the majority of white Americans, a view that no adult black American could possibly fail to grasp. Indeed, whiteness remains the sine qua non of Americanness, far more important than nation of birth or first language or religion or any other variable.7 Whether whiteness is a necessary prerequisite to Irishness is in fact a more open question than is its relation to Americanness. ‘Home to Harlem’ is far less of a ‘feelgood’ story than are the first four Doyle wrote for Metro Eireann, particularly because of its unresolved ending. The serial ends with Declan’s making vague plans to return to Ireland, still uncertain whether he will ever be at home there, despite being born

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and raised in Dublin, but more certain that Harlem will never be ‘home’. The story leaves readers to reflect on a critical question – can blacks be Irish? – and implicitly serves as a call to action that will eventually make the answer an unqualified ‘yes’. To my knowledge, Doyle is the only well-known Irish writer trying to reach a broad audience with fiction that focuses on the changing Irish racial context and whose aim is to impact the developing racial discourse in Ireland. Although Metro Eireann has a small readership, I think Doyle’s influence on that discourse is likely to be significant, especially when the stories are published as a collection. Certainly he offers with ‘I Understand’, and even with ‘Home to Harlem’, a far more liberatory set of possibilities than does the official discourse on race. Whether more radical fiction writers will take up the challenge to shape Irish understandings of race and racialization remains to be seen, but Doyle has begun the necessary work of decentralizing white consciousnesses.

Notes An early version of this chapter was presented at the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL) conference in Galway, July 2004. Thanks to those who attended that session and made suggestions. Many thanks also to the readers of Irish University Review and to my colleague, Amritjit Singh, for their helpful recommendations. 1. Roddy Doyle, Oh, Play That Thing (New York: Viking Penguin, 2004). 2. Throughout this essay, I am influenced by a large body of cultural and, especially, race theory. See, for example, bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: the Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Charles Taylor and Susan Wolf, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), and Stuart Hall, The Real Me – Postmodernism and the Question of Identity (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1987). 3. All information from Chinedu Onyejelem comes from my interview with him conducted in March 2004 at the Metro Eireann offices on the North Circular Road in Dublin. 4. Unless otherwise noted, all information from Roddy Doyle comes from my interview with him conducted in April 2004 in New York City. 5. See, for example, Martha Nussbaum’s Poetic Justice: the Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). Although Nussbaum focuses on nineteenth-century realist novels, the case she makes applies in its basic form to realist fiction in general. 6. Steve Garner, Racism in the Irish Experience (London: Pluto Press, 2004). 7. For the intertwining of whiteness and Americanness, see Ian F. Haney Lopez, White by Law: the Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996).

3 Marching, Minstrelsy, Masquerade: Parading White Loyalist Masculinity as ‘Blackness’ Suzanna Chan

Considering the spectacle of a young ‘Blood and Thunder’ band marching in ‘blackface’, during the 2001 Twelfth of July Orange Order March in Belfast, as well as Sara Greavu’s artwork All Souls (2003), which features the identity blurring masquerades of Halloween revelry in Derry, this chapter explores how racial constructions practised today are built on established categories and stereotypes interwoven in the popular cultural life of Ireland for centuries. The spectacle of the marchers is a crude reminder that politico-cultural identities variously coexist with racial consciousness, and intimates the instabilities of white masculinity, here enacted in an assumption of Ulster loyalism, whilst All Souls exposes the visual practices of ‘race’ that underwrite identity politics. In his study of racial attitudes in Northern Ireland, Robbie McVeigh argues that notions of their whiteness underpin both blocs of white Irish, nationalist, republican, and white British, unionist, loyalist. He notes that in 1912, Willoughby de Broke contended that ‘every white man in the British Empire’ would rally behind Ulster Unionists, whilst later, T.J. Campbell, asserting a claim to the privileges of whiteness, objected to Northern Irish Catholics being ‘the only community of white ones’ without parliamentary representation.1 Much more recently, in 2004, Tommy McTeague, formerly of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, twice complained that councillors were being ‘treated like niggers’ by the government. Refusing to apologize, McTeague hoped that ‘coloured people will realize it [his remark] is not a slur on them’ but, rather, a comment on the treatment of councillors.2 Whilst by no means restricted to Northern Ireland, Northern Irish culture continuously circulates stereotypical symbols and metaphors of ‘race’, providing forms of difference against and through which whiteness can be dialectically constructed and arranged. And, while white remains the authenticating category of 26

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oppositional humanism in Northern Ireland as well as elsewhere in postenlightenment societies, uncritical postcolonial analogies can use ‘black’ as an appropriable category by white subjects who wish to claim the position of ‘most oppressed’. Yet although it is constantly reproduced and ubiquitously represented, whiteness for the most part goes unremarked as a racialized position, which is crucial to its normative operation in terms of the privileges associated with being a settled white man, or white woman, in Ireland’s (North and South) white-centred contexts. In an instance where it might seem to be subverted in stereotypical crossracial masquerade, whiteness is re-secured as a mythically ‘natural’ state, as the band in ‘blackface’ show.

Marching identities A home video recorded by Maria Azambuja, a spectator at the 2001 Twelfth of July Orange Order March in Belfast, shows what is by now the familiar concatenation of Orangemen and marching bands parading down the Lisburn Road on the return journey to the city centre. The majority are men, as the Orange Order is an exclusively male organization, although women and girls parade in mixed and all-women marching bands. This lap of the march commemorates the triumphal return of King William III from the battlefields of the Boyne in 1690, having routed the English Catholic, King James II, and reaffirms the historic establishment of the Protestant Ascendancy.3 That morning, the marchers would have paraded from their different districts and converged in front of the City Hall. Then, they formed the main procession through South Belfast to the field in Edenderry outside the city where respite from marching in the summer heat is found in picnics and socializing, which eclipse the speeches and thanksgiving service. The footage of their return from the field shows that while most are ceremonially turned out, a cluster of marching bands bring up the rear in fancy dress, an unofficial custom sometimes observed by bands for the return march. The most startling of these sport dreadlock wigs and ‘blackface’ make-up to render a charged minstrelsy, thus loosely interpreting the clause in their contract with the Grand Lodge, which stipulates dignified dress. The group marching in their wake wear pastiche ‘Native American’ headdress; the next band have opted for Afro wigs, which another teams with grass skirts. Like all stereotypical forms, the fancy dress fixes difference. The Afro and Dreadlocks are radical and politicized black hairstyles, created in the United States and Caribbean as responses to the racist degradation of black people’s hair. The Afro articulated Black Pride, and Dreadlocks declare

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Black Consciousness and empowerment through association with discourses of Rastafari.4 Here, they are mimicked in novelty ‘fright wigs’ that function as signifiers of amusement. So, what function does this fancy dress have for a young, white male marching band? Fancy dress is all about temporarily transgressing boundaries, often serving to ultimately reinforce them, and regularly features a host of stereotypes. This is well-illustrated in All Souls, an artwork by Sara Greavu, which featured as an installation shown in Derry’s Context Gallery in 2003. It comprises fourteen photographic prints which documented the detritus of Halloween in Derry in 2001 and 2002, in the discarded remnants of the night’s costumes lying on pavements around the city centre: a green, white and orange pom-pom, angel wings, a police helmet, a platinum wig, bondage gear, a swastika armband, an Afro wig. Derry is a predominantly nationalist city, and although the Halloween fancy dress cannot be pinned to distinct politico-cultural identities, it shows how stereotypes are a feature in public ritual across the sectarian divide. Colin Darke made some cogent observations about the artwork, and the Halloween festival in Derry, commenting that it is not just a huge night out, but is also ‘an opportunity for a one night stand in which we can liberate the oppressed elements of our psyches. Men dress as women, women dress as men, both dress as naughty nurses, sex workers, military personnel [. . .] the whole town partakes for the one evening in a mass role-playing orgy.’5 This is all great fun, but fancy dress, as Darke insists, is ‘primarily a manifestation of stereotyping’ and the night offers up ‘disturbing examples of overt racism, sexism, homophobia, and all manner of deep seated intolerance [. . .] We find black-face minstrels, yellow-face mandarins, mad mullahs and gypsies, the sexualisation of whom [. . .] contributes significantly to their racist identification.’6 The photographic prints, measuring 74 cm ⫻ 121 cm, were mounted on reflective surfaces, acting as a mirror which overlaid the viewer’s reflection with imagery of the debris. This formally implicated the viewer both with the fancy dress imagery and with the act of watching other people’s identity displays. The public, communal nature of Halloween revelry means that the excitement of dressing as something excessive to one’s normalized identity lies precisely in the public recognition of being seen. The thrill is in the publicity of risibly attempting, if not failing, to pass in cross-racial or cross-gender guise, when passing is itself very much a public act. All Souls also featured a peep-show booth, with a fish-eye lens yielding views of images of white actors in ‘blackface’ and ‘yellowface’ from early Hollywood movies and more recent Christmas pantomimes. Examples

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of alternative challenges to ‘race’ and gender norms under white patriarchy were also shown in portraits of individuals who had eschewed its privileges, a white jazz musician who pretended to be an albino black man, or men who chose to adopt feminine identities. It also featured a photograph from a 1988 Derry Journal of a trio of Halloween revellers dressed as Ku Klux Klansmen, dangling a golliwog doll from a miniature noose. Through the peep-show apparatus, which makes the act of seeing into a controlling event, and a fetish of the object of vision, Greavu turned the viewer into a voyeur with an eye at the keyhole. This determined mode of looking stressed how vision and visual culture are key to the raciology established by imperial racism, based on categorizing human bodies differentially in a socially and historically contingent process, and as justification for enslavement. The mutability of historical ideologies of ‘race’ demonstrate that it is an inherently unstable invention, but visual practices still arbitrate how, subjected to biologically nonsensical yet pervasive ideologies of racial difference, we are seen by and see one another. The home video of the ‘Blood and Thunder’ band in ‘blackface’ does not have the artwork’s critical intention. But, by representing the audiovisual spectacle of an identity display through a medium that is primarily about looking, the footage explicitly dramatizes how racial categories are established and fetishized as objects of vision. The performance it frames takes place within the context of a politico-cultural ritual, where some participants have plugged into stereotypes of racial and ethnic difference. Such stereotypes have long been used to constitute places of otherness on the identity maps of Britishness or Irishness, and define white national identities. Even though they are a feature in fancy dress worn by bands in Orange Order marches, there has been a notable lack of commentary on their semiotic possibilities, with the exception of Dominic Bryan’s and Neil Jarman’s observations that sombreros sported in the mid-1990s refer to Mexico’s World Cup victory over Ireland.7 I have seen recent parades where the sole elements of fancy dress were sombreros, with no Mexican victory to recall. Nonetheless, is fancy dress to be readily assumed as an affront intended for the Irish Republic and nationalists, or are there grounds for wider understandings? This is not to deny the conflict-ridden, sectarian nature of the marches, their contestation by nationalists, republicans, Catholics and many Protestants, nor the violence and belligerence with which the ‘right to march’ is asserted by supporters and the Loyal Orders. The marchers participate in a divisive display regardless of their stereotypical fancy dress, but whether

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it is intended solely to amplify this divisiveness remains debatable. The loyalist identities on parade also operate in relation to registers beyond their fundamental opposition to Irish nationalism and Catholicism, which constitute an inter-loyalist dialogue. The parade of bodies asserts a claim to control of the city and temporarily knits it into a unionist whole, but for all its appearance of cohesion, the march accommodates sharp and myriad internal dissonances. The marching bands comprise the largest portion and are contracted for the day to provide music. Amongst the young flute bands, the ‘Blood and Thunder’ or ‘Kick the Pope’ bands, named for their aggressive style and sectarian songs, play flutes with percussion from a bass drummer. These evolved from urban youth gangs in the early 1970s in working-class estates, providing young males with an alternative to paramilitary activity.8 In the Orange Order Parade, bands flout regulations by agreeing to carry UDA and UVF banners, but this cannot be taken as an indicator of their membership. Many bands, and working-class loyalist youth, are mistrustful of loyalist paramilitaries and of Unionist politicians in general.9 ‘Blood and Thunder’ bands are considered an ambivalent element in the marches. They bring excitement the Orangemen lack, but the Orange Order are unwilling or unable to impose their code of conduct on the bands, who in turn tend to be contemptuous of the Orange Order for its conservatism, middle-class values, and emphasis on religion, when they consider their own Protestantism more a matter of political and cultural identity.10 Fancy dress, when it is worn, flouts Orange Order regulations and brings the visible statement of dissent. In the 2001 Twelfth of July March, the fancy dress worn by some bands was observably intended to inject a carnival element to the return leg of the march, appealing to a stereotypical notion of the uninhibited abandonment of non-whites. The cultural work of ‘Blood and Thunder’ bands has been characterized as a response to the material decline of Protestant working-class communities. Loyalist band membership allows young working-class men to assert their masculinity in a militaristic display.11 For the band in the video footage, doing so in ‘blackface’ both secures masculine whiteness and simultaneously provides a ticket into a playground of imagined colourfulness and unruliness that usually get pitched into the ambit of non-whites. They can grab the enjoyment and embodiment that according to Eric Lott must be set aside for the subject to become white and male in rationalized Western societies.12 Viewed according to this understanding, the band’s fancy dress is a projection of their own mistrusted excesses onto the stereotyped other, which they reclaim again by promenading bewigged and daubed in ‘blackface’, to perform an intensified visual

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spectacle through contested urban spaces. The loyalist band’s mimicry of stereotypes of ‘blackness’, with its undertones of desire for the other, on the one hand mocks the ‘white’/‘black’ opposition because it shows the instability of both categorizations. But, on the other, it appeals to a visual logic of racial difference to secure the notion that they really are white, the white skin partly visible as if a reminder. In true fetishistic fashion, ‘blackness’ is both desired and disavowed. They crudely illustrate the différance by which ‘white’ hierarchically depends on ‘black’ for definition. In reducing ‘blackness’ to a stereotyped projection of the white imagination, blackface accords with Frantz Fanon’s contention that racial domination involves the curse not of being black, but of being black in relation to white.13 The temporary transgression of the ‘Blood and Thunder’ band from whiteness into ‘blackness’ is a fantasy of the omnipotent ability of whites to be white, yet incorporate the imagined virility and pleasurable excess of the non-white other.

‘Race’, whiteness, and Northern Irish identities While they serve particular interests and secure identity, racial imaginings are always contradictory and contingent. The spectacle of Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair swaggering down the Shankill Road, the logo on his chest proclaiming, in the words of Tina Turner, that he is ‘Simply the Best’, announces the inconsistencies of white loyalist identity for Stephen Howe.14 Adair played in a ‘white power’ rock band and the Shankill UDA core converged as teenage neo-Nazi skinheads in the 1970s. Although his former C Company, responsible for the sectarian murders of dozens of Catholics in the 1980s and early 1990s, has fans amongst German skinheads, Adair is keen to deny that the latter are of the neo-Nazi variety. He survived an assassination attempt at a UB40 concert, his ‘favourite band of all time’, and is rumoured to holiday in Jamaica.15 As Howe recognized, Adair’s jewellery, leisurewear and bodybuilder’s magnified masculinity are indebted to the stylistics of 1990s’ gangsta-rap, tapping into its disturbing reworking of the trope of ‘the black man’ as body.16 Adair’s former protégé and fellow ‘brigadier of bling’, Andre Shoukri, nicknamed ‘the Egyptian’ for his mixed Irish-Egyptian parentage, became UDA commander of North Belfast. Meanwhile the routed, exiled Adair touts his unpublished autobiography and, in common with many men whose livelihoods depend on their militarized bodies, contemplates private security work in occupied Iraq.17 As distinct from the criminal, murderous realm of loyalist paramilitaries, loyalist popular culture has always been invigorated with cultural

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borrowing and mixing. Young ‘Blood and Thunder’ band members researched by Desmond Bell in the 1980s, fans of the sophisticated rhythms of black dance music, introduced variation to their routine by drum duelling. Their uniforms have combined mod or punk elements, and they subvert the military regularization of marching with exaggerated swaggers and criss-crossing formations.18 Post-ceasefire loyalist identities are a miscellany, like all cultural identities, and thus lend themselves to postmodernist theories even if the hybrid result is regressive and sectarian. For Brian Graham, resistance and loyalist discourses of subalternity – as ‘oppressed victims’ of official unionism and a world opinion sympathetic to the Sinn Fein message – intersect in the ‘thirdspace’ of identity formations.19 And, tongue in cheek, Howe wonders if loyalist borrowings from black subcultures, fused with their sense of alienation, might yield an inversion with UDA gunmen declaring their ‘blackness’ by appropriating that hackneyed affirmation, ‘the Irish are the blacks of Europe’, from Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments (1991).20 Doyle’s character, Jimmy Rabitte, reduces ‘blackness’ to an appropriable cliché, in his hegemonic claim that the Irish are uniquely persecuted amongst Europeans, which simultaneously elided the existence of racism against people of colour and ethnic minorities in Ireland, North and South. However, while Johnny Adair’s bodily self-fashioning is made by way of black masculinist subcultures, it is toward the production of a white alpha masculinity, rather than to stake a claim to a subject position of ‘most oppressed’. Ethnicity is routinely used to describe both of Northern Ireland’s majority white communities in terms of nationalism and religion, and flagged as the means through which resource competition has been rooted and legitimized.21 Analysts of racism also favour ethnicity over ‘race’ because it stresses differences as socially rather than biologically produced; nonetheless, it can miss particular histories of racial differentiation and their pervasive influence. The limitations of conflating ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are demonstrated in Michael Poole’s contention that Northern Ireland’s small populations of ‘racially defined groups of non-European origin’ should not preclude the use of ‘ethnicity’ for religion. By ignoring them, Poole implies that including ‘racially defined groups’ could problematize the application of ‘ethnicity’ to the two dominant white communities, questions of whose whiteness he overlooks despite referring to a University of Ulster survey where most respondents described their ethnic identity to include ‘white’.22 Yet, if whiteness, or the whiteness of various ethnicities, goes unnoticed, it is those who occupy the position of whiteness in white-centred societies – subjects, that is, who are not identified as ‘non-white’, in physical, social and cultural spaces – who

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fail to recognize that whiteness. The hegemonic normality of ‘whiteness’ as ‘non-visible’ is preserved, paradoxically, by being seen everywhere.23 Whiteness is normalized through constant representation, which re-invests an inherently unstable social and political construct, rather than any natural attribute. Sometimes, as we have seen with the ‘Blood and Thunder’ band, whiteness is established as a normative racial identity by crude juxtaposition with a stereotype of racial difference at the visible level of phenotype as fetish. The band present ‘non-whiteness’ as something to be gazed upon, as extraordinary yet, like any stereotype, instantly knowable, in their ‘blackface’ promenade through white-centred spaces. In doing so, they revive a racist cultural form with a long history in Ireland, North and South.

‘Blackface’ minstrelsy on the Belfast stage The band’s ‘blackface’ shares its derisory mimicry with the ‘blackface’ minstrelsy that was a staple of the stage and screen until the latter part of the twentieth century. ‘Burnt cork’ minstrelsy, named for the substance which performers used to paint their faces, emerged in America in the early 1800s as white impersonations of blackness, and cast enslaved Africans as figures of amusement. It was America’s most popular stage entertainment and also proved a highly successful cultural export in the early 1800s flourishing in most of the anglophone world, notably the British Isles and Australia.24 ‘Blackface’ minstrelsy was ubiquitous on the Irish stage, and bequeathed the banjo to traditional music, yet remains little researched with the important exception of Douglas C. Riach’s study of the period between 1830 and 1860.25 Before the American Civil War, over fifteen minstrel acts visited Dublin, including such American luminaries as Thomas Dartmouth Rice, and Christy’s Minstrels, who toured the country. Irish performers copied their songs, prompting warnings in the press that ‘nigger songs’ burgeoning in the taverns would mire the minstrel mode of sentimentality in the vulgarity of burlesque.26 Here, I briefly indicate some developments in nineteenth-century Belfast’s theatres that expanded the outlets and audiences for a hugely popular, and deeply problematic, cultural form. By the mid-1800s, Belfast’s theatres, formerly patronized by the gentry, had proliferated into the playhouses and music halls of the working class that were regularly denounced by the Protestant clergy. Performers and audiences included both sexes, and when the Empire Theatre of Varieties opened in December 1894, audiences of middle-class women were provided with a ‘respectable’ auditorium. The Grand Opening Night

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featured Chirgwin the ‘White-Eyed Kaffir’, a famous British ‘blackface’ entertainer. The Belfast Newsletter’s reviewer tells how the unreserved section of the theatre was filled to capacity and that the audience represented ‘almost all sections of the community’. Christy’s Minstrels returned to perform in the 1894 Queen’s College Students’ Union Fête, though the reviewer was more engaged by Tel-El-Kebir, an ‘Open Air Military Spectacle’, of staged war scenes and prisoner-taking.27 Popular entertainment frequently represented British imperialist military campaigns in India and Southern Africa. Their interest would have had much to do with the massive numbers of Irish men, Catholic and Protestant, serving in the British Army. The Indian Mutiny played in the Theatre Royale, and a ‘Grand Display of High-Class Pictures By Powerful Oxo-Hydro Limelights, Depicting Scenes of British Bravery in Matabeleland’, in the Bellevue Gardens. Concurrently, the Original Joseph Hamilton’s Diarama boasted ‘54 Colossal Tableaux of Scenery and Incidents in all parts of the World’, with a performance of the ‘Full Minstrel Troupe’ for the Lord Mayor.28 Within the first three months of 1897, the Theatre Royale boasted, as part of In Old Kentucky, the ‘Celebrated Picaninny Band’, fresh from winning the Good Competition Coronet at the World’s Fair Exposition in Chicago. The Empire offered ‘Paul Langtry the Famous Negroist’, meanwhile Chirgwin the ‘White-Eyed Kaffir’ resurfaced, and Cyrus Walling, another ‘Famed Negroist’ entertained at the Grand Opera House, which had opened two years previously.29 However, Belfast’s ‘respectable’ venues were attacked by sections of the press for falling short of the standards expected of them, though criticism was directed at the predominance of ‘Musicals and Melodramas’ in general rather than the ‘Negro Minstrels’. The Magpie rubbished the ‘fourth-rate vulgarities’ of Belfast’s ‘third-rate’ theatres, while the Northern Star demanded ‘in the name of the Nationalists of Belfast, who constitute the overwhelming majority of the patrons of the theatres – that this city shall be placed on a plane with Dublin as regards companies and plays’.30***** Thus from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century (the BBC’s Black and White Minstrel Show was broadcast until 1978), minstrelsy allowed Irish audiences to dwell on stereotypes of ‘blackness’, and simultaneously, the terms of whiteness. The early twentieth century also saw blackface minstrelsy transferred into Hollywood films such as The Jazz Singer (1927), which was widely enjoyed by Ireland’s filmgoers.31 Jazz itself, as Susan Gubar observes, hardly features in the movie.32 Despite this, however, it was sufficiently prominent on the cultural landscape to become a potent signifier of ‘otherness’ in the Free State. Popular in the dancehalls, jazz was denounced by the Catholic Church as a debauched

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form that threatened sexual morality and exercised a ‘denationalizing’ influence on the young. In the 1920s and 1930s, the press denounced both jazz and modern dancing as ‘savage’, ‘apish and heathenish’, while the Limerick Gaelic Athletic Association warned that ‘African dances have come to the country of late’, and some district justices cautioned on the perils of ‘nigger music’.33 Through its complex associations with racial difference and fashionable Parisian and London entertainments, jazz provided an antithesis to ‘Irishness’ as gendered, idealized whiteness, but since this was a wilfully corruptible construct, it needed constant regulation. Through the citizenship referendum of 2004, the boundaries of national identity in the Republic were redrawn against a ‘non-national’ other, widely propagandized in racist, misogynistic discourses as the pregnant non-white woman straining the resources of a white, settled majority. That in the face of intensive racialization of ‘non-nationals’, 79 per cent of the Irish electorate voted to alter the basis of Irish citizenship from jus soli to jus sanguinis hardly needs underscoring as a reproduction of Irish national identity through gendered, exclusionary discourses of whiteness. These are mapped onto national terrains, involving spatial practices of controlling the movement of non-white bodies through borders. The visual practice of seeing non-whiteness and registering it as ‘not Irish’ determines whom the Gardaí have been routinely electing to interrogate for passports and visas on public transport entering the Republic from Northern Ireland since the 1990s. This chapter began as an exploration of how a marching band staked a claim to Belfast as white loyalist through a visual practice of ‘blackface’. Looking at the band has meant focusing discussion of racial identity on the construction of white loyalist masculinity; however, this is by no means to deny that other, and opposing politico-cultural identities are also constructed and identified according to discourses of whiteness. The Halloween revelry documented in All Souls reminds us of how common racist, as well as supremacist and sexist stereotypes are in Northern Ireland across the sectarian divide. While racism and sectarianism are not the same thing, discussion of racism, which is not a new phenomenon, has been overshadowed by sectarianism. Racist incidents against people of colour and ethnic minorities have spiralled in the last few years: between 2003 and 2004, 453 racist offences were reported to the police.34 The inner South Belfast residential and leisure zone had the worst record of reported incidents between 1996 and 2001. The majority occurred in predominantly Protestant working-class areas, where more people of colour and ethnic minorities live due to greater availability of accommodation.35

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Thus, a wider context of prevalent residential segregation amongst the majority communities in Belfast has an impact on racism in different ways. In 2004, a spate of violent attacks occurred in the Village, where some loyalist paramilitaries have far-right links. In nationalist republican areas where there are fewer people of colour and ethnic minorities, however, there are also racist incidents and attacks. Dispelling any misconception that nationalist republican areas might somehow be immune from racism, Bill Rolston flags an editorial in West Belfast’s Andersontown News which cautions against smugness in the community, arguing that because there is not the same presence of people of colour in West Belfast as in loyalist areas, it remains to be seen whether the language of hate translates into similar levels of action. The editor then details how readily locals use offensive terms and tell racist jokes.36 He could have also pointed out that West Belfast’s Travellers have been excluded and marginalized for generations. Some of Belfast’s loyalist areas see oppressive patriarchal paramilitarism, a defensively territorial ideology, demographic decline, market-led redevelopment without local benefit, working-class re-marginalization through economic restructuring, long-term unemployment, and insecurity prompted by perceived republican political advances. Attempts to recoup a mythically homogeneous communality can take exclusionary forms and suppress ‘internal’ heterogeneities. Any anti-racist focus needs to be directed at these localized, dominating practices of whiteness. Though non-whites and ethnic minorities including Travellers bear its brunt, white privilege also, ultimately, affords its beneficiaries a blighted freedom in inhumanity. Or, as James Baldwin put it: ‘as long as you think you are white, there’s no hope for you’.37

Notes Thanks to Maria Azambuja and Sara Greavu for allowing me to reference their work. 1. Robbie McVeigh, ‘ “There’s No Racism Here Because There’s No Black People Here”: Racism and Anti-Racism in Northern Ireland’, in Divided Society: Ethnic Minorities and Racism in Northern Ireland, ed. Paul Hainsworth (London: Pluto Press, 1998), p. 16. 2. Jonathan McCambridge, ‘Racist Remark Causes Uproar’, Belfast Telegraph, 28 July 2004, p. 1. 3. Neil Jarman, Material Conflicts: Parades and Visual Displays in Northern Ireland (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997), p. 106. 4. Kobena Mercer, ‘Black Hair/Style Politics’, in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p. 253. 5. Colin Darke, ‘Sara Greavu and Elizabeth McGlynn at Context Gallery’, Circa, 107 (Spring 2004): 81.

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6. Darke, ‘Sara Greavu’: 81. 7. Dominic Bryan, Orange Parades: the Politics of Ritual, Tradition and Control (London: Pluto, 2000), p. 150. See also Jarman, Parades, p. 105. 8. Desmond Bell, Acts of Union: Youth Culture and Sectarianism in Northern Ireland (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 113–15. 9. Bell, Acts of Union, p. 166. 10. Neil Jarman, ‘For God and Ulster: Blood and Thunder Bands and Loyalist Political Culture’, in The Irish Parading Tradition: Following the Drum, ed. Thomas G. Fraser (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 165. 11. Bell, Acts of Union, p. 104. 12. Eric Lott, ‘White Like Me: Racial Cross Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness’, in Cultures of United States Imperialism, eds Cora Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 482. 13. Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 40. 14. Stephen Howe, ‘Mad Dogs and Ulstermen: the Crisis of Loyalism’, Open Democracy: Free Thinking for the World, http://www.openDemocracy.net (accessed 8 January 2006). 15. Henry McDonald, ‘Trust IRA, Mad Dog Adair Tells Loyalists’, Observer, 19 February 2006, p. 24. 16. Howe, ‘Mad Dogs and Ulstermen’. 17. McDonald, ‘Trust IRA’, p. 24. 18. Bell, Acts of Union, p. 124. 19. Brian Graham, ‘The Past in the Present: the Shaping of Identity in Loyalist Ulster’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 16:3 (2004): 488. 20. Howe, ‘Mad Dogs and Ulstermen’, p. 24. 21. Peter Shirlow and Mark McGovern, ‘Counter-Insurgency, Deindustrialisation and the Political Economy of Ulster Loyalism’, in Who Are ‘The People’? Unionism, Protestantism and Loyalism in Northern Ireland, eds Peter Shirlow and Mark McGovern (London: Pluto Press, 1997), p. 178. 22. Michael Poole, ‘In Search of Ethnicity in Ireland’, in In Search Of Ireland: a Cultural Geography, ed. Brian Graham (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 129. 23. See Sara Ahmed, ‘Declarations of Whiteness: the Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism’, Borderlands e-journal, 3:2 (2004), http://www.borderlandse journal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no2_2004/ahmed_declarations.htm (accessed 31 March 2006). 24. John G. Blair, ‘Blackface Minstrels and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Nineteenthcentury Entertainment Forms as Cultural Exports’, in European Readings of American Popular Culture, eds John Dean and Jean-Paul Gabillet (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 3. 25. Douglas C. Riach, ‘Blacks and Blackface on the Irish Stage, 1830–60’, Journal of American Studies, 7:3 (1973): 231–41. 26. See Riach, ‘Blacks and Blackface’: 232–33. 27. ‘The New Empire’, Belfast Newsletter, 4 December 1894, p. 5; ‘The Fancy Fair at Queen’s College’, Belfast Newsletter, 25 May 1894, p. 5. 28. ‘Amusements’, Belfast Newsletter, 4 September 1894, p. 1; 5 September 1894, p. 1. 29. Belfast Newsletter, 6 January 1897, p. 1; 19 January 1897, p. 1; 25 January 1897, p. 1; 23 February 1897, p. 1; 30 March 1897, p. 1.

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30. Lyn Gallagher, The Grand Opera House Belfast (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1995), p. 25. 31. Myrtle Hill, Women in Ireland: a Century of Change (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2003), p. 110. 32. Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 66–75. 33. See Louise Ryan, Gender, Identity and the Irish Press 1922–1937: Embodying the Nation (Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), pp. 50, 183; and Hill, Women in Ireland, p. 110. 34. Jonathan McCambridge and Deborah McAleese, ‘Police Plea for Help to Fight Race Thugs’, Belfast Telegraph, 21 August 2004, p. 1. 35. See Neil Jarman and Rachel Monaghan, Racist Harassment in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Institute for Conflict Research, 2003), p. 39. 36. Bill Rolston, ‘Legacy of Intolerance: Racism and Unionism in South Belfast’, Independent Race and Refugee News Network, http://www.irr.org.uk (accessed 10 September 2004). 37. James Baldwin quoted in Alastair Bonnett, ‘Constructions of Whiteness in European and American Anti-Racism’, in Race, Identity and Citizenship: a Reader, eds Rodolfo D. Torres, Louis F. Mirón and Jonathan Xavier Inda (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 213.

4 ‘Is it for the Glamour?’: Masculinity, Nationhood and Amateurism in Contemporary Projections of the Gaelic Athletic Association Mike Cronin

The GAA is the hottest property in town at the moment from a sponsor’s perspective.1 In a contemporary sports industry that is increasingly globalized and based on professionalism, player purchasing, marketing, mass media exposure and commercial sponsorship, the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) remains unique in the world of sport, as its players are all amateurs. Whilst the athletes of the US NFL (National Football League) can earn millions of dollars by winning the Superbowl, golfers on the Professional Golfers Association tour will compete for total prize money of $1 billion at tournaments in the next five years and the winner of the men’s title at Wimbledon takes home £630,000, the GAA player officially earns nothing. The GAA, at an administrative level, has adopted the corporate model of other major professional sporting federations, but its players remain strictly amateur, and its ethos strongly nationalist. How did the GAA, with its ethos of amateurism, strong community ties and promotion of an indigenous, nation-specific sport get into bed with multinational companies, major advertising agencies and media outlets whose practices and values appear antithetical to its core values? Focusing on the depiction of the GAA in the recent advertising campaigns of its main corporate sponsors (Guinness, the Bank of Ireland and Vodafone), this chapter examines how cultural-national masculine stereotypes are redeployed to bring the GAA up to date. The GAA has prided itself, ever since its foundation in 1884, on producing strong and skilful men who are imbued, by virtue of playing the game, with the associated positive values of team spirit, fair conduct and acceptance of the rules. However, this mode of masculinity as a viable ideal has recently been in 39

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crisis, in part due to an increasing disregard for the rules that regulate on-pitch aggression. Transgressions have been increasingly reported in the press and tell of on-field violence and occasional events off-field, namely the previously hidden problems of alcohol and sexual abuse in team sports.2 These fracas are, in one aspect at least, evidence of the displacement of the mode of masculinity that underwrites the GAA’s constitution. The GAA was founded at a time of nascent nationalism and the breakdown of empire across Europe, and the ‘GAA man’ was connected with the ideologies of masculinity that propelled both empires and revolutionary national movements. Both needed men to volunteer for frontline activity and they invested heavily in an ideology of masculinity in which a ‘man’ was one who was prepared to sacrifice himself for the glory of something else.3 However, the appeal of these national ‘core masculine values’ in a wider arena have been eroded by the long ‘peace’ of the later twentieth century, as the nation-state found that as an officially neutral country it had no need for conscription, and has needed not volunteers, nor national martyrs, but men to build the economy. The once seemingly unproblematic relationship between nation, sport and manhood is complicated not only by the changing needs of the nation in terms of the masculine roles it depends on, but also by the need to survive in a world of international corporate sport in which the male athlete’s body is increasingly fetishized and feminized. Given that the ‘femininity’ index is measured by how much money a woman invests in her body, then the increasing endorsement of body-enhancing products, exemplified by such player-stars as David Beckham, disturbs expectations about masculinity and femininity in which women focus on their bodies as commodity, and men focus on accumulating commodities.4 Thus, the metrosexual glamorization of the sportsman’s body in advertising for non-GAA sports can also be seen as indicating a move away from team spirit into a dangerous narcissism, associated with the ‘me-féinism’ of greedy internationalism (me-féinism is a colloquial term derived from the Irish for ‘myself’ – me-féin – denoting selfish or unsporting behaviour). Further, foreignness becomes equated with femininity and ‘native’ Irishness with GAA masculinity when players of ‘foreign’ sports in Ireland benefit as part of a global commodity-driven multinationalism. A number of Irish professional sportsmen, such as rugby player Brian O’Driscoll, or soccer player Robbie Keane, have accepted advertising work, but because of their amateur status, and agreements made between the GAA and the Gaelic Player’s Association, product endorsements by individual Gaelic players are strictly controlled.5 This means that while the major sponsors of the GAA have used actual players in their advertisements, they are

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usually shown in a strictly sports related setting. It is evident from recent advertisement campaigns, especially Vodafone’s 2004 GAA All-Stars campaign, that a strong and moral masculinity continues to be employed in relation to Gaelic games. Thus, a cordon sanitaire is drawn around an indigenous masculinity which is reified in GAA symbolization as the national model citizen, implicitly and favourably contrasted with ‘foreign’ sports and their association with the taint of commerce and the politically correct excesses of the ‘new man’. This results in an image of the games which rejects the sexualized commodification of the Gaelic sporting body, and which occludes the problematic issues of abuse that are connected with the rapacious culture of the male sporting team, and which aligns femininity with the threat of foreign contagion. The success of the GAA as an embodiment of postmodern Irish culture is paradoxically due to this apparently ‘traditional’ appeal to nationality as masculinity.

The GAA and contemporary Irish society The GAA was founded in 1884, at a time of social and political change in Ireland.6 Its existence, although part of a wider European and American organization of sport along modern lines, owed much to the spirit of the cultural revival.7 However, while other revival organizations such as the Gaelic League failed to flourish, the GAA has remained a staple feature of community life since the late nineteenth century. Due to its connections with the cultural revival, the close connection of many of its members with the forces of advanced nationalism and its ban on foreign games, the GAA can be seen as an unchanging, irredentist force representing a particular brand of Irish nationalism.8 While these links do much to explain the early success of the GAA, the association has itself always been a consummately able marketing machine, and thanks to its efforts, the GAA club became and remains an essential part of Irish community life. The spectacle of highly skilled players competing ensured its popularity, but more importantly, its organization around the parish system powerfully ensured that it would become part of the daily fabric of life at the heart of small communities. This sense of national cohesion was reinforced by the GAA’s willingness to use and be used by a range of media. When the fledgling national radio station 2RN was seeking to appeal to listeners, it started broadcasting major hurling and football games.9 The same was true in the 1960s of RTÉ’s television coverage: GAA games were the first sports it covered. By using the new forms of mass media (a process that was reinforced by

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high levels of coverage in the print media), the GAA emphasized its place at the heart of Irish life.10 Through radio and television, and the legendary commentary of Micheál Ó Hehir and Míchaél O’Muireachtaigh, the GAA travelled directly from the field of play at Croke Park, Semple Stadium or Casement Park into homes and pubs across the land. It transformed the localized space of Ireland’s native games, which were essentially rural pursuits, into the modern spectacle of mass media sport that bound together the all-important imagined national community.11 Because of this mediation from the local to the national, the GAA ensured continued support based on parochial local rivalries and attachment to counties of origin for those who had migrated to cities. Except for the Catholic Church, and perhaps Fianna Fáil, no Irish organization inspired such loyalty. The patterns of community life, as well as the institutions with which the GAA were associated, underwent considerable change in the later decades of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first.12 How has the GAA not only survived, but also prospered, when so many of its core values were associated with institutions that have entered periods of crisis? The exposure of institutional and sexual abuse significantly reduced the power of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and the dominance of Fianna Fáil in the nation’s political life has been undermined by media exposure of internal corruptions. Whilst these stalwarts of Irish life have been partially undone by the media, the GAA has prospered from its associations with the same. A comparison of older footage of the GAA with more recent footage shows how it continues to reinvent itself in order to embody whatever it is the nation needs. Old footage of GAA matches in the 1960s and 1970s often features the old guard of de Valera or McQuaid in the stands, an old-fashioned stadium with pitch-side and programme advertisements for agricultural products and machinery. Equally, modern coverage of an All-Ireland final, at the refurbished Croke Park, shows brash, self-confident and above all successful GAA supporters enjoying pre-match drinks and food in corporate boxes, pitchside advertising that speaks of Ireland’s participation in a global economy and the affluence of Celtic Tiger Ireland. The imagined ‘organicism’ that bound country and city, parish and nation was reinforced. The cyclical patterning of the season, with its organicist metaphors of the renewing of ties with the games every spring, where supporters and players alike looked forward with hope to glory in September, knit so cleverly to the rites of spring and harvest, reveals a capacity for re-branding that has enabled the association to repackage itself for a nation of ideology-scarred post-nationalists.

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The GAA administration was galvanized into action by the success of the Irish soccer team in the early 1990s, when it was faced with the challenge of retaining the support of its young players. While soccer was being transformed by the money, modern technologies, multiple camera angles and the high quality production values of satellite television companies, the GAA was stuck with the dated production values of RTÉ – fixed camera angles and scant pre- and post-match analysis created little sense of occasion. Further, Rules 21 and 42 were a problem: the former banned all security forces in the North from taking part in the games, while the latter kept GAA facilities closed to foreign sports. These residues from a protectionist era were gradually redressed. The GAA secured money from central government to modernize Croke Park, making it one of the best sports stadiums anywhere in Europe. RTÉ’s coverage of the games improved to the level of that associated with soccer, and extra television exposure of the league and women’s games by TG4 introduced an element of competition to the market that kept standards improving. After a carefully managed process, Rules 21 and 42 were removed.13 Although hotly debated within the GAA, the changes to the rules were widely applauded by commentators, politicians and other sporting organizations.14 The GAA’s proactive approach led to a renewed and ever-growing enthusiasm for hurling and Gaelic football, which made them the most popular sports in the country. In 2004, the GAA dominated attendance figures at sporting events taking 57 per cent of the total sports audience. Of the 400,000 people in Ireland who took a voluntary role in sport that year, 40 per cent of them took part in Gaelic games.15 Paradoxically, because of modernization, the GAA continued to prosper as a safe repository for a traditional, yet largely uncontroversial, Irishness, and this in turn made the GAA attractive to sponsors. Retaining the amateur system allowed them to recast the ideal GAA man as the opposite of the foreign-identified metrosexual. It allowed for a reassuring integration of the cultural and economic in the realms of national representation, presenting the image of an ‘authentic’ Irish identity associated with indigenous products, in a market place that often felt saturated by global forces and foreign goods.16 The sponsors depicted a tradition of the games that spoke, in a postmodern fashion, to a culture that was refashioning its history as well as itself. As with national products and identity processes in other economies, the link between the GAA – as a repository of national character – and its corporate sponsors, ‘displays a type of national sentiment’. While this is familiar to the consumers of such advertising campaigns, their complexity and apparent banality ‘conceals a more truthful political-cultural conflict within the domain of economics,

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the oppositional (or even life and death) struggle between the transnational corporations and national industries and the welfare of labourers’.17 Rather than interrogating the complexities of the new Ireland, the difficulties of a red-hot housing market or the experiences of nonnationals when they arrive in the state, the GAA and the racially homogeneous images that the sponsors produce create a societal pretermission that elides racial, class and access inequities. Three large companies have been highly instrumental in the successful re-branding of the new GAA.18 Bank of Ireland sponsors the Gaelic football championship, Guinness sponsor the hurling championship, and Vodafone the annual year-end All-Star awards. These campaigns depict the day-to-day practices of the GAA world and often show neighbourhood events, rather than large-scale universal or global extravaganzas. They show the short-lived excitement, concomitant mundane nature and repetitiveness of local GAA experience. Guinness and the Bank of Ireland, both ‘national’ companies, use local images and narratives of choice to ensure their continued sense of nationality as a way of appealing to a domestic market saturated with multinational choices, but Vodafone, as a multinational, emphasized inheritance and ancestry, not choice, in relation to Irishness. Although different in how they dramatize national identity, each chooses sports-related advertising as a means of influencing consumer behaviour to buy their product by association with famous athletes or celebrities. As ‘the media present audiences with stunning athletic feats of which the average human is incapable’, it is increasingly found that ‘watching sports on television helps audiences establish relationships with athletes who are mythically superhuman in their talents yet very human and “knowable” as mediated personalities’.19 Such images of the superhuman athlete are in contrast to the imagery in GAA-related advertisements. These have stressed normal (attainable) attributes of fans and amateur players over the superhuman (unattainable) feats of athleticism of the superstar. Advertising wisdom holds ‘that celebrities can enhance the audience perceptions of the product in terms of image and performance’.20 James H. Martin’s analysis of sport and advertising observes that ‘athlete endorsers are expected to accomplish a number of objectives, including: capture the attention of the product, give the message credibility, increase product attractiveness, increase liking and recall of the ad, and increase the likelihood of purchase’.21 In the GAA however, the ‘superstars’ are actually amateurs, and actual players have rarely appeared centre-stage in the campaigns of the Bank of Ireland, Guinness or Vodafone, thus privileging the game and not the individual: the superstar of GAA-related advertising is

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the games themselves. As Martin concluded, the process of sponsoring a sport rather than an athlete works because of ‘a function of the similarity between the image of the product and the image of the sport, such that the more similar the images the higher the endorsement evaluation’.22 It is also true that by concentrating on Gaelic games, rather than specific athletes, sponsors avoid being linked to superstars who bring their own name and those of the products they endorse into disrepute through undesirable actions.23 However, the effects of sponsoring a game rather than an individual are not limited to providing built-in damage limitation. By emphasizing the team, the consumer and player alike are asked to sublimate their selves in the cause of the ‘greater glory’. Thus the game, despite using the operations of international corporate sponsorship and media, becomes more emphatically a repository of an Irishness predicated on a communitarian anti-globalization. This commercially circulated version of communitarian anti-globalization does not, however, represent any radical opposition to transnational forces, but rather seeks refuge in the fortress of the nation. In none of the advertisements under discussion does the product (with the exception of one shot of a pint of Guinness) appear in the filmed or billboard versions of the campaign. All of the advertisements discussed here build on the viewers’ common social knowledge and invite them into a preconstructed world built around the Gaelic games, and Irish, communitarian and positive. Once it is accepted that these are the values of the games, the same value judgement can be made of the products themselves. The Bank of Ireland began its sponsorship of Gaelic football in 1994 with a four-year campaign entitled ‘Answer the Call’, which focused on the bravery of supporters in following their team. While moderately successful, feedback on the campaign made it clear that the partnership between the GAA and the Bank was not fully recognized by the public. In 1998, a decision was made to switch the direction of the campaign under the guidance of advertising agency, McCann Erickson. The aim of the campaign was to suggest that the GAA, and by extension, the Bank of Ireland, were central to Irish life. McCann Erickson’s research into the mindset of the GAA supporter revealed that love of the game and the county drove the supporter, not necessarily a belief that their county was actually good enough to lift the Sam Maguire trophy. The report concluded: The insight was that the games meant that they [the supporters] had a chance to express their local identity. It was less about the winning and more about the taking part. By focusing on each fan’s love and passion

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for their county of birth, we [McCann Erickson] included every GAA fan in the county regardless of how good their team was.24 The result was a campaign, launched in 1997, titled ‘Ask’, which won industry awards in Ireland and the United States, as well as the prestigious Silver Shark at the Kinsale International Advertising Festival. By 2001 ‘Ask’ was, according to industry statistics, the most famous sponsorship campaign in the country with 50 per cent of adults spontaneously associating the Bank of Ireland with the GAA Football Championship. The campaign took the love of county as its central theme, and all adverts, whether on television or in poster format, featured an adaptation of the famous J.F. Kennedy quote and stated: ‘Ask Not What Your County [my emphasis] Can Do For You’. All the counties of Ireland were featured and the supporters were affectionately depicted as eccentric fanatics consumed by love for their county. A Cork supporter was shown in a field of flowers, equally planted in stripes of the county colours of red and white. A Mayo man, naked apart from green and red underpants, was shown in a western landscape pegging his clothes, all of which were in the county colours, on to a washing line. For Galway, the scene was illustrated by a picture of a newly married couple emerging from church. They were being showered with purple and white confetti, and the bride was dressed in a checked purple and white bridal gown. The campaign was brilliantly simple. It reminded GAA supporters of their allegiance to county, and showed that support for the team was woven into the fabric of daily living and was not confined to Sunday afternoons on the side of a pitch. The central point of ‘Ask’ was that it recognized that fans could make no demands on their team. This is in contrast to the ‘answer the call’ campaign, which had demanded a fealty from the consumer along the lines of old-style volunteerism. ‘Ask’ inverted this relationship, recasting love for a cause and dedication to the greater glory as a passionate choice and not a duty. In the early 1990s, hurling found that spectator numbers were declining, and that the championship was not sufficiently competitive. The GAA decided that a good sponsor would not only provide much-needed funds to promote the game, but would also raise its profile. Guinness was chosen and the relationship continues to this day. This link further emphasized a new-yet-essentially-traditional Irishness for the GAA. Brenda Murphy argues: Rituals and myths surrounding Guinness provide the product with a bedrock of historicity and continuity – functioning in the same way as

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a Durkheimian ‘collective consciousness’. The mythic underpinnings of Guinness consumption provide the product with many extra dimensions, giving it solidity and function in people’s imaginations. In addition, these associations give the consumer a sense of ownership and tradition, thereby enabling him or her to develop a deeper relationship with the product.25 The renamed Guinness Hurling Championship salvaged the troubled sport: in 1994, aggregate attendance figures for the hurling championship were 289,281. This figure had risen to 543,335 by 1999 and to over 600,000 by 2006. The number of active players grew by 50 per cent in the first five years of the campaign, and the number of live games shown by RTÉ increased dramatically. In 1993, only three championship matches were broadcast live, but by 2005, that figure had risen to 14.26 The sponsorship campaign was worth €5 million to the GAA in the first five years, and Guinness invested a further €10 million in supporting the game at the grass-roots level, including €3000 in hurling scholarships for players attending the University of Limerick, University College Cork and University College Dublin. The most successful advertisement promoting the Guinness connection with hurling, although not specifically connected with promoting the championship, was titled, ‘Free In’. Designed by the Dublin-based agency BBDO, ‘Free In’ was filmed in Kildare and Wicklow, and showed the final minutes of a match. The player had to score the free he was taking to win the match. The advertisement switches between the player’s preparation for the shot, his anticipation that winning the game will make him a hero, and his vision of being carried shoulder high through his town to a waiting celebratory pint.27 Although the campaign was the subject of a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland because a viewer felt it equated sporting success with the consumption of alcohol, the advertisement was hugely successful.28 Like the Bank of Ireland campaign, the Guinness advertisement relied on the relationship between sport and local identity. The game was not in one of the main stadia, but could have been a local match anywhere in the country. Likewise, the player’s imaginary celebration is not that of national acclaim, but a homecoming to the congratulations of locals in a parish bar, a grounded return to origin. ‘Free In’ represented values associated with the local, authentic and ancestral. In the various advertisements associated with the GAA, Irishness is determined by the pattern of descent emphasized in inheritance and ancestry (of being ‘truly’ Irish). In real terms, these core Irish values find a disturbing echo in the results of the

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2004 citizenship referendum, which denied automatic Irish citizenship to children born in the state whose parents were not Irish.29 Inheritance and ancestry as determining factors in GAA-identified Irishness are the central themes of the campaign Vodafone ran in 2003 and 2004 to promote its sponsorship of the GAA All Stars. Entitled ‘DNA’ and produced at a cost of €600,000, the advertisement was filmed in Wicklow, and was aired across all the Irish television networks, most prominently during live matches. The advertisement was filmed entirely in black and white, and opened with the question, ‘What makes a GAA All Star do it?’ The humble rewards for the GAA player are implicitly contrasted to the rewards of the contemporary soccer star. ‘DNA’ depicted a series of images of solitary GAA players practising and poorly-supported teams competing. In one, a player receives a verbal lashing from his coach, in another a lone player practises his hurling skills in a field, and in another a team runs out in front of a paltry crowd that includes one young boy holding a sign saying ‘Come On Da’. Each sequence was prefaced by a question asking about the player’s possible motivations. For instance, in one the question ‘Is it for the glamour?’ was answered by footage of a rugged and muddy player smiling in close-up to show his missing front teeth and the line that explains the motivation: ‘it’s not DNA . . . it’s GAA’, where the homophonic slippage between DNA and GAA makes an ‘essential’ connection between Irishness and Gaelic games. Irish GAA Man is the opposite of the superstar athlete not only by rejecting the grooming of Soccer Man with his toothless gurn, but is also his opposite in that he clearly doesn’t do it for the women: there are no footballers’ wives for the GAA. The Vodafone campaign, like those of the Bank of Ireland and Guinness, linked the passion of the players with that of the supporters. Most importantly, in the context of the amateur status of the GAA, the campaign reinforced the fact that the stars of the game were not spending the cold, wet and windy months of preparation before the championship matches cosseted and pampered like the millionaire stars of soccer, but that they simply played (often in difficult circumstances) for the love of the game. The final line of the Vodafone advertisement implied that players had no choice but to do what they did (because the force of the GAA is stronger even than DNA). And, although the Bank of Ireland advertisement demonstrated that the Irish, whether players or fans, are born into a county and have no choice about whom to follow, it stressed that they choose whether to follow. The multinational emphasis on ancestral Irishness (‘DNA’) is thus in contrast to the ‘Irish’ sponsors, who instead employed international signifiers of playful choice (‘Ask’) and

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open boundaries (‘Free In’) in a global market of sports. What they all had in common was the rejection of ‘outsider’ masculinity and an appeal to a national identity that is above all male, white, and physically able: it may not be for the glamour, but it’s still for the Glory.

Notes 1. John Trainor, ‘Time is Ripe for GAA to Make Serious Money’, Sunday Times, 6 November 2005, p. 14. 2. For example, see The Kingdom, 10 November 2005, p. 6, for a report on the conviction of an Offaly footballer for on-field violence; the high profile trial that led to the acquittal of Kerry footballer Declan Quill on sexual assault charges on the evening of an All-Ireland semi-final, Examiner, 11 August 2002, p. 2; and the GAA’s own investigation into the problems of the drink culture within the game, Gaelic Athletic Association, A Report by the GAA Task Force into Alcohol and Substance Abuse (Dublin: GAA, 2004). 3. Diverse ideological and political movements have expressed themselves through the promotion of different masculinities through sport. See Shaping the Superman: Fascist Body as Political Icon – Aryan Fascism, ed. J.A. Mangan (London: Frank Cass, 1999); Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Sport and International Politics: the Impact of Fascism and Communism on Sport, eds Pierre Arnaud and Jim Riordan (London: Spon, 1998). 4. For an exploration of the marketing, sexualization and commodification of sports stars, see Sport, Culture and Advertising, eds Steven Jackson and David Andrews (London: Routledge, 2004). 5. Debates over player-specific endorsements and the role of the Gaelic Player’s Association’s role in promoting separate deals for stars have been a topic of controversy since the association was founded. See for example, An Phoblacht, 7 October 1999; and Michelle Warren, ‘Links between Alcohol and Sports Come under Scrutiny’, Sunday Business Post, 13 August 2000, The Post.ie: the Sunday Business Post Online, http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2000/08/13/ story41508038.asp# (accessed 5 April 2006). 6. For a history of the GAA see Mike Cronin, Sport and Nationalism in Ireland: Gaelic Games, Soccer and National Identity since 1884 (Four Courts: Dublin, 1999), and Marcus de Burca, The GAA: a History (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan: 2000). 7. For an analysis of the birth of modern sport see Neil Tranter, Sport, Economy and Society in Britain, 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and for the link between sport and the cultural revival see Tom Hunt, ‘The Development of Sport in County Westmeath, 1850–1905’ (unpublished PhD thesis, De Montfort University, 2004). 8. For a critical engagement with the nationalist history of the GAA, see Mike Cronin, ‘An Historical Identity: Historians and the Making of Irish Nationalist Identity in the Gaelic Athletic Association’, Football Studies, 1:2 (1998): 89–102. 9. See Raymond Boyle, ‘From our Gaelic Fields: Radio, Sport and Nation in Postpartition Ireland’, Media, Culture and Society, 14 (1992): 623–36.

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10. For the early relationship between the GAA and the print media, see Paul Rouse, ‘Sport and Ireland in 1881’, in Sport and the Irish: Histories, Identities, Issues, ed. Alan Bairner (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2003). 11. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), and for an application of his work on sport, see Joseph Maguire, Grant Jarvie, Louise Mansfield and Joe Bradley, Sports Worlds: a Sociological Perspective (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2002). 12. For a review of these issues see Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy, eds Luke Gibbons, Peadar Kirby and Michael Cronin (London: Pluto Press, 2002). 13. For the history of the Rule 21 debate see David Hassan, ‘The Gaelic Athletic Association, Rule 21 and Police Reform in Northern Ireland’, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 29:1 (2005): 60–78. 14. For extensive coverage on the decision to open Croke Park to soccer and rugby, see the Irish Times, 18 January 2006, pp. 15, 19. 15. ‘Time is ripe for GAA to make serious money’, Sunday Times, 6 November 2005, p. 14. 16. This is an adaptation of arguments made in relation to sport and spectacle in the context of Chinese nationalism. See Dai Jinhua, ‘Behind Global Spectacle and National Image Making’, Positions, 9:1 (2001): 165. 17. Dai Jinhua, ‘Behind Global Spectacle’: 166. 18. One of the most successful campaigns was for the sports drink Club Energise Sport. Launched in 2003, the drink secured a 9 per cent share of the market within one year. This was due to a campaign, ‘Fuelling the Passion’, which linked the brand with the Gaelic Player’s Association and used various county players in the advertisements. As an Irish product, Club Energise chose to work with Gaelic games, as they ‘are grass roots community sports’; ADFX 2004 Case Histories, www.iapi.ie/adeffective/adfx04/cases.energise.htm (accessed 15 March 2006). 19. Robyn Goodman, Lisa L. Duke and John Sutherland, ‘Olympic Athletes and Heroism in Advertising: Gendered Concepts of Valor?’, Journal of Mass Communication Quarterly, 79:2 (2002): 375. 20. Chris Kambitsis, Yvonne Harahousou, Nicholas Theodorakis and Giannis Chatzibeis, ‘Sports Advertising in Print Media: the Case of the 2000 Olympic Games’, Corporate Communications: an International Journal, 7:3 (2002): 156. 21. James H. Martin, ‘Is the Athlete’s Sport Important when Picking an Athlete to Endorse a Nonsport Product?’, Journal of Consumer Marketing, 13:6 (1996): 28. 22. James H. Martin, ‘Is the Athlete’s Sport Important’: 39. 23. For a discussion of negative connotations of celebrity sponsorship see George Stone, Matthew Joseph and Michael Jones, ‘An Exploratory Study on the Use of Sports Celebrities in Advertising: a Content Analysis’, Sport Marketing Quarterly, 12:2 (2003): 94. 24. Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland, ADFX, 3 (2000): 73–9. 25. Brenda Murphy, ‘Pure Genius: Guinness Consumption and Irish Identity’, New Hibernia Review, 7:4 (2003): 52. 26. Figures taken from Sponsorship: a Successful Partnership between the GAA and Guinness, www.business2000.ie/cases/cases/cases413.htm (accessed 15 March 2006).

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27. The advertisement can be accessed via the Guinness website, www. guinness.com (accessed 15 March 2006). 28. There is now a serious debate within the GAA over whether it can continue its relationship with Guinness given the Association’s commitment to promoting youth sport. For coverage of the debate see Richard Gillis, ‘Last Orders’, Sports Business, August (2004): 12–14. 29. The GAA as an organization has been very proactive in promoting its games to non-national groups in Ireland, and has grasped, far in advance of many other organizations in Ireland, the need to accommodate new ethnic, national and race groups. For a discussion of this issue see An Fear Rua: the GAA Unplugged, www.anfearrua.com/ViewSectionDetail.asp?docid⫽1720 (accessed 15 March 2006).

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Part II Space

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5 ‘Our Nuns are not a Nation’: Politicizing the Convent in Irish Literature and Film Elizabeth Butler Cullingford

The sexual abuse scandals that have shaken the Catholic Church in Ireland, America and elsewhere primarily involve priests and Christian Brothers, but since the production of Patricia Burke Brogan’s play Eclipsed in 1992, the TV documentary States of Fear in 1999, and Peter Mullan’s 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters, the stories of the Magdalene Laundries and the Industrial Schools have forced us to recognize that some Irish nuns were also sadistic abusers of women and children.1 Claims of maltreatment in orphanages and reformatories all over the world, the majority of them run by orders that originated in Ireland, have multiplied. The exposure of this shameful past has accentuated a demographic trend that began just after Vatican II, long before tales of brutality threatened to undermine the ethical foundations of the religious life. As modernizing nuns abandoned the medieval habit and the hidden discipline of the cloister to take up work in the world, and as professional careers for women outside the convent increased, the distinctive appeal of the religious life faded. In Africa, which offers fewer secular opportunities for women, convents continue to recruit, but the precipitous decline of Irish vocations has accelerated during the last decade. During the 1960s roughly seven hundred women entered Irish convents every year; in 2004 there were only twelve postulants, and most of the remaining Irish nuns are over sixty years old.2 A traditional way of life is ending amidst accusations that threaten to invalidate everything it once stood for. I was once a convent girl myself, and as a feminist I would like to recuperate the ethical and social value of these communities of women, even as I confront their past corruption and their probable disappearance. My personal experience is corroborated by the positive representation of the convent in Kate O’Brien’s 1941 novel, The Land of Spices, but the theoretical issues are complex and contradictory. Feminism in Ireland is frequently aligned with the discourse of modernity, and many feminists 55

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who oppose patriarchal Catholicism see nuns as complicit with a traditional system that both dominated and devalued them. Catriona Clear writes: ‘Visible but not vocal, nuns were an Irish Catholic variation on the theme of the ideal Victorian female.’3 Dwindling religious recruitment can thus be interpreted as a positive by-product of the scandals, and the dissolution of the nexus between religion and nationalism acclaimed as a symptom of progress. As disused convent buildings are modernized into condos for the newly prosperous, the traditional foundation of Pearse and de Valera’s Catholic Ireland is crumbling. Yet, as postcolonial scholars have frequently pointed out, the narrative of global modernity threatens to erase the specificity of the nation and its struggle for freedom. In Ireland after History, David Lloyd defines the rejection of tradition as complicity with the forces of neo-colonialism. The agenda of progress, he suggests, involves ‘the displacement of indigenous forms of religion, labour, patriarchy and rule by those of colonial modernity’.4 While Irish feminists are unlikely to lament the displacement of indigenous patriarchies, the history of religious women has until recently remained open to positive interpretation. In The Transforming Power of the Nuns, Mary Magray defines the Irish convent not merely as an economic refuge for surplus females, but as a privileged space where women could reject marriage and childbirth, choosing to live, work and love within a traditional community that offered them more cultural power and self-determination, and possibly more sensual satisfaction, than was to be found within the home.5 And as recently as 1995, celebrating the pioneering research of the Dominican nun Margaret McCurtain, the editors of the Journal of Women’s History claimed: ‘If voices of Irish women’s history and solidarity begin anywhere, it is within religious sisterhoods.’6 This sentence now sounds bitterly ironic. The fact that apostolic orders like the Sisters of Mercy and the Good Shepherds were the primary abusers of poor children and unwed mothers is especially troubling for feminists who believe that voluntary associations of women offer a positive social model, or that someone like Catherine MacAuley, who founded the Sisters of Mercy, is a feminist heroine. Although the assumption that women are more compassionate than men is essentialist, and the belief that religious women are exempt from the temptation to cruelty is naive, both these ‘common sense’ ideas intensify our horror at the stories of those who ‘survived’ the institutional trauma. Nuns who ran laundries, asylums and industrial schools wielded absolute authority over socially marginal people: poor children, mentally disturbed adults, and women who were classified as sexual delinquents. These were not ‘charitable’ institutions: they received per capita grants from the government, or, in

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the case of the laundries, the slave labour of the detainees produced the income that supported them.7 Attempts have been made to defend the nuns on several grounds. It is argued that all types of institutional care used to be brutal; and certainly acceptable levels of violence in child-rearing declined during the course of the twentieth century. Post-independence Ireland, however, increased its reliance on the industrial school system at a time when other countries were rejecting the mass warehousing of unwanted children. Magdalene Asylums were not a peculiarly Irish invention: they were to be found in medieval Europe, and during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they flourished in Protestant Britain. But the Magdalene system lasted much longer in Ireland than in England or America: women were still being confined in the 1970s, and the last laundry closed in 1996.8 Their defenders correctly point out that not all nuns were cruel; nevertheless, of the 69 religious orders active in Ireland,9 18 have been implicated in abuse, chief among them the Sisters of Mercy. Finally, several nuns have claimed that they did the dirty laundry of the family and the state by offering shelter to women who were cast out by their relations.10 Jim Smith argues that these unfortunates were ‘disappeared’ because any display of aberrant female sexuality would tarnish the purity of Irish national identity,11 and that Church, state, and community sanctioned the development of what he calls ‘Ireland’s architecture of containment’.12 Historians are divided about the degree to which nuns can be seen as independent agents, and about the role of class in the convent. In nineteenth-century Ireland the repeal of the penal laws, combined with the Church’s grudging recognition that religious women might be trusted to work outside the cloister, produced an explosion in the number of nuns. Active non-cloistered sisters performed essential social services, staffing free schools and hospitals, assisting the poor and sustaining the elderly. Clear sees these women as cheap, socially conservative, self-effacing servants of the Church: ‘As women they were politically incapacitated; as nuns, they had no real ecclesiastical power.’13 In contrast, Magray argues that the wealthy and independent mid-nineteenth-century religious women who founded or directed the apostolic communities remade the devotional and social identity of the Irish nation in the image of their own increasingly powerful bourgeois Catholic class.14 This claim, however, leaves the nuns she admires open to the charge that they led rather than followed the movement to censor the expression of sexuality, impose Victorian moral standards, and lick the disreputable poor into shape. The more independent power we attribute to the new sisterhoods, the more blame they must shoulder for scapegoating sexually deviant women and

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establishing Our Lady’s chaste maternity as the dominant feminine ideal. It is important to historicize this debate: Magray concedes that in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries Irish bishops asserted their authority over female religious communities more vigorously than before,15 and were especially successful at controlling those orders that, like the Mercy Sisters but unlike the daughter houses of Continental communities, had no centralized structure of governance. At the same time the dowry system, which had kept many poor and less-educated women out of Irish convents, or consigned them to the inferior status of lay sisters, grew weaker, and the numbers of articulate and independent nuns decreased. Of course, the religious orders also managed fee-paying schools that were accountable to their consumers, and nuns who were selected to teach middle-class children were likely to be better educated and from more prosperous backgrounds than those who supervised the washing tub or policed the poor. Was the difference between the enlightened and the abusive merely a reflection of money and class? Or did the Jansenistinflected Catholicism practised in Irish convents exacerbate horror of the flesh and so justify its brutal mortification?16 Was the Irish or Irishinfluenced experience exceptional? The nuns themselves have apologized, but not explained. After the 1996 RTÉ documentary Dear Daughter exposed child abuse in their Goldenbridge industrial school, the Mercy Sisters expressed regret; in May 2004 they tried again: ‘We know that you heard our apology then as conditional and less than complete [. . .] Now without reservation we apologize unconditionally to each one of you for the suffering we have caused.’17 Between the conditional and the unconditional apologies, however, Sister Helena O’Donoghue had negotiated, on behalf of the Mercy congregation and seventeen others, a phenomenally advantageous deal with the government. In return for contributing €128 million to a victim compensation scheme that will cost the Irish taxpayer €1.3 billion, they secured an indemnity from all future claims.18 Their admission of guilt, therefore, does not entail a full assumption of responsibility; nor has any Irish apology or offer of compensation yet been made to the Magdalenes.19 Apart from the Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano, which called The Magdalene Sisters ‘an angry and rancorous provocation’, most critics assume that Peter Mullan’s recent film makes the same kind of truth claims as the testimony of survivors.20 Mullan emphasizes his veracity by including on the DVD his documentary source, Sex in a Cold Climate (1998), and by closing with captions that align the ‘afterlives’ of his fictional characters with the ‘afterlives’ of the witnesses on whom they are based. Yet his transmutation of testimony into fiction is inevitably mediated by

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generic codes, including that of the prison or concentration-camp film. The most shocking scene shows two nuns humiliating a group of naked penitents by comparing the size of their breasts and the hairiness of their genitals. One witness from Sex in a Cold Climate describes similar practices taking place in an orphanage, but, as Jim Smith has noted, Mullan transposes the scene into an adult register, which enhances the sexual component of the sadism.21 In the Ireland of the 1980s this episode would have been rejected as a tendentious fabrication. But the seismic shift in Irish culture, initiated by the election of Mary Robinson in 1990 and the disgrace of Bishop Casey in 1992, and intensified by more than a decade of clerical abuse scandals, has produced a mood of quasi-Lutheran reaction against religious corruption, creating a climate in which such things appear perfectly plausible. This new cultural atmosphere obscures the extent to which Mullan’s fact-based film participates in a long-established fictional genre constituted by melodramatic exaggeration: the sexualized anti-Catholic Gothic. Luke Gibbons has argued convincingly that sensational eighteenthcentury Gothic narratives contributed to the consolidation of English Protestant national identity and the marginalization of the Catholic other. According to Gibbons, the Gothic sensibility can be seen as following through on the cultural work of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–91, expunging the traces not only of feudalism but also its archaic Catholic remnants from the social order. Hence the familiar stage-props of the Gothic mise-en-scène: ruined castles [. . .] mouldering abbeys and monasteries, endless, hidden vaults and torture chambers, lecherous monks and nuns.22 These stage-props are characteristically medieval and Mediterranean, but Robert Mighall claims that the Gothic genre can be activated in any place or time: ‘Gothic settings change – from Naples in the thirteenth century, to Madrid in the late eighteenth, or even to London in the nineteenth century – if the location in question is perceived to harbour unreasonable, uncivilized, and unprogressive customs or tendencies.’23 Mullan’s contemporary Gothic sabotages the traditional link between Irish identity, Catholicism and virtuous femininity, and associates Irish religious practices with the unreasonable, uncivilized narrative of medieval barbarism. Despite its debts to Hollywood asylum and prison films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Shawshank Redemption, The Magdalene Sisters must also be viewed in a European generic and historical frame if its political implications are to be decoded.24

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Mullan may not have read Diderot’s The Nun or Lewis’s The Monk, both published in 1796, but the forced vocation of Suzanne Simonin and the burying alive of the pregnant Sister Agnes established the central tropes of the Gothic convent-as-prison genre, in which the darkest secrets are always sexual. Diderot’s sixteen-year-old Suzanne is compelled to take the veil because she is illegitimate: her mother wishes to expiate and obliterate her own erotic transgression. When Suzanne attempts to renounce her vows she is imprisoned, starved, forced to walk barefoot over broken glass, and subjected to a macabre mock execution. She asserts that such brutality is not an aberration but the inevitable result of repression, isolation and sexual segregation: ‘The urge to hurt and torment gradually wanes in the world outside; it never does in the cloister.’25 Denouncing all monastic life as unnatural, she enumerates its effects on the psyche: ‘Where is the dwelling-place of hatred, disgust and hysteria? Where is the place of servitude and despotism? Where are undying hatreds and passions nurtured in silence? Where is the home of cruelty and morbid curiosity?’26 When Suzanne is removed to a different convent she exchanges physical for sexual abuse: her new Mother Superior, a predatory lesbian, seduces her. Suzanne’s confessor asserts: ‘This is what happens sooner or later when you go against the universal law of nature: this constraint deflects it into monstrous affections.’27 Diderot eschews supernatural horrors, but his convent is a traditional Gothic location: a hidden site of insanity, torture and sexual perversion. Suzanne is a classic Gothic victim: her modern reason is outraged and her body assaulted by the adherents of a medieval Catholic world-view. Almost all Diderot’s characters illustrate the psychopathology of convent life, its contradiction of ‘the universal law of nature’. Diderot’s enlightenment appeal to ‘nature’, in which woman’s proper role is to reproduce the family, exposes the inadequacy of the tradition/ modernity binary when it is applied to gender. Diderot’s demonization of nuns reflects heterosexist hostility to communities of women who have replaced the love of men with the ‘monstrous affections’ of same-sex desire.28 Lesbian nuns and dominatrix Reverend Mothers have long been and continue to be a pornographic cliché: their supposedly virginal inaccessibility heightens the pleasure of their defilement. Diderot’s moral condemnation of the prioress is compromised by his lasciviously voyeuristic depiction of her lesbian orgasms; what is more, his construction of the ‘natural’ woman as a reproductive heterosexual replaces the medieval Catholic coercion of the convent by the modern coercion of Protestant matrimony. He discounts the possibility that some women chose virginity and female community as a desirable alternative to patriarchal marriage

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and serial childbirth, and he is both horrified and fascinated by the alternative queer sexualities enabled by an all-female social space. Lewis’s The Monk, an energetic romp set in Spain during the Inquisition, eschews lesbian nuns but deploys sex, incest, murder, torture and the Gothic supernatural to expose ‘in glaring colours, how enormous were the abuses but too frequently practised in monasteries, and how unjustly public esteem was bestowed indiscriminately upon all who wore a religious habit’.29 The Monk’s flamboyant subplot juxtaposes two young women whose families force them into convents. Agnes de Medina’s mother vows her unborn child to the religious life, but Agnes plans to elope with her lover Raymond instead, disguising herself as the Bleeding Nun, the ghost of another young girl who ‘took the veil at an early age, not by her own choice, but at the express command of her parents’.30 Unfortunately, Raymond abducts the ghost instead of his girlfriend. Devastated by his supposed perfidy, Agnes finally takes her vows, but her ‘disgust at a monastic life’31 subsequently reignites her passion for Raymond, and she becomes pregnant. The fanatical prioress immures her for life in a dungeon below the convent, where she gives birth to her baby alone; she is discovered cradling its worm-infested corpse: a classic Gothic tableau that identifies Catholicism with illicit sex, confinement and corruption. While Diderot’s explanation for the brutality of nuns is social and psychological, Lewis’s is theological. The nuns are motivated by ‘the idea that to afflict my body was the only way to preserve my soul’. Constrained by ‘blind obedience to their superior’, they genuinely believe that ‘to treat me with lenity, or to shew the least pity for my woes, would be a direct means to destroy my chance for salvation’.32 Agnes’s reflections on ‘blind obedience’ and the relation of penance to salvation are echoed in modern versions of the anti-Catholic Gothic. Moreover, Lewis’s ludicrous exaggerations are based on the indisputable fact that Catholicism celebrates both martyrdom and mortification of the flesh. The Nun and The Monk establish the fictional paradigms exploited by Ireland’s major Gothic novel, the Protestant clergyman Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), in which the forced vocation of the young monk Moncada is closely modelled on the ordeal of Suzanne Simonin.33 The most politically influential nineteenth-century Gothic text, however, was supposedly non-fictional. In Maria Monk’s international bestseller The Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery (1836), nuns are forced by other nuns to have sex with priests, their babies are smothered at birth, and recalcitrant sisters are gagged, hung upside down, and murdered. Supposedly authored by a runaway Canadian nun but actually ghostwritten by several Protestant clergymen, this book fuelled anti-Catholic

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and anti-immigrant prejudice in America, and is still used as a propaganda text in Northern Ireland.34 Although the real Maria Monk was never a nun, she briefly entered a Magdalene Asylum, an experience that may explain her readiness to perpetrate this elaborate anti-Catholic fraud.35 The convent was not a Gothic prison to those who entered voluntarily. But several modern documentary films, of which the French Les Blanchisseuses de Magdalen (1999) is the most balanced, reveal that Irish nuns imposed on the sexualized bodies of the Magdalenes their own chosen discipline of poverty, chastity and obedience. The penitents were cloistered, their labour was unpaid, they wore uniforms, their names were changed, their lives were an endlessly repeated alternation of work and prayer, they were expected to keep silence, and they were forbidden ‘particular friendships’. They were nuns in all but name. Perhaps this explains why the real nuns were not ashamed of their actions: both they and the penitents were seeking salvation through mortification of the flesh. In Les Blanchisseuses Sister Teresa Coughlan asserts: ‘We worked hard together as a team.’36 Like Oona O’Connor in The Magdalene Sisters, some women eventually accepted the logic of their situation and became ‘consecrated’ penitents; some, like Kathleen in Les Blanchisseuses, could never face life outside the convent walls. In fact, many (though by no means all) of the penitents endured the classic Gothic forced vocation, since, like the persecuted victims of Diderot, Lewis and Maturin, they were incarcerated and abandoned by their families. Sister Lucy Bruton argues: ‘I don’t think we drove anyone to madness . . . we institutionalized them.’ She might have added that nuns institutionalized themselves, as does anyone who joins a ‘total organization’ like, say, the Marines: The daily life of the convent followed very closely Goffman’s (1961) description of a total institution in which large numbers of likesituated individuals, cut off from the wider society, live, work, eat, sleep, and recreate together. Individuality is deemphasized by uniformity in dress, personal belongings, furniture, and daily schedule. Clear distinctions are made between subordinates and superiors.37 The difference between a vocation and a punishment, however, lies not in the strictness of the discipline but in the will to perform it. Kate O’Brien’s novel The Land of Spices, for example, which evokes the proto-feminist convent as McCurtain and Magray have described it, completely lacks the Gothic sensibility. O’Brien writes with affection and respect of the female community in which she was educated from the age of five, the Limerick Convent of the Faithful Companions of Jesus.

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Two of her aunts were Presentation Sisters: Aunt Mary the successful Reverend Mother and Aunt Fan the quasi-Fenian dominate her memoir, Presentation Parlour (1963).38 She also wrote a biography of St Teresa of Avila, ‘a woman of genius’ and would have liked, according to one contemporary, to be a Reverend Mother herself.39 In her novel The Last of Summer (1943), she describes the ‘rightness’ of a religious vocation in terms of purity, detachment and asceticism: And she had visited Sainte Fontaine – and knew that the best part of her soul was waiting for her there, had gone ahead of her to that outof-date, cold, medieval centre of discipline and rigidity and elimination. No vulgarity within those cold, high, echoing walls; no personal passion.40 O’Brien here reclaims the derogatory term ‘medieval’ by evoking neither insanity nor primitive barbarism, but the austere architectural beauty of a Gothic cloister. By the time O’Brien published The Land of Spices in 1941 she had become ‘disillusioned with de Valera’s Ireland’, at least partly because in 1936 her novel Mary Lavelle, which contains an explicit defloration scene and compounds the offence by adding a non-tragic lesbian, had been banned by the Irish censors.41 The Land of Spices, banned in its turn because of a single sentence evoking a homosexual encounter, encodes a lesbian-feminist attack on de Valera’s 1937 constitution, which accorded the Church a ‘special position’ within the Irish state, enshrined the heterosexual family as the national norm and defined women solely as mothers ‘within the home’.42 In this novel, the convent family provides an alternative ‘home’ and power base for women. Neither Helen Archer, the English Reverend Mother of the Compagnie de la Sainte Famille, nor her Irish protégée, Anna Murphy, who is sent to the convent at the age of six because her drunken father and self-pitying mother are at loggerheads, conform to the prescriptive definition of femininity imposed by the constitution. The feminist strength of O’Brien’s convent, despite its inevitable snobberies and rivalries, is based on the exchange of love and power between older and younger women. When a former pupil asks the old French Mère Générale if she has ‘loved all the generations of fools you ruled so well?’ she replies, ‘There is no other way. Power is love, or else it is corruption. Remember that.’43 On her deathbed Mère Générale bids farewell to Helen Archer as her daughter, but also evokes the officially proscribed and sexually suspect category of the ‘particular friend’:44 ‘Chère enfant,

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il n’y a que vous au monde à laquelle je voudrais faire les adieux d’une amitié particulière.’45 Although in several of her novels O’Brien codes lesbians as ‘nunnish’, she nevertheless avoids coding her nuns as lesbians: the relationships between them are empowering rather than erotic.46 Mère Générale passes on to her ‘daughter’ in religion the governance of the order, and Helen Archer admits that ‘she liked power . . . she had learnt with the years to understand power a little, and to use it with care’.47 Helen uses her power to offer her own Irish ‘daughter’ freedom from her biological family, defeating their plans to make Anna sacrifice her university scholarship for work in the local bank. Anna will not become a nun, but a nun offers her the liberty to determine her secular future. The feminist connection between cloistered and activist women is made explicit by Miss Robertson, an English suffragette who reminds Anna of Reverend Mother, and who happily embraces the comparison: ‘After all, a nun knows more than you or I about devotion to an idea, or an ideal. If your Reverend Mother had been in the world, she might quite easily have gone to jail for the vote.’48 Anna learns from Miss Robertson and Reverend Mother that liberty, equality, sorority and authority are compatible with the ideals of religion. By making both these characters English, however, Kate O’Brien implies that liberty for an Irish woman may be harder to achieve. The Land of Spices is set in the years 1904 to 1914, against the background of the Irish cultural revival and the political ferment leading up to the Easter Rising. Helen Archer is uneasy as the governor of an Irish house because she recognizes that to the chaplain Father Conroy and to Mother Mary Andrew, both passionate nationalists, her Englishness is an ‘enemy’ quality.49 She is doubly foreign because, unlike the Mercy Sisters, the Compagnie de la Sainte Famille is governed from a Mother House in Brussels, and is therefore free from the control of the local Irish bishop.50 This bishop dislikes the order’s independence and its French traditions because he believes that Irish education ‘should be very nationalistic indeed, even what is called narrowly so’.51 When he debates with Miss Robertson, who appreciates the ‘detachment’ of the convent and finds the Sinn Fein motto ‘ourselves’ unattractive, O’Brien stages a confrontation between Irish nationalism and international feminism.52 This opposition also structures the interactions between Reverend Mother and the bishop. She tells him that ‘Our nuns are not a nation, and our business is not with national matters. We are a religious Order.’ The bishop, nevertheless, insists that ‘Irish national life is bound up with its religion, and it may well be that educational work will become difficult here soon for those Orders which adhere too closely to a foreign

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tradition.’53 Reverend Mother cites the international reach of the Compagnie de la Sainte Famille, which has daughter houses throughout Europe as well as in Australia, Canada and the Americas. But she recognizes that the Irish, because of their exponentially increasing numbers of vocations, will soon achieve worldwide dominance: They would win. In the twenty-three years of her life as a professed nun she had seen in the Order the numerical balance of Irish, IrishAmerican, and Irish-Australian nuns shift from fifteen to sixty percent. The European populations were not producing nuns; the Irish populations were.54 The patriotic Father Conroy therefore feels justified in objecting to Irish postulants undertaking their novitiate at Sainte Fontaine in Bruges, which he calls a ‘barbarous’ place.55 Stung by his ‘little nationalistic commonplace’56 into an uncharacteristic moment of hatred, Helen Archer writes to Mère Générale asking to be relieved of her position among the Irish: ‘To-day you have given them up to that narrowing future of their own which you are leaving. You have given them up, in fact, to Mother Mary Andrew.’57 O’Brien’s uniformly negative representation of Mother Mary Andrew challenges the bishop’s demand that nuns should embrace the ‘narrowing future’ of the Irish nation. A draper’s daughter from Tyrone, she belongs to the newly powerful Catholic commercial class; an enthusiast for the Gaelic language, she is identified with the cultural revival and the traditional narrative of Irish nationalism. She even produces her own Gaelic version of ‘Who Fears to Speak of Ninety-Eight?’ Despite the fact that the author herself ‘actively supported the nationalist movement and avidly studied Gaelic at Laurel Hill’, while her fictional alter ego Anna excels at the language, O’Brien’s construction of Mother Mary Andrew juxtaposes exclusivist nationalism with a proclivity for the abuse of children.58 This nun is ‘erratic and cruel’; Reverend Mother deplores the ‘illadvised, splenetic neurotic storms’ of her rule,59 and resents her public rebuke to six-year-old Anna: ‘ “I’m afraid she’s a bit of a cry-baby.” Tears rose in Anna’s eyes at mention of this failing.’60 To protect the child from both her dysfunctional heterosexual family and her religious tormentor, Helen discards her letter of resignation and stays in Ireland. Mary Andrew nevertheless victimizes the child. In her French examination Anna forgets the present participle of the verb finir, but still does well enough to win a holiday. Combining intellectual injustice with physical violence, Mary Andrew denies Anna the prize, fiercely rebukes

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her subsequent tears, and manhandles her into bed. No one is beaten, there is nothing to match the brutality of the industrial schools; but even in this most benign of middle-class fee-paying institutions children are ‘tortured’ by a vindictive nun.61 The juxtaposition of nationalism, intellectual authoritarianism and physical bullying in O’Brien’s portrait of Mother Mary Andrew suggests that if religious institutions are constitutionally imbricated in the ‘narrowing future’ of the Irish state, vulnerable children will find themselves at risk. O’Brien differs radically from Diderot and Lewis: for her, sadism in the convent is not the inevitable consequence of an unnaturally segregated and celibate environment; nor is it theologically justified as a means of saving souls or breaking wills. It is produced by the combination of a ‘neurotic’ individual personality with a hegemonic Church that for historical reasons is increasingly identified with the political aspirations of a nation. O’Brien’s nuanced analysis shows how a particular alignment between psychology, religion and the state can produce the deformity of abuse. The convent school in The Land of Spices is separated from the convent laundry in The Magdalene Sisters by almost a hundred years, as well as by money, class, function, governance and relation to the Irish state. What links them is the cruelty of the Gaelic Leaguer Mother Mary Andrew. After the caption, ‘County Dublin 1964’, the opening shot of The Magdalene Sisters is a bodhrán, a traditional Irish folk instrument decorated with an image of Christ before Pilate. A priest sings the ballad ‘The Well Below the Valley’, the story of an incest victim who has borne six children by her uncle, her father and her brother, murdered them all, and is condemned to burn in hell, although she asserts that she may yet be saved. This Gothic tale of incest and infanticide, ostensibly inappropriate for a clerical singer at a country wedding, exposes a hidden Ireland in which women are abused by male relatives and judged by religious men.62 To underline the point, the camera alternates between the unresponsive, sceptical or puzzled faces of the female auditors and tight close-ups of the priest’s unpleasantly sweaty face. The following scene illustrates the text of the ballad: Margaret is raped by her cousin, complains of the abuse, and is condemned to the hell of the Magdalene laundry by her father, the rapist’s father and the priest. This sinister patriarchal transaction, rendered inaudible throughout by the traditional music of the céilí band, connects Irish cultural identity with the silencing of women, for whom Ireland is Gaelic and Catholic but far from free. Neither Margaret’s cousin, nor the men who impregnated her fellow Magdalenes Rose and Crispina, nor the boys whose flirtation with Bernadette causes her incarceration, are punished. Sex is the sin of Eve, and Mullan indicts Irish

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society, as represented by Rose’s parents, Oona’s father, all of Margaret’s relations except her brother, the police who escort the Magdalene procession, and the townspeople who watch it, as complicit with the Church in maintaining a fundamentally misogynist and nativist culture of female shame. Like the bodhrán’s Pilate, they wash their hands of the innocent victims. Robert Mighall argues that Gothic fiction ‘depicts the anachronistic survival of vestigial customs into the enlightened present’.63 The Magdalene system is one such gendered anachronism: the modernizing Mullan exposes the Gothic horrors of the traditional Catholic crypt. The Magdalene Sisters highlights its generic difference from Hollywood’s deceptively soft-focus vision of nuns by ironically quoting two scenes from The Bells of St Mary’s (1945), a sentimental comedy starring Ingrid Bergman as the benevolent and liberal headmistress Sister Benedict.64 Against the touching spectacle of Bergman weeping into her wimple, Mullan evokes the contemporary Gothic of the Taliban, whose concealment of women’s bodies within the burqa is analogous to the medieval monastic habit.65 He views the Church’s ‘perverse’ obsession with women’s sexuality as an ‘attack on Nature’. In his film, a priest with a movie camera begs the nuns to ‘try and act natural’, and Mullan acknowledges ‘a deliberate gag on my part . . . how did they know what natural was? These were celibate women cut off completely from society.’66 Like Diderot, Mullan sees isolation, segregation and celibacy as perversions of universal human nature. As a good Marxist, Mullan also foregrounds the profit motive: the laundry is ‘a place that is supposedly there to save your immortal soul and is actually just a factory with slave labour and fairly barbaric keepers’.67 So sermons about penance and salvation are juxtaposed with close-ups of Reverend Mother’s hands counting the cash, and the blessing of the new electric dryers ironically underscores the fact that the domestic washing machine, not Vatican II, put paid to the Magdalene system. Despite his socialist ideology, however, Mullan admits that he is not a social realist: both his aesthetics and his anger lead him into melodramatic exaggeration.68 Reverend Mother’s appetite for flagellation is as psychotic as her hairdressing techniques, which produce a striking moment of visual Gothic: when the shorn Bernadette is forced to look at her ruined beauty in a mirror, Reverend Mother’s face is reflected in her bloody eyeball. This surreal image is appropriate because Bernadette herself becomes a sadist in captivity. Equally surreal is the scene in which Margaret gives a contagious rash to the priest who is sexually abusing Crispina, on whose body the telltale marks also emerge. Mullan knows that Ireland contains

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no plant capable of producing such an effect; moreover, the grotesque comedy of the priest’s naked flight across the field is shattered by Crispina’s insanely repeated denunciation, ‘You’re not a man of God’, in an excruciatingly long take that stretches beyond realism into Gothic horror.69 Not one of Mullan’s melodramatic religious villains questions the ethics of the laundry, perhaps because Phyllis McMahon, an ex-nun who played Sister Augusta, told him: ‘We had no doubts about what we did.’70 He surmises that for laundry supervision ‘they sent in the heavy-duty nuns and filtered out the good ones’ and Geraldine McEwan’s viciously mannered performance is pure Grand Guignol.71 In her plays Eclipsed (1992) and Stained Glass at Samhain (2002), Patricia Burke Brogan, a Mercy sister who left the order after working in a laundry, offers a less extreme perspective. Her heroines Sister Virginia, Sister Benedict and Sister Luke struggle with the morality of their work, and with an authority structure that subordinates them all, including her two malign Reverend Mothers, to the pampered and materialistic bishop. The Mercy Sisters, who had no equivalent of O’Brien’s Mère Générale and no independent system of female corporate governance, were particularly vulnerable to dominance by the local hierarchy: Brogan argues the feminist case against women’s ‘Blind Obedience’ to male ‘Central Powers’.72 Although the phrase ‘Central Powers’ refers to the Germans of the First World War, not the Second, the allusion surely hints at fascist authoritarianism. Neither poverty nor chastity trouble Brogan’s nuns: the struggle for intelligent women like Virginia and Benedict, as for Helen Archer, is obedience. Brogan’s Sister Luke, who was demoted when she tried to improve the treatment of the Magdalenes, deploys the Gothic trope of the ‘crazy nun’ as cover for her disobedience, while Sister Benedict eventually leaves the convent; but neither of Brogan’s plays suggests that celibacy turns all nuns into psychopaths.73 Nevertheless, only ‘crazy’ Sister Luke retains both agency and spirituality: the other nuns are underlings in a male Church that has retained its institutional stranglehold longer in Ireland than in other Catholic countries. In Eclipsed, set in 1963, Sister Virginia decides to write to Pope John XXIII about the Magdalenes because ‘it takes a long time for news of change to reach this island, this laundry’.74 Apparently the news was inordinately delayed: in Stained Glass at Samhain, Sister Luke claims that the dead Pope ‘is very disappointed that his Aggiornamento of Vatican II was never accepted here in our Island of Saints and Scholars’.75 The old thesis about Ireland’s belated modernity is signalled by the names of Brogan’s two reverend mothers: Victoria and Victoire.76 In Mullan’s far less nuanced view, female religious life has no justification other than profit, power or perversion. While his Gothic melodrama

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is cinematically effective, his indictment of the laundries concomitantly (and probably inadvertently) revives the old colonial and essentialist discourses of Irish primitivism and Maria Monk-style anti-Popery.77 The long postcolonial persistence of the Magdalene system cannot be blamed on imperialism unless we claim that the peculiar imbrication of Church and state in Ireland was a deformity developed in the process of resistance to colonial rule: a powerful argument, but one that Mullan does not choose to make. Is it an indication of social maturity and confidence or of scandal fatigue that so few Irish people have objected to his horrific vision of their immediate past? Except for an organization called Let Our Voices Emerge (LOVE), which is quixotically collecting what might be termed non-abuse narratives, Irish nuns are currently as short of defenders as they are of novices.78 Was the Irish experience indeed exceptional? Diderot suggests that the ‘unnatural’ monastic system produces both the theological justification for and the psychological disposition towards cruelty: nationality, history and class are irrelevant. Yet Mary Raftery insists that in Ireland, ‘the scale of the abuse . . . was so vast as to pose the most fundamental questions about the nature of religious orders in this country’.79 For her, the Gothic is less a fictional genre than an Irish reality. But I would argue that, although their independence was always compromised by their allegiance to a patriarchal Church, and their extinction under the onslaught of Western modernity currently seems assured, many traditional Irish convents offered in their time a greater degree of autonomy for women than was available in ‘the world’. Moreover, the relative detachment from the local bishop afforded by a European mother house prevented some communities from becoming the perpetrators of abuse against children and other women, as did the mitigating influences of money and class. Although Irish culture has historically been hyper-patriarchal, there is nothing essentially Irish about institutionalized misogyny. The sexually repressive agenda of the Catholic Church in Ireland was reinforced by the material experiences of colonization and famine. Jansenist puritanism was a legacy of the penal laws, which made it necessary for priests to be trained in France. If the Irish Church represented the tenant farmers at prayer, their post-famine practice of familism (passing the land intact to the eldest son and dowering only one daughter) decreased legitimate marriage opportunities and made sex ‘a far more subversive threat than the landlord to the security and status of the family’.80 The fanatical determination of the Church to retain social control of its flock derived from sectarian battles with the Protestantism of the colonizer; its hegemonic power in the new Free State from its central role in the construction

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of an oppositional Irish identity. Politics and economics thus cooperated with theology to produce an environment from which a disproportionate number of women were forced to flee. Some of those who remained became the obedient accomplices of male institutional power, and some became sadistic abusers; but others found in the convent a room of their own, satisfying work in the community, and perhaps even a particular friend.

Notes 1. The Magdalene Sisters, dir. Peter Mullan (Miramax, 2002). 2. Kim Bielenberg, ‘Why My Call to Prayer Was So Irresistible’, Irish Independent, 16 October 2004, online, LexisNexis. 3. Catriona Clear, ‘The Limits of Female Autonomy: Nuns in NineteenthCentury Ireland’, in Women Surviving, eds Maria Luddy and Cliona Murphy (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1990), p. 45. 4. David Lloyd, Ireland after History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), p. 2. 5. Mary Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion, and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750–1900 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 46–73. 6. Joan Hoff and Maureen Coulter, ‘Editors’ Note’, Irish Women’s Voices: Past and Present: Special Issue, Journal of Women’s History, 6:4/7:1 (1995): 10. 7. Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan, Suffer the Little Children: the Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools (New York: Continuum, 2001), pp. 89–109. 8. For the most consistently hostile account of the Magdalene system in nineteenth-century Ireland, see Frances Finnegan, Do Penance or Perish: Magdalen Asylums in Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 9. See ‘Religious Orders’ on the Catholic Ireland website, http://www. catholicireland.net/pages/index.php (accessed 24 January 2006). 10. For example, Sister Teresa Coughlan and Sister Lucy Bruton in Les Blanchisseuses de Magdalen, dir. Nicolas Glimois and Christopher Weber, France 3, 20 February 1999. 11. James M. Smith, ‘Remembering Ireland’s Architecture of Containment: “Telling Stories” in The Butcher Boy and States of Fear’, Éire/Ireland, 36:1&2 (2001): 111–13. 12. James M. Smith, ‘The Politics of Sexual Knowledge: the Origins of Ireland’s Containment Culture and the Carrigan Report (1931)’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 13:2 (2004): 209. 13. Catriona Clear, Nuns in Nineteenth-century Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987), p. 155. 14. Magray, Transforming Power, pp. 32–45. Fahey lays out both the positive and the negative interpretations, but declines to choose between them. Tony Fahey, ‘Nuns in the Catholic Church in Ireland in the Nineteenth Century’, in Girls Don’t Do Honours: Irish Women in Education in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Mary Cullen (Dublin: Women’s Education Bureau, 1987), pp. 28–30. 15. Magray, Transforming Power, pp. 107–26. Margaret McCurtain agrees, citing the promulgation of the Dogma of Papal Infallibility (1870) and the Code of

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16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

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Canon Law (1917) as events that ‘strengthened the control of the bishop and parish priest’: ‘Godly Burden: Catholic Sisterhoods in Twentieth-Century Ireland’, in Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland, eds Antony Bradley and Maryann Gialanella Valiulis (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), p. 246. For Jansenists the original sin was ‘concupiscence’. Mary Raftery, ‘Sisters of Mercy Break Ranks’, Irish Times, 6 May 2004, online, LexisNexis. Patsy McGarry, ‘Sister Act’, Irish Times, 4 October 2003, online, LexisNexis. For the current situation, see Henry McDonald, ‘Dail and Church Agree €1.3bn Payout to Child Abuse Victims’, Observer, 3 January 2006, online, LexisNexis. Maeve Connolly, ‘Magdalene Laundries Women “Ignored”’, Irish News, 17 May 2004, online, LexisNexis. The Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, however, posted an online apology after the release of Mullan’s film, http://www. sistersofmercy.org/justice/magdalene_movie.html (accessed 24 January 2006). Fintan O’Toole, ‘Sisters of No Mercy’, Observer, 16 February 2003, online, LexisNexis. James M. Smith, ‘The Magdalene Sisters: Evidence, Testimony . . . Action?’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 32 (2007): 431–58. Luke Gibbons, Gaelic Gothic: Race, Colonization, and Irish Culture (Dublin: Arlen House, 2004), pp. 10–11. Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. xvii. Jonathan Murray, ‘Convents or Cowboys? Millenial Scottish and Irish Film Industries and Imaginaries in The Magdalene Sisters’, in National Cinema and Beyond: Studies in Irish Film 1, eds Kevin Rockett and John Hill (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), p. 154. Denis Diderot, The Nun, trans. Leonard Tancock (London: Penguin, 1974), p. 59. Diderot, Nun, p. 103. Diderot, Nun, p. 176. Rosemary Curb’s collection of personal testimonies suggests that there were indeed many lesbians in convents. See Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan, eds, Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence (Tallahassee, Florida: Naiad Press, 1985), passim. Matthew Lewis, The Monk (New York: Modern Library, 2002), p. 276. Lewis, Monk, p. 136. Lewis, Monk, p. 145. Lewis, Monk, p. 329. For an insightful discussion of Melmoth the Wanderer that helped me to formulate my argument about the Gothic, see Margot Backus, The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 109–26. Nancy Lusignan Schultz, ‘Introduction’, Veil of Fear: Nineteenth-Century Convent Tales by Rebecca Reed and Maria Monk (West Lafayette, IN: NotaBell Books, 1999), pp. vii–ix. Wesley Hutchinson remembers Maria Monk’s fraudulent story being offered as the truth about Catholicism to young Protestants in Northern Ireland (personal communication, 18 May 2005). Schultz, ‘Introduction’, p. xv.

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36. See Maria Luddy, ‘Prostitution and Rescue Work in Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, in Women Surviving, eds Luddy and Murphy, p. 64. The testimony of Mary Norris in Les Blanchisseuses is particularly detailed and convincing. 37. Helen Ebaugh, Nuns in the Vanishing Cloister: Organizational Decline in Catholic Religious Orders in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), p. 25. 38. Kate O’Brien, Presentation Parlour (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1994), pp. 40–81. 39. Kate O’Brien, Teresa of Avila (London: Max Parrish, 1951), p. 10; Clare Boylan, ‘Introduction’, in Kate O’Brien, The Land of Spices (London: Virago Press, 2000), p. xii. 40. Kate O’Brien, The Last of Summer (London: The Book Club, 1944), p. 175. 41. Eavan Boland, ‘Continuing the Encounter’, in Ordinary People Dancing: Essays on Kate O’Brien, ed. Éibhear Walshe (Cork: Cork University Press, 1993), pp. 20–1. 42. For a slightly different view of O’Brien, the constitution, and de Valera, see Adele Dalsimer, Kate O’Brien: a Critical Reading (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1990), pp. 48–58; for a similar one, see Mary Breen, ‘Something Understood?: Kate O’Brien and The Land of Spices’, in Ordinary People Dancing, pp. 167–9. 43. Kate O’Brien, The Flower of May (New York: Harper, 1953), p. 169. Mère Générale and the Brussels convent appear in both The Land of Spices and The Flower of May. 44. For a nuanced discussion of the paradoxical nature of ‘particular friendships’, which were technically forbidden but often condoned, see Magray, Transforming Power, pp. 46–72. 45. O’Brien, Spices, pp. 223–4. 46. See Emma Donoghue, ‘“Out of Order”: Kate O’Brien’s Lesbian Fictions’, in Ordinary People Dancing, pp. 37, 42, 50. 47. O’Brien, Spices, pp. 279–80. 48. O’Brien, Spices, p. 207. 49. O’Brien, Spices, p. 74. 50. See Clear, ‘Limits’, p. 33, on the lack of ‘the machinery for effective corporate action’ within those orders that had no Mère Générale. See Raftery, Suffer, pp. 282–7, for the Mercy Sisters’ strong emphasis on obedience to the bishop. 51. O’Brien, Spices, p. 210. 52. O’Brien, Spices, p. 211. 53. O’Brien, Spices, p. 15. 54. O’Brien, Spices, p. 55. 55. O’Brien, Spices, p. 9. 56. O’Brien, Spices, p. 12. 57. O’Brien, Spices, p. 75. 58. Dalsimer, O’Brien, p. 61. 59. O’Brien, Spices, p. 75. 60. O’Brien, Spices, p. 81. 61. O’Brien, Spices, p. 106. 62. Murray notes ‘the repressive role of indigenous and pre-cinematic popular cultural traditions’ signalled by the performance, a ‘native cultural discourse that legitimates the barbarism of Margaret’s immediate ostracization and incarceration’ (‘Convents’, pp. 157–8, italics mine). 63. Mighall, Geography, p. 21. 64. The Bells of St Mary’s, dir. Leo McCarey (Republic Studios, 1945).

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65. ‘As Peter Mullan noted to the Italian leftist newspaper Il Manifesto, 8 August 2002, “The Catholic Church is not that different from the Taliban. It seems that every religion considers their enemy the young women, their sexuality, their vitality, maybe because they break the rules of patriarchal society.”’ ‘The Magdalene Sisters: Women’s Oppression and the Irish Clericalist State’, Spartacist Ireland, 3 (Spring/Summer 2003), http://www.icl-fi.org/english/spi/oldsite/ Magdalen.html (accessed 24 January 2006). 66. Peter Mullan, ‘Interview’, Channel Four Film, http://www.channel4.com/film/ reviews/feature.jsp?id ⫽ 111965 (accessed 24 January 2006). 67. Mullan, ‘Interview’, Channel Four Film. 68. Walter Chaw, ‘He Who Courts Controversy: Interview with Peter Mullan’, Film Freak Central (10 August 2003), http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/notes/ pmullaninterview.htm (accessed 24 January 2006). 69. Interview, The Movie Chicks (Summer 2003), http://www.themoviechicks.com/ summer2003/mctmagdalene.html (accessed 24 January 2006). 70. Brian Pendreigh, ‘The Nun Who Imitated Her Real Life’, Sunday Times, 23 February 2003, online, LexisNexis. 71. Jay Richardson, ‘Interview with Peter Mullan and Anne-Marie Duff’, http:// www.futuremovies.co.uk/filmmaking.asp?ID=33 (accessed 25 January 2006). 72. Brogan, Eclipsed, p. 45; Brogan, Stained, p. 6. 73. Brogan, Stained, p. 60. 74. Brogan, Eclipsed, p. 66. 75. Brogan, Stained, pp. 56–7. 76. Before Vatican II, some nuns took male names, some took female ones, according to which patron saints they preferred. Post-Vatican II (1965), some nuns went back to their own Christian names. Victoria and Victoire function symbolically, but could have been the Christian names of the nuns concerned. 77. Mullan notes that there were Protestant Magdalene Asylums in Scotland, and rejects the idea that he intended to make an anti-Catholic film. But intentions and effects are very different things. Gary Crowdus, ‘The Sisters of No Mercy: an Interview with Peter Mullan’, Cineaste, 28:4 (2003): 33. 78. See their website at http://www.voicesemerge.com (accessed 24 January 2006). 79. Raftery, Suffer, p. 16; italics mine. 80. J.J. Lee, ‘Women and the Church since the Famine’, in Women in Irish Society: the Historical Dimension, eds Margaret McCurtain and Donncha Ó Corrain (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), p. 39.

6 Fanfic in Ireland: No Country, No Sex, No Money, No Name Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka

Fan texts [. . .] are shaped through the social norms, aesthetic conventions, interpretive protocols, technological resources, and technical competence of the larger fan community. Fans possess not simply borrowed remnants snatched from mass culture, but their own culture built from the semiotic raw materials the media provides.1 Fanfic, short for fan fiction, is fiction that takes popular television series, films, comic books, famous people and popular fiction as its starting point. Produced by fans of the original texts for other fans and, today, largely published on the internet, fanfic appears to erase the distinction between reader/writer. Fans take literally the poststructuralist view that every reader already rewrites a favoured text and makes it her own. It is not simply that those who, in the words of Roland Barthes, are not ‘intimidated by the censorship implicit in literal meanings’ identify the non-hierarchical plurality of allusions in texts; more than this, fan writers work on the assumption that the original author-generator has long been dead.2 In fanfic, the cultural ‘consumer’ becomes subcultural producer, as fanfic irrevocably alters the perception of its source material, urging the reader to perform radical interventions each time she confronts an original text. According to John Fiske, all popular texts require the active participation of the reader,3 but fanfic has an unprecedented effect: what Henry Jenkins refers to as ‘encouraging viewer activism’.4 The first fanfic stories were self-published in zines (fan-made magazines) in the late 1960s and the 1970s in the USA, from where the practice spread through the increasingly transnational communities of ‘media fans’. Today, fanfic has migrated to the internet, where individual location and physical characteristics are less relevant, at least in the community 74

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of fans, even if nationality, sex, gender and ethnic origin function as markers of fanfic itself, as they also functioned as part of the original texts. Fanfic authors from Ireland have been producing fanfic in increasing numbers since around 1995, mainly through internet-based fan networks.5 Fans from Ireland have obtained USA-produced zines since the late 1970s by mail, and even though transnational fanfic requires no more than access to a media text and to a postal system, access to both of these still assumes a segment of the population over the poverty threshold in industrial societies. Fanfic is transnational in the sense that fans’ interaction with texts and each other partly transcends the context of nation and state. In the words of one writer, ‘I am Irish and a fan, rather than I am an Irish fan.’6 The famous ‘A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace’, posted on the net in 1996, opened with the following statement: Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.7 Fans in the ‘Industrial World’ access net communities with the potential to be ‘politically autonomous islands’.8 To be a fan, then, is to have (at least) a double identity, to inhabit more than one place at once: the geopolitical space in which you are materially based and the fandom/s to which you belong. The geopolitical location of the fan is not relevant, except in the sense that there is closer contact between fans belonging to the same linguistic community. For example, fans from Latin America and Spain interact regularly, and most Irish fanfic belongs to fandoms based on popular television series produced in the USA, and to a lesser extent, the UK, which encourages a greater interaction between fans in those countries. While the locally destructive effects of the global impact of English are rightly deplored in critiques of transnationalism, the global reach of English has one paradoxically positive effect in cyberspace (an ambivalently positive effect likewise exploited by, for instance, feminist networks and environmental activism), where it facilitates exchanges between fans from very different cultural backgrounds. Language barriers are regularly crossed, with Latin American fans accessing anglophone texts available in translation, or European and North American fans producing their own translations of Japanese comics which are only available in the original language, learning Japanese in order to do so.9 Fans go to considerable lengths in order to master the texts they favour, and writers’ interventions can only be legitimated and made

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intelligible through that fandom-specific mastery. For instance, those that belong to the Star Trek fandom are committed to the ‘knowledge’ produced by that television series, and their ties with other fans are centred on that specialized knowledge. In line with this, the majority of writers from Ireland10 that I was able to contact claimed not to have incorporated elements connected to Ireland in their fanfic, including the Irish language or any local dialect; however, signifiers of Irishness do feature, often unconsciously, and occasionally deliberately, in their work. Even though most authors chose neutral (‘Paranoidkitten’, ‘Katherine F’) or foreign-sounding pseudonyms, (‘Jukashi’, ‘Nuckpang’) some chose a pen name that linked them to Ireland (‘Lasair’, ‘Jo, the Irish one’). I also found instances of character names and place names reminiscent of Ireland, and the use of Hiberno-English was relatively common, having slipped undetected into their work. Yet, this divergence is not as relevant as the fact that most writers strive to erase their background from their work. Fandoms can be seen as providers of utopian nationalities, cultural ‘homes’ that can be adopted and abandoned at will, where citizenship is rooted in shared interests and pleasures rather than obligation. The language of fandom is broadly accessible to all fans, but each specific fandom also has its own ‘vernacular’. Fanfic is thus fandom-specific, rather than nation-specific, or genre-specific. Fandom, like any other selfaware community, is socially constructed and regulated, but in the current Irish context of defining citizenship as privilege/exclusion, fandom provides a radical model of cultural allegiance and community building (fans are experts at creating networks as required) which fans from Ireland implicitly endorse. Fans have developed a publishing network which includes selfpublishing authors, host publishing sites (websites) or zines with little or no selection process, Beta readers (personal editors), reviewing publications, discussion forums, and sites or zines presenting writing guidelines or offering supervised training.11 All of these services are freely facilitated and accessed by fans in a wider context of a seemingly inexhaustible variety of fan-art produced in fandom. This set-up, however flexible and open to expansion, operates through a number of conventions that writers are expected to follow, such as the use of pseudonyms, introductory warnings/information on content, disclaimers, and the provision of a contact address. Social regulations also apply, and divisive controversies within the fanfic community (such as those regarding ‘Mary Sues’ and ‘Alt Fics’) indicate an impetus towards self-policing.12 Despite this, fanfic has effectively eliminated the authority associated with authorship, it treats original textual sources like communal property, and in conjunction with a

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self-sufficient and decentralized community it has developed a set of practices of a distinctive egalitarian tone. The fanfic author is a new creature: a reader-writer at the service of a cyborg culture, akin to Donna Haraway’s symbolic ‘cyborg citizen’, which is ‘a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self’, that integrates technological and human traits.13 Fanfic is most affiliated with speculative genres, such as fantasy or science fiction, and Haraway notes that these are the genres most amenable to cyborg formations. Haraway’s analysis of postmodernism envisions writing in an ‘integrated circuit’ that facilitates political subversion, and fanfic would certainly appear to embody this.14 The breaking down of the subject (writer)-object (reader) in the ‘integrated circuit’ of fandom has been pathologized within sectors of the academy and the popular media, testifying to the way in which this activity cannot be located comfortably in traditional models of writer as source and reader as consumer.15 For example, ‘deranged’ and ‘bizarre beyond words’, were used to describe some types of fanfic in an otherwise balanced article published in 2005, in the Irish Times.16 The piece, titled ‘Welcome to the World of Fanfic’, was introductory in style, noting the transnational character of fanfic, and its existence outside the accepted parameters for literary creation in an Irish context. However, the effect of the article was not to celebrate any challenge to normative culture and national literary production fanfic may represent but to immunize the cultural body against fanfic by demarcating it as other, just as a comparable recent article, claiming to introduce the phenomenon of blogs (open-access internet diaries) to an Irish public, published by the Sunday Tribune, too readily dismissed the political aspects of this form of literature in Ireland.17 If fans and fanfic are often depicted in the media as a more or less objectionable oddity conveniently removed from familiar contexts, the culture industries have taken the opposite stance, and mimic characteristics of fandom, as shown by additional material included in DVDs, the ostentatious intertextuality of many recent films, and participatory gimmicks in the media.18 Not all media responses have been hostile: ‘Fan/ tastic Voyage’ or ‘When Frodo Met Sam’, in the feminist magazine Bitch and the Sunday Times Magazine respectively, presented fanfic as an intriguing literary subculture worth investigating (genuinely or just for kicks).19 Further, fanfic communities are being increasingly regulated according to normative hierarchical and financial priorities. A dispute within the partly fan-maintained internet game Cantr (conceived and set up by a designer from Ireland) over issues of fanfic and copyright is a recent example of how these contradictions have the potential to divide

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even the fan community.20 As all fanfic writers are in breach of copyright, in the purview of copyright law fanfic is an illegal practice. The fansite closures legally enforced by Paramount, the owners of the Star Trek franchise, in the 1980s in the USA, opened the way for a number of court cases involving fans over the years, but, despite legal vigilance, copyright is increasing difficult to police, and may well soon be an obsolete legal concept. The majority of fanfic writers that I have interviewed respect copyright in so far as they claim that it would not be ‘fair’ to get paid for a reworking of borrowed material. ‘Ownership’ is at stake, not at the level of profit, but rather in consonance with Haraway’s claim that the ‘cyborg citizen’ tends to rewrite oppressive narratives, with a view to narrating a more inclusive space in which she is no longer oppressed. This claim was the starting point for Frank Dery’s analysis of fanfic, and it is easy to see why, as some examples from fanfic authors working in Ireland show.21 For instance, ‘Milk’, a story by Lasair, reviews the childhood of a character from the fantasy book saga Harry Potter to find sexual abuse.22 ‘The Bishounen Theories’, by Jukashi, borrows a heroic warrior from The Lord of the Rings who turns out to be more upset by stained armour than by the beheading of a friend.23 ‘Spinning’, by Claire, focuses on the nuances of a television personality to show that he has a crush on his male counterpart in the quiz show Have I Got News for You?24 ‘Another Kind of Exile’, a poem by Ebony, is given over to the ruminations of a secondary character from the dystopian science fiction television series Blake’s 7.25 ‘Star Wars: a New [Insert Humorous Word Here]’, by Nuckpang, translates the mechanical ‘blips’ of a robot from the film Star Wars: the Return of the Jedi to reveal existential despair.26 ‘The Milky Way’, by Cyclops, borrows the protagonists of the fantasy-adventure series Xena: Warrior Princess to eroticize pregnancy and lactation.27 These ‘fics’ systematically ‘speak’ taboo subjects. In an Irish context of institutional silencing through censorship, these writers express suppressed violence and trauma, give protagonist status to ‘disposable’ characters, and celebrate female and queer sexualities outside of patriarchal and heteronormative representations. Their relationship to ‘official Ireland’ is distinctly oppositional in that they do not append, but offend the normative heroics of conservative discourse, providing a ‘home’ for dissent, a space for dialogue. The collective writing of ‘sims’ (role-play) provides examples of this.28 ‘[USS Endeavour] SD 240109.09 Chief Operations Officer Log, Lt. JG Plekhov’, by Jos Elkink, simultaneously introduces a character to the Star Trek universe and to the simming writing group it was sent to, by forwarding a distress call from a shuttle adrift in space.29 In fanfic, the call is always answered. Another example, the ‘Sidhe Macanor String’, by Jo,

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the Irish One, presents a series of interactive episodes that take place within the framework of the fantasy saga The Wheel of Time.30 ‘The Traveller crossover’, by Channeller, merges the science fiction television series Andromeda with an original novel previously written by Channeller herself.31 In fact, there is also an increasing amount of fanfic based on other fanfic. This dialogic aspect has an egalitarian impetus. While it is now well accepted by scholars that writing has historically been bound up with patriarchal power, there is a general sense that this is no longer the case. However, in Ireland, despite the fact that women make up a majority among English graduates and postgraduate students in literature, in theatre audiences, and in reading groups, they are overwhelmingly constructed as passive readers, not sites and sources of creativity. Despite the fact that the great majority of the authors that I have contacted have asserted that being male or female is not relevant to their work, gender remains a central issue to fanfic. Many point out that it should not be important, because ‘one mark of a really good [fanfic] writer is that I can’t actually tell what their opinions are, or their nationality, or their [sex]’.32 However, it seems that between 80 and 90 per cent of all fanfic is written by women, a fact largely accepted by writers themselves.33 Katherine F. puts it this way: ‘In fandom, one is female until proven otherwise.’34 Corroborating this, it was claimed in 2002 that 80 per cent of the 100,000 members of Fanfiction.net, one of the most important fanfic websites, were female,35 which is especially worth noting in a context where 80 per cent of internet users are male.36 This has been connected by Jenkins to the ‘historical split’ in the (male-dominated, fiction-oriented) science fiction fan community in the United States in the 1960s. According to Jenkins, women found that they were not welcome at cons (fan-organized conventions), and so they went on to create their own fan networks, which resulted in the consolidation of a femaledominated media fandom from which fanfic was to develop.37 Female fanfic writers may not have deliberately developed a form of literature that is politically informed, but fanfic has certainly been created from a position of marginality. In Ireland, women writers also produce the majority of fanfic, and some of them have explored issues or presented settings associated with women. For example, ‘En Suite, En Fin’, by Cyclops, based on the television series Xena: Warrior Princess, sets the action in an Amazon village and includes a feast at which stories (adventures from the series) are shared, linking this fictional audience to the fan community.38 Another example is ‘Automorphism’, by Lasair, based on Harry Potter, which presents a young wizard woman suffering from ‘internalised misogyny’ who creates a magic

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potion that will turn her into a man, because she feels this is the only way in which she can fully enjoy sex with other men.39 In Ireland, there have been few public outlets in which to explore, celebrate, and develop women’s solidarity or female masculinities, and fan stories such as these facilitate an accessible, collective discussion space by tapping into a transnational forum.40 Even though fanfic focused on women is comparatively rare, except when based on original texts with a strong female presence, the ‘interventions’ on borrowed male characters consistently undermine stereotypical masculine values, such as valour, self-control and normative sexuality, implicitly critiquing hierarchical gender structures.41 The fanfic author may exist in a disembodied form, but her characters tend not to. The most popular type of fanfic, slash, concentrates on stories that explore male homoeroticism and it often shows a fascination with male bodies in close contact, as well as a relishing of the physical specificity of sexual encounters between men.42 This type of fanfic has attracted most critical attention, in accounts that tend to present slash as the apex of an already ‘anomalous’ practice. To read even one fanfic that ‘queers’ ostensibly heterosexual characters or figures in the mainstream media has the immediate effect of undoing ‘official’ narratives that are predicated on silencing undesirable topics. Given that most authors of slash are heterosexual women, it has been suggested that these writers wish to create a fantasy of equality.43 However, this type of fanfic is not always utopian or celebratory, and it often deals with difficult issues in an uncompromising manner. Thus, gay male slash is partly an intervention in the restricted models of masculinity produced by the mainstream, seeking to expand their emotional range and undermine their normativity. As importantly, slash is also partly an exploration of eroticism, reclaiming male homosexual scenarios as a source of pleasure for women. As one author commented, ‘Ireland has been a hugely repressive society for people of all sexual orientations. In years to come we may see [sexually graphic fanfic] as inappropriate, but I think it’s symptomatic of lifting the lid of a pressure cooker – things are bound to explode at first.’44 The overwhelming majority of fanfic takes the form of short stories, of about 1500 words on average. The short story was the most popular form in Ireland in the mid-twentieth century, and its success attributed to a number of factors, one of which was its evolution of the devices and intimacies of oral tradition.45 Both the formats favoured in fanfic and the approachability of fanfic authors can certainly be understood as a continuation of modes of orality and oral literature. For example, much fanfic is produced as an immediate reaction to a development in a serialized media text, chains of stories or open invitations to pursue single themes

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(‘Round Robins’ and ‘Challenges’) are common practices, and most fanfic encourages and expects a direct response from the audience, with informal exchanges being an integral part of the process. The overwhelming majority of writers use pseudonyms, a convention in the form (rather than a precaution in the context of copyright breach), which is also linked to an authorial self-effacement consonant with the oral tradition, foregrounding communal goals. However, in the context of national literatures, the most telling feature in fanfic produced in Ireland is the fact that these authors’ interests, their commitments, and their pleasures do not lie in Ireland, but elsewhere. Katherine F.’s story ‘Inis Icileán’, whose protagonist is a secondary character in the TV series The X Files, provided a string of exceptions to this rule: set in Ireland, engaging with contemporary Irish politics, including intertextual references to no less than three Irish writers and some dialogue in Irish.46 However, for the most part Irish fanfic remains distinctly un-‘Irish’, the (laborious) result of foregrounding the parameters set up by a given fandom/text. The incorporation of Ireland into the EU and the influx of foreign workers have problematized notions of Irish cultural distinctiveness, and it is not a coincidence that many of the writers considered here began their careers around the same time as the Irish Government published, in 1995, a Green Paper on broadcasting under the title Active or Passive?: Broadcasting in the Future Tense.47 The paper voiced concerns about the ‘identity crisis’ of the nation and urged the media to fight ‘cultural amnesia’.48 The parental and pedagogical role of the state and the power of the media referenced in this paper are dismantled by fans. Fanfic in Ireland represents a space which erases distinctions between natives and residents, an ‘imaginary community’ built on a common ground of creativity, where ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’ are always in the making. Whether understood as an array of quantum realities, or as live spaces without clear boundaries, fanfic’s adoption of ‘universes’ celebrates unfixed and alien cultural citizenships. It is worth emphasizing, however, that media fans have redrafted the notion of citizenship rather than eliminating it altogether. Fandoms have in many respects the connotations of the local, and fans have developed a global federation of organic, close-knit communities that rely on ‘home-grown’ (fandom-specific) literature to develop their sense of selfhood.

Notes I am indebted to the following people for providing information and discussing related topics with me: Lydia Bigley, Jos Elkink, Tuula Juvonen, Rosalind Hanmer,

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Frank McGuinness, Margaret Moran, Stephen Rodney and all the fanfic readers and writers who completed for my research a questionnaire on fanfic. 1. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 49 (emphasis added). 2. Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth (London: The Athlone Press, 1987), p. 69. See also Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 142–9. 3. John Fiske, Television Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1987). 4. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, p. 2. 5. There had been fan cons (fan-organized conventions) before in Ireland, but the country saw its first media con, which attracted 1100 people, in 1993 (Time Warp I). 6. Damson, questionnaire 2003. 7. John Perry Barlow, ‘A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace’, in Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, ed. Peter Ludlow (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 28. 8. Peter Ludlow, ‘Preface’, in Crypto Anarchy, p. xix. 9. For work on the Latin-American fans of Xena: Warrior Princess, see for example Walter Alesci Chelini, ‘Xena: Warrior Princess out of the Closet?: a Melodramatic Reading into the Show by Latin American and Spanish Lesbian & Gay Fans’, in Femme Fatalities: Representations of Strong Women in the Media, eds R. Schubart and A. Gjelsvik (Göthenburg: Nordicom, 2004), pp. 203–18. 10. By ‘writers from Ireland’ I mean natives of and residents in the island of Ireland. 11. For two examples from Ireland presenting writing guidelines, see James Bacon (ed.), Earisheen, 1 (October 2002). See also Lasair, ‘Lasair’s Quick and Dirty Guide to Britpicking’ (2004), http://www.lasairandmaya.com/lasairfic/ (accessed 21 January 2004). 12. Mary Sue is fic with a ‘perfect’ idealized central character who ‘stands in’ for the writer; Alt Fic is a broad term that encompasses slash and, in particular, femslash (see note 42 below). 13. Donna Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 190–233, 203, 205. 14. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, p. 207. 15. Joli Jenson, ‘Fandom as Pathology: the Consequences of Characterization’, in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 9–30. 16. Anna Carey, ‘Welcome to the World of Fanfic’, Irish Times, 27 January 2005, p. 16. 17. Ed Power, ‘The Blog Revolution and How it Changed the World’, Sunday Tribune (‘i Magazine’ Supplement), 6 February 2005, pp. 8–10. The article reduces politics to the Northern Ireland conflict, a typical occurrence within dominant orthodox nationalist discourses. 18. Henry Jenkins, ‘The Poachers and the Stormtroopers: Cultural Convergence in the Digital Age’ (Spring 1998), conference paper delivered at University of Michigan, http://www.commons.somewhere.com/rre/1998/The.Poachers. and.the.Sto.html (accessed 07 May 2004).

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19. Noy Thrupkaew, ‘Fan/tastic Voyage’, Bitch, 20 (Spring 2003): 40–45, 92; Milly Chen, ‘When Frodo Met Sam’, Sunday Times Magazine, 18 July 2004, p. 16. 20. Personal correspondence with the creator of Cantr, January 2006. 21. Mark Dery, ‘Slashing the Borg: Resistance is Fertile’ (1996), http://www. dds.nl/⬃n5m/n5m/media/texts/markdery.htm (accessed 12 March 2001). 22. Lasair, ‘Milk’ (2002), http://www.lasairandmaya.com/lasairfic/ (accessed 21 June 2004). J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter (London: Bloomsbury, 1997–). 23. Jukashi, ‘The Bishounen Theories’ (2003), http://www.fanfiction.net (accessed 30 July 2004). The Lord of the Rings, dir. Peter Jackson (New Line Cinema, 2001, 2002, 2003). 24. Claire, ‘Spinning’ (2004), http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user⫽ kittenfic (accessed 11 July 2004). Have I Got News for You?, dir. Ben Fuller, John F.D. Northover, Paul Wheeler (British Broadcasting Corporation, 1990–). 25. Ebony, ‘Another Kind of Exile’ (1999), http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/ Network/9754 (accessed 21 June 2004). Blake’s 7 (British Broadcasting Corporation, 1978–81). 26. Nuckpang, ‘Star Wars, a New [Insert Humorous Word Here]’ (2003), http:// www.fanfiction.com (accessed 30 July 2004). Star Wars: the Return of the Jedi, dir. George Lucas and Richard Marquand (Lucasfilm, 1983). 27. Cyclops, ‘The Milky Way’ (1999), http://uk.geocities.com/lucath/blonde.html (accessed 21 June 2004). Xena: Warrior Princess (Renaissance Pictures, 1995–2001). 28. In ‘sim’ (‘simulation’, also known as role-play) fanfic, a writer creates an original character which interacts with other fanfic authors’ creations in the context of a given ‘universe’ (fans refer to the given parameters of an original text as a ‘universe’). 29. Jos Elkink, ‘[USS Endeavour] SD 240109.09 Chief Operations Officer Log, Lt. JG Plekhov’ (2001) (correspondence with the author, 2005). Star Trek (Paramount, 1966–9). 30. Jo, the Irish One, ‘Sidhe Macanor String’ (2004), http://www.wheeloftimerp.com (accessed 8 March 2004). Robert Jordan, The Wheel of Time (New York: Tor Books, 1990–). 31. Channeller, ‘The Traveller crossover’ (2003), http://www.Fanfiction.net (accessed 24 June 2004). Andromeda, dir. Peter DeLuise (Fireworks, 2000–). 32. Katherine F., personal correspondence, May 2003. 33. Camille Bacon-Smith, ‘Spock among the Women’, New York Times Book Review, 16 November 1986; Maryanne Murray Buechner, ‘Pop Fiction: Stars and Storybook Characters are inspiring more Teens to Write for the Web – Is This a Good Thing?’, Time, 2 March 2002, p. 14. 34. Personal correspondence with Katherine F., May 2003. 35. Buechner, ‘Pop Fiction’, p. 14. 36. According to Carmen Luke, ‘Cyber-schooling and Technological Change: Multiliteracies for New Times’, Multiliteracies: Literary Learning and the Design of Social Futures, eds Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 69–91, esp. p. 86. 37. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, p. 48. 38. Cyclops, ‘En Suite, En Fin’ (1999), http://www.uk.geocities.com/lucath/ blonde.html (accessed 30 July 2004). Xena: Warrior Princess. 39. Lasair, ‘Automorphism’ (2003), http://www.lasairandmaya.com/lasairfic/ (accessed 21 June 2004). Rowling, Harry Potter.

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40. ‘www.femalemasculinity.net’ was set up in Ireland in 2005. 41. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, pp. 165–8; Thevina, ‘Does Gender Matter?: Women, Tolkien and the Online Fanfiction Community’, The Fanfic Symposium (2003), http://www.trickster.org/sympsium/symp144.html (accessed 7 May 2004). 42. ‘Slash’ is often used as the generic term for fanfic with homosexual and lesbian content. I use slash here to mean gay male-centred fics. Lesbian slash (where straight characters are refigured as lesbian) is known as ‘femslash’. 43. Constance Penley, ‘Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology’, in Technoculture, eds Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 135–62. 44. Cyclops, personal correspondence, May 2003. 45. Declan Kiberd, ‘Story-telling: the Gaelic Tradition’, in The Irish Short Story (Buckinghamshire: Collin Smythe, 1979), pp. 13–22. 46. Katherine F., ‘Inis Icileán’ (before 2002), http://www.squidge.org/terma/ katherne.htm (correspondence with the author, 2004). The X Files, dir. Robert Mandel (Twentieth Century Fox Television, 1993–98). 47. Active or Passive?: Broadcasting in the Future Tense (Green Paper on Broadcasting) (Dublin: Government of Ireland Publications, 1995). 48. Active or Passive?, p. 130.

7 Widening the Frame: the Politics of Mural Photography in Northern Ireland Kathryn Conrad

Analysis of Northern Irish political wall murals and their symbols has been almost as ubiquitous as the murals themselves. Little has been written, however, about the implications of actually photographing and reproducing the murals – yet images of them circulate through postcards, books, souvenirs and the internet, a colourful collection of images that continue to shape perceptions of Northern Ireland both at home and abroad. The constant reproduction, circulation and commodification of photographs of political murals, however, perpetuates a narrow vision of a Northern Ireland shaped primarily by a history of (para)military conflict. This in turn has material implications, effectively fetishizing a violent vision of Northern Ireland in both the local and international imaginary and thus shaping not only Northern Irish politics and culture but the economic and political relationship between Northern Ireland and the rest of the world. This chapter is an attempt to widen the frame: to make the photographic framing process more visible and in so doing to explore the ways in which the photographic frame creates the larger frame through which Northern Ireland is seen. I approach this analysis of Northern Irish murals from the perspective not only of an academic who teaches and writes about Northern Ireland but also as a photographer who is responsible for disseminating images of the murals throughout the world via the internet and print.1 My recognition of my own complicity in the process of reproducing an impression of Northern Ireland that my written work has attempted to challenge led me to consider more critically the process in which I was, at least initially, naively engaged. As is the case for many who teach and write about Northern Ireland, I have also used mural images as a point of entry into discussing Northern Ireland, focusing primarily on decoding the murals themselves. Such an approach is limited, however. In ‘Painting Landscapes’, 85

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Neil Jarman has argued that ‘to regard the murals essentially, or only, as images is [. . .] to restrict their power. Their very location affects how they are interpreted and what they mean, while the location is used and treated differently because of the presence of the paintings.’2 While Jarman argues for the need to understand murals in their material contexts, he also acknowledges that the circulating images of the murals, the de- and re-contextualized murals, have a power as ‘a highly mobile signifier of violence and danger’; ‘their power and importance is always in part derived from this capacity to resonate meaning both at a specific localised site and at seemingly endless other sites, at one and the same time’.3 Jarman’s essay makes clear that there is an important relationship between the murals, the muralists and the audience of the murals; and he alludes to the importance of photography when he notes that, during the tours of Belfast that have become even more prevalent since his article was written, ‘the tour bus stops to allow the sightseers to disembark to make their own photographic record of their visit’.4 Jarman sees the mural photograph as an ‘image’ of the mural that takes on new meanings when relocated away from its originary space. But the photograph is more than an image: it is the material outcome of a particular technology and a particular set of choices on the part of the photographer. As John Szarkowski points out, ‘photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one’s cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.’5 The choice of what and what not to frame, in other words, is an essential element of the photographic process, one that profoundly affects the viewer’s understanding of the photographic subject. To understand the relationship between the mural in context and the mural as floating signifying image, therefore, one needs to consider mural photography in the particular geopolitical space of Northern Ireland. It is on this tension between the selective image of the mural, the photograph and the mural in its material occasions that this chapter will focus. Photography in Northern Ireland has been a charged process since the beginning of the conflict. Allen Feldman notes that ‘photography in the policed zones of working-class Belfast has been a dangerous avocation throughout the conflict. The photo lens of the aimed camera is considered equivalent to both the gun sight and the pointed rifle.’6 The Linen Hall Library’s 2000 exhibition catalogue, Images & Reflections: Photographers and Writers Seeing our Century, evokes this sense of threat through juxtaposition of a photograph and text. On the left-hand page, the catalogue

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reproduces a photograph of a soldier seated on an armoured Humber Pig riot-control vehicle (and in front of a Republican mural, no less), readying his camera and gazing at the photographer. The heading, ‘Soldier’, and the caption, ‘Soldier with camera, Belfast, 1980s / Sean McKernan, Belfast Exposed’, implies the complex relationship between photography and power more fully realized when read in conjunction with the facing page, an excerpt from Glenn Patterson’s Fat Lad: Hugh McManus told Melanie, last time she saw him, that a camera had been found in a derelict building across the road from his parents’ law firm. The local TV companies sent their cameras round to film it. A crowd gathered, as crowds do. Someone said that a car which had passed the scene several times was army undercover, taking pictures. The car sped off when someone else tried to take a picture of it [. . .] You forget sometimes till you went back, Hugh said, how bad it was. Somebody was always filming somebody else. You didn’t know from one moment to the next if they were filming you too. The temptation was to act as though they were at all times.7 As the text goes on to suggest, this filming places the objects of the photographic/filmic gaze into a larger narrative of conflict in which ‘everyone had a part to play, however humble’ – a deliberate re-framing of the clichéd phrase so often used by ‘police and politicians’. In this case, the parts to be played are the parts of victims (‘bit parts, tit-for-tat parts’): ‘five workmen heading home on such and such a road’ or ‘a schoolgirl caught in the crossfire’.8 The photographic process in Northern Ireland is linked here to a surveillance culture in which the captured image is part of a larger system of information with deadly consequences – a surveillance culture aligned with violence as a form of control and a counterculture that returns the violent gaze. Of course, combatants have not been the only photographers in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland has been represented through the work of photojournalists throughout the history of the Troubles. In the early 1980s, Belinda Loftus suggested the extent to which the Troubles were imperfectly represented by the then-current generation of British war photographers who focused primarily on ‘British soldiers in action on the streets; children involved in violence; political leaders; paramilitary fighters; and IRA bombs on the British mainland.’9 As Declan McGonagle puts it, ‘sometimes it seems as if only certain perceptions [of Northern Ireland] are permissible (viz) tragic, turbulent, taciturn, tribal and tiresome’.10 These perceptions are arguably reinforced in the publication of

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photographs in black and white, a traditional choice for photojournalism; this is also true of the photographs I have included in this chapter, which, rendered into black and white by the economies of publication, make sometimes upbeat or amusing photographs seem ‘grittier’ or more serious through the historical associations of the medium. The perceptions of Northern Ireland as ‘tragic, turbulent, taciturn, tribal and tiresome’ are echoed in the objects of the tourist’s photographic gaze. Jarman’s allusion to the new tourist culture of Northern Ireland evokes a vision of the photographer as consumer, a less threatening player/participant in the circumstance of the more obviously violent surveillance culture of Northern Ireland. A commercial infrastructure has emerged to facilitate this process, as with the tour buses that take their passengers through the mural-rich areas of working-class republican and loyalist Belfast, as, for instance, in Figure 7.1. As the conditions of this photograph imply, this is a safer gaze in a safer time than that of which Feldman writes: note in the photograph not only the open curiosity of the tour bus passengers, but also the unabashed gaze I wield as the photographer. The object of the gaze of the tourist is the residue of the conflict, occasionally referred to as ‘terror tourism’: the tourist (and, as Jarman notes, occasionally

Figure 7.1

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the local) traverses the city with the express purpose of viewing and recording signs of the Northern Ireland conflict.11 Not only is the tourist gaze generally trained on the remnants of the conflict, but that gaze sometimes relies literally on the infrastructure of colonialism, as when the walls of Derry where the surveillance cameras are mounted are billed as the place to get a good view; Spurgeon Thompson has noted the ‘structural homology between political or state surveillance (police and military) and tourist surveillance’ in such places – a connection visible from the photographs I took from the wall that faces the mostly Catholic Bogside area of Derry (see figures 7.2 and 7.3).12 Sontag pushes the homology further: ‘To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power.’13 The process of the photographic cataloguing of signs of the conflict both engages and distances the photographer and, ultimately, the viewer of the photograph. Sontag argues that ‘the feeling of being exempt from calamity stimulates interest in looking at painful pictures, and looking at them suggests and strengthens the feeling that one is exempt’.14 For the touristphotographer who leaves Northern Ireland after the terror-tour, the photographs become reminders both of one’s nearness to the conflict and comfort at one’s distance; they also become proof for others of one’s adventurousness – a way of experiencing conflict and ‘terrorism’ that

Figure 7.2

Figure 7.3

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resonates as simultaneously excitingly present and safely past. For the professional or semi-professional cataloguer of murals, the power over the subject is both constitutive and economic: such photographers are reminiscent of the folklore collectors of the nineteenth century, cataloguing ballads and stories as discrete objects and ultimately ‘owning’ and controlling the circulation of their photographic output.15 Photographers, in other words, have a great deal of control over how Northern Ireland is literally, and figuratively, seen; and what is ultimately seen resonates locally and globally, offering ‘terror’ as a fetish object that can be safely consumed. Northern Irish political wall murals are amongst the most popular, prevalent visual artefacts for the photographer, whether amateur or professional, to capture; and given the scopic terror of recent Northern Irish history, the mural has been an obvious object of the photographic gaze for several reasons. The violence that the photographic gaze has signified historically means that, even in post-Agreement Northern Ireland, it is much safer to point one’s camera at a mural than, for instance, a local businessman or a soldier or a woman walking alone. All the more reason, too, for a tight frame on the photo: one makes it clear that one is taking pictures of the mural and not anything else. The murals also offer a compelling focus: colourful, politically charged, seemingly iconic. As Oona Woods notes, murals have featured heavily in British television news programmes and documentaries on Northern Ireland; the murals, particularly ‘visually intimidating’ ones, are shown in lieu of showing the members of proscribed organizations, since such people were for many years banned from appearing on television.16 Their circulation, however, reinforces the notion that Northern Ireland is reducible to the set of symbols and issues represented on the murals, and obscures the way in which this misperception is reproduced. The veteran photographer, visitor and local know that these images are always changing. New murals emerge out of the ashes of the old. Muralpainting styles change; paint bombs are thrown; new events are reflected in the murals. And the muralists themselves, sometimes self-promoting and sometimes anonymous, respond to the attention they are given. More murals and signs emerge in response to catalogues, newspaper articles, tourist visits and other evidence of the notice generated by the circulation of the images. The unspoken dialogue between photographer and mural painter is an economy of consumption, as Sontag suggests: ‘to consume means to burn, to use up – and, therefore, to need to be replenished. As we make images and consume them, we need still more images; and still more.’17 This is most visible in the increasingly frequent use of murals in postcards (usually with very little contextualizing information) and even

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Figure 7.4

on refrigerator magnets (Figure 7.4). Note the tight frame on the individual mural photographs on the magnet: it is the image of the mural alone, divorced from any surroundings and describing a decorative, commodifiable Belfast that can be purchased in the tourist office and presented as ‘Beautiful Gifts’ ‘Just for You’.18 Eoghan McTigue’s photographic exhibition ‘All Over Again’, a collection of photographs of painted-over murals, focuses on the process of change itself, and Aaron Kelly, in his essay ‘Walled Communities’ that accompanies McTigue’s exhibition catalogue, has suggested that, if murals are taken, by and large, to be examples of either Loyalist or Republican iconography, then something must be said about what an icon now means, for this has implications for the supposed communal identities instantiated by murals as cultural symbols. Notably, the icon has been divested of its original religious ideological import as the manifestation of a sacral presence that assumes a seamless receptive community. This dissemination of iconic presence is fundamentally

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rewritten by our late capitalist or postmodern society, wherein the image is transformed by what Marx dubbed commodity fetishism. Put simply, the image becomes a compensatory fetish object that disavows its actual historical referent and social context. In Walter Benjamin’s terms, the image loses its ‘aura’ through both its reification and reproducibility.19 This is the complex milieu out of which the murals arise: with an eye to the eyes that watch, but increasingly based on an economy of consumption and less on dialogue. What, then, is being consumed, precisely? Although Kelly refers to the reproducibility of the mural and its iconic images, what are ultimately being reproduced are photographs of the murals. The murals’ rich environment is generally lost in these snapshots – and what we see are primarily snapshots, collected as data: mural photographs generally make no attempt to make their own constructedness visible but are, rather, read as mere recording. There is the sense that the snapshot, without artifice, represents things as they really are, a transparent reality. But what is naturalized in the snapshot? What is presumably self-evident? Photography is never simply recording. As concerned with aesthetics as much as with representation, photographers circulate images that are themselves just as constitutive as they are representative. As John Tagg writes, ‘like the state, the camera is never neutral’.20 As the photographer frames the mural, s/he makes several choices: this is worth photographing; this is where the end of the image should be; this is the best angle; this should be left in, this out. But, all of these choices profoundly affect one’s understanding of what one is seeing even as those choices are often invisible to the viewer of the photograph. Political signs, for instance, or painted political images on tarps are often included in collections of mural photography;21 while this choice is certainly logical, it weights the definition of ‘mural’ toward political signage, leaving an image like Figure 7.5, a mural without a clear sectarian message, as categorically anomalous. The definitional question – ‘what, precisely, is a mural?’ – is certainly open to debate. One thinks primarily of large paintings on gable ends, but the line between ‘murals’ and ‘graffiti’ is often blurred. An article by Marie Foy in the Belfast Telegraph, for instance, reports: A Belfast City Council scheme to remove sectarian graffiti on the Shankill Road could land one of the UK’s top environmental awards. Twenty-seven murals and 7000 metres of kerbstone paint portraying unionist and republican messages have been scrubbed away. And

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Figure 7.5

now the cleanup project has made it to the final of the UK’s People and Places Awards, managed here by Tidy Northern Ireland.22 Any distinction between ‘mural’ and ‘graffiti’ is here elided; later in the article, graffiti is considered together in a list with ‘litter, dog fouling, flyposting’; the article, read as a whole, suggests a surprising equivalence between muralists and ‘litter louts’. The context for the article is a postceasefire, post-Agreement Northern Ireland in which murals are read as part of the ‘legacy of the past’, as Alan Woods, awards organizer, describes them. Despite the surprising equivalences suggested by this newspaper article, it also suggests a particular, historically specific, local and contested environment for the murals, conditions not visible to the viewer of a typical mural photograph and certainly not implied by, for instance, the refrigerator magnet of Figure 7.4. The juxtaposition of this campaign and the postcards and other souvenirs that feature mural photographs suggests that murals occupy a contested place in the new Northern Ireland: for some, they are Northern Ireland’s most popular commodity, and for

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Figure 7.6

others, they are barriers not only to reimagining geopolitical terrain, but also to encouraging foreign investment and development. Mural photography has tended to elide these issues. Graffiti, in the sense of text or image added to or near a mural by someone other than the muralist(s), complicate the boundaries of the mural image in interesting ways; photographs of murals with graffiti are less transparent, since they are less obviously recordings of a static object. The mural photographer must choose what to do when faced with a mural that includes graffiti. McCormick’s ‘Mural Directory’ describes murals as ‘deteriorated’, indicating that the ‘mural has faded or is covered with graffiti’; Rolston tends not to comment on graffiti in his Drawing Support collections, even when they occupy a significant portion of the photographic frame.23 Changing the frame of the photograph changes one’s understanding of what one is looking at, particularly when graffiti is part of the image. For instance, Figure 7.6 represents a typical mural photograph, tightly framed and cropped around the mural image; Figure 7.7, on the other hand, photographed in late March 2004, implies the charged context in which these murals occur: in this case, the graffito

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Figure 7.7

‘assesins!’ suggests a Spanish viewer whose reading of ETA, most likely immediately following the Madrid train bombings, is at odds with that of the idealism of the Republican muralist(s). The photographs, read together, suggest that the relationship between muralist and viewers is multi-layered, dialogic, and includes the photographer herself. The pairing of images is one strategy for making the photographic framing process more visible, for denaturalizing the image. Another, to echo the title of the chapter, is literally to widen the frame, as I have done in Figures 7.8 and 7.9: in so doing, we see the murals in the context, respectively, of a Belfast in the midst of development, with the Sandy Row mural’s location next to a new Day’s Inn, and, in the case of the paramilitary salute photo, of a Belfast that is part of a global marketplace of consumption – of Disney films, beer, and even political art.24 In commenting on a photograph of a painted-over mural that appears next to a David Allen advertising sign, Kelly remarks that ‘the photograph captures the advertising sign in the midst of rotating its display, proffering another indeterminate sign, an openness between advertisements that

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Figure 7.8

Figure 7.9

seduces us towards another blankness – the phantasmagoric realm of commodity culture’.25 I would go further and suggest that the photograph itself has the potential either to participate uncritically in the latter, even to encourage it, or to make that ‘blankness’ more visible. I will end with a particularly evocative photograph given the concerns of this chapter (see Figure 7.10), one that refers explicitly to ‘frames’. A typical mural photograph might focus in tightly around the ‘Saoirse – Free the Prisoners’ sign that occupies the space just below the centre of the photograph. This photograph, however, has a wider frame, in line with the slogan on the advertisement. In the Varilux advertisement, what is meant to ‘count’ is precisely what lies inside its metal frame: the advertisement attempts to encourage the viewer to ignore what surrounds it, to embrace the promise of framing what really ‘counts’ – the eye, with which one is viewing the advertisement – by buying the spectacle frames. But as a photographer, I have framed the photograph to include the politically charged but currently, in post H-Block Northern Ireland, mostly irrelevant ‘Saoirse’ sign: that is, by the time this picture was taken in 2004, the Maze prison had closed, and the freedom of political prisoners was no longer a live political issue. By framing the image as I have, I offer the viewer the possibility that what ‘counts’ is both the advertisement in a Northern Ireland whose consumer culture is developing rapidly with the promise of the peace dividend, but also an outdated sign, individual graffiti tags, fencing, and dilapidated buildings, all of which exist simultaneously in this image, just as they do in Northern Ireland: Northern Ireland is an environment in which urban decay, consumer culture, urban renewal, multinational investment, local and

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Figure 7.10

global political discourse can be literally visible in a single frame. The photographer chooses what visual markers remain in play. What I hoped to show in this photograph, ultimately, is not just a Northern Ireland of sectarian division, but a Northern Ireland whose sectarian divisions are itself commodifiable, thanks in part to the complex web of photographic images; this in turn has a material impact on political, social and economic development in Northern Ireland. Widening the frame has the potential to expose the commodification of the conflict to show, literally, a Northern Ireland that exists in a more complex, if not necessarily always more hopeful, dialogue than that indicated by sectarian discourse. With that in mind, I might suggest that we as viewers must continually remind ourselves to be critically aware of the substantial impact of how our own gaze is framed.

Notes My thanks to my colleague Cathy Preston: our discussions of visual culture have helped sharpen my own thinking about this topic. A General Research Fund

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grant from the Center for Research, Inc. at the University of Kansas helped support the research for this project. 1. This chapter emerged out of a conference presentation and lecture delivered several times in 2005; although page and printing limitations prevent me from reproducing many of the images that illustrated that talk, a photo essay that will supplement the ideas presented here currently appears at http://people.ku.edu/⬃kconrad/widenframe.html (accessed 31 January 2006). All of the photographs included in this essay are my own – with the exception of the photographs within the fridge magnet, which are credited to the Irish Picture Company, www.irishpicturecompany.com., copyright 2000. 2. Neil Jarman, ‘ Painting Landscapes: the Place of Murals in the Symbolic Construction of Urban Space’, in Symbols in Northern Ireland, ed. Anthony Buckley (Belfast: Queen’s University Belfast Institute of Irish Studies, 1998); reprinted http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/bibdbs/murals/jarman.htm (accessed 21 January 2006). 3. Jarman, ‘Painting Landscapes’. 4. Jarman, ‘Painting Landscapes’. 5. John Szarkowski, as quoted in Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 169. 6. Allen Feldman, ‘Violence and Vision: the Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror’, Public Culture, 10:1 (1997): 26. 7. Images & Reflections: Photographers and Writers Seeing our Century, ed. and curator John Gray (Belfast: Linen Hall Library, 2000), p. 68. 8. Gray, Images, p. 68. 9. Belinda Loftus, ‘Photography, Art & Politics: How the English Make Pictures of Northern Ireland’s Troubles’, Circa, 13 (November/December 1983): 10. 10. Declan McGonagle, ‘Introduction’, in Troubled Land: the Social Landscape of Northern Ireland, photographs by Paul Graham (London: Grey Editions, 1987). 11. For references to Belfast’s ‘terror tourism’, see, for instance, Dominic Casciani, ‘All Aboard Belfast’s Terror Tour’, BBC Online (Northern Ireland) (1 December 1999), http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/544851.stm (accessed 31 January 2006); and Ron DePasquale, ‘Destination Belfast? Tourists Flood in’, Christian Science Monitor (1 September 2005), http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/ 0901/p06s02-woeu.html (accessed 31 January 2006). 12. Spurgeon Thompson, The Postcolonial Tourist (Ann Arbor: UMI Dissertations, 1998), pp. 277–319. 13. Sontag, On Photography, p. 3. 14. Sontag, On Photography, p. 147–8. 15. See, for instance, Bill Rolston, Drawing Support: Murals in the North of Ireland (Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications, 1992); Drawing Support 2: Murals of War and Peace (Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications, 1995); Drawing Support 3: Murals and Transition in the North of Ireland (Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications, 2003); Kathryn Conrad, ‘Northern Ireland Photo Gallery: Murals, Graffiti, Marches, and Protests’, http://people.ku.edu/murals.html (accessed 31 January 2006); Jonathan McCormick, ‘Mural Directory: a Directory of Murals in Northern Ireland’, http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/mccormick/index.html/ (accessed 31 January 2006). All of these collections copyright their images, which, as John Tagg has noted in his discussion of nineteenth-century legal debates over the property status of photographs, gestures toward their status as something other than unmediated reality, as ‘creation rather than mere reproduction’. See John

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

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Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 108. Oona Woods, in Seeing is Believing?: Murals in Derry (Derry: Guildhall, 1995), notes the frustration of some muralists at the ways in which their artwork has not only been decontextualised but also used for profit through photography (pp. 7–8). Woods, Seeing is Believing? p. 7. Sontag, On Photography, p. 157. Fridge magnet photos credited to Irish Picture Company, http://www. irishpicturecompany.com, copyright 2000 (accessed 31 January 2006). Aaron Kelly, ‘Walled Communities’, in Eoghan McTigue, All Over Again (Belfast: Belfast Exposed Photography, 2004). Tagg, Burden, p. 63. See, for instance, Rolston, Drawing Support 2, plate 49, p. 26; plates 81 and 82, p. 43; Drawing Support 3, plate 88, p. 47; McCormick, ‘Mural Directory’, Album 11, Mural 357, http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/mccormick/album11.htm (accessed 31 January 2006); Conrad, ‘Northern Ireland photo gallery’, http://people.ku.edu/ ⬃kconrad/murcan.html (accessed 31 January 2006). Marie Foy, ‘Graffiti Work Paves Way to Awards Finals’, Belfast Telegraph, 22 January 2004, p. 13. See McCormick, ‘Mural Directory’, any album page. For unremarked graffiti, see, for example, Rolston, Drawing Support 2, plate 81, p. 43 and plate 91, p. 48. The Day’s Inn website advertises the hotel as ‘conveniently located close to many of the city’s shops, restaurants, attractions and night life’, conveniently cropping the mural out of its own promotional photographs. See Day’s Inn Belfast website, http://www.belfastcityhotel.co.uk (accessed 31 January 2006). Kelly, ‘Walled Communities’.

8 Tracking the Luas between the Human and the Inhuman Wanda Balzano and Jefferson Holdridge

Can an essay on the Luas be a consideration of the aesthetics of landscape? Though the present one did not begin as such a consideration, it eventually became one along the lines of tradition and modernity, nature and technology, the human and inhuman, just as surely as the two lines of the light rail make their way through Dublin and those who

Figure 8.1 People queuing to avail themselves of a free ride on the debut of the Luas, 30 June 2004. Photograph by Wanda Balzano. 100

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consistently ride them reflect on the passing scene. If we accept the idea of the imminent ‘end of nature’, that everything in nature, even the rain in the Arctic, may soon bear the polluted imprint of our existence on the planet, that, like God, nature will lose its separateness as a category beyond our comprehension and control, that we must manage nature like the minimum wage or labour laws, then, looking for nature in the cityscape seems to be the right place to forestall this end. If the ancients looked for comforting patterns in the constellations because they were surrounded by wild and hostile nature, then we, surrounded by domesticated nature, must look beyond those anthropomorphic patterns. The ‘comfort we need’, as Bill McKibben concludes, ‘is inhuman’.1 How do we find such comfort in the inhuman amid the proliferation of the human? One way is to look toward the urban landscape, which, in Ireland at least, has a specific tradition, and on which the accelerated gaze of the

Figure 8.2 A replica of an old car of the Dublin Tramway lines, removed from service in 1949, on display at St Stephen’s Green to celebrate the launch of the Luas, 30 June 2004. A history of this tram car can be found at http://www .nationaltransportmuseum.org/b006.html. Photograph by Wanda Balzano.

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Luas will concentrate many views for the future. As even an ardent naturalist such as Henry David Thoreau came to believe, one may even encounter the otherness of nature ‘though in the midst of cities’. Such an encounter with ‘drear inhuman Nature’ challenges the progressive image that the Luas is meant to represent.2 In the ever-changing cultural and economic patterns of contemporary Dublin, the stability of the subject underlies the aesthetics of landscape, as artists struggle to establish a fixed perceptual point amid the acceleration of modern life. Many critics have tried to account for the inability of contemporary artists to record the dramatic economic and demographic changes that have taken place in Ireland in the last two decades of the Celtic Tiger. Would early twentieth-century writers have successfully recorded them? James Joyce, for example, used the trams and decaying city streets to profoundly reflect his own contemporary realities. Or, have the changes occurred too quickly for anyone to reflect them ably? Declan Kiberd uses the figure of taking a photograph of a moving object to indicate the difficulty of the artist’s task in capturing these changes. In response to the epistemological question of the origins of knowledge (‘How do we know what we know?’), Kiberd astutely remarks that the inevitable answer to this question has been a type of autobiographical writing set in the remote past. He again resorts to a telling figure of speech, noting that this backward view functions like ‘an expansive rear-view mirror attached to a fast car’.3 By describing the landscape left behind, contemporary writers help us to understand just how much things have changed since the early years of independence: it may also give some sense of where the country is now. The following examples by Louis MacNeice and Elizabeth Bowen are chosen because there is no literature of the Luas as yet, and because they are important examples respectively of the literature of train and tram. That the train in MacNeice’s poem is travelling toward and then through Dublin makes it an excellent figure for an essay on the potential literary uses of the Luas once it has arrived in the literary consciousness of Dublin. Bowen’s short story of the last tramline suggestively foreshadows the re-emergence of the light rail, as the last always remembers the first (and vice versa). Both pieces are not so much concerned with images of the remote past reflected back to the present, but rather endeavour to measure the velocity of the now itself; and, though written many years ago, they attempt to envision a postmodernist view (avant la lettre) of shifting reality, while maintaining a Modernist belief in moments of being, in which the natural rhythms of life continue to haunt the passengers on the train or tram.

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MacNeice’s ‘Train to Dublin’ takes the rail journey as a reigning metaphor of how we are passively driven along in life; hence, his surprising claim that only ‘during a tiny moment of our lives [are we] not in trains’. His aim is to show how, by recognizing the power driving us, we must be set free from it during transcendent moments of inhuman, or superhuman, clarity in which our ‘grimace relaxe[s] again’.4 MacNeice begins the poem by meditating on the experience of the ride. Notice how he captures our half-consciousness of what passes so rapidly during train travel in the first stanza of the poem ‘Train to Dublin’: Our half-thought thoughts divide in sifted wisps Against the basic facts repatterned without pause, I can no more gather my mind up in my fist Than the shadow of the smoke of this train upon the grass – This is the way that animals’ lives pass. It is an apprehension that can never move to comprehension. Similarly, the Luas, following some of the old tramlines, is a template for the future that carries the burden of the past. From the unrelentingly moving perspective of modernity, we read the signs and landscape, remembering earlier more fixed meditations within the Georgian city: The train’s rhythm never relents, the telephone posts Go striding backwards like the legs of time to where In a Georgian house you turn at the carpet’s edge Turning a sentence while, outside my window here, The smoke makes broken queries in the air. MacNeice composed the poem from September to October 1934, as Europe veered towards the war whose ‘broken queries’ define the postmodern era. The poem is a reflection on what principles should rule our behaviour. His conclusion is that we should use experiential methods of inquiry, guided by an aesthetic and ethical hand. MacNeice will ‘not give you idol or idea, creed or king’, but instead ‘the incidental things that pass / Outward through space exactly as each was’. It is the living idol of ‘joy at random’ that he seeks rather than the wooden one of ‘creed’ or ‘king’. He ends by saying: ‘I would give you more but I cannot hold / This stuff within my hands and the train goes on’. By the close of the poem, he displays a desire for synthesis that aligns him with Yeats, Eliot and other Modernists. A need for coherence shadows the fragmented text of the train trip, but such a need is perilous and inevitably leads to the sublime encounter with the inhuman other of nature and technology.

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MacNeice cannot escape this desire: ‘I know that there are further syntheses to which, / As you have perhaps, people at last attain’. Redemptive syntheses such as ‘rich and breathing gold’ also occur at the end of MacNeice’s famous long poem on the coming war, ‘Autumn Journal’. In ‘Train to Dublin’, the syntheses have a technological import. Breathing gold is the life of the machine (or God), not that of human beings. The inhuman is the puppet in Freud and Lyotard’s works, which they each theorize as a force mechanically working out another’s will, like the light rail of the Luas itself. ‘Deprived of all intention . . . the dolls merely place their limbs at the moment as they are ordered’, writes Lyotard.5 We become no more than the trains we ride. Here, some inhuman force that underlies all human endeavour, and which makes us puppets of its will, is invoked. MacNeice has said as much earlier in ‘Train to Dublin’: ‘It is we, I think, are the idols and it is God / Has set us up as men who are painted wood’. In a later poem, ‘Prayer in Mid-Passage’, another travel poem which was written during the war (in 1943), the inhuman force is directly addressed: O pattern of inhuman good, Hard critic of our thought and blood, By whose decree there is no zone Where man can live by men alone, Unveil Thyself that all my see Thy fierce impersonality.6 MacNeice’s version of the inhuman is both recognizably divine and threatening. It is also a version of otherness, both ancient and modern, that challenges identity. It is God and Thing in a way quite consistent with Lyotard’s definition of the inhuman. At the start of the second of two technologicallydriven, inhuman and sublimely destructive world wars, such a blending of God and Thing is telling. The train/tram/Luas (or automobile and computer for that matter) embody both God and Thing, both transcendent force and subconscious drive. Yet, there is something in this version of the sublime that calls us back to the beautiful: a ‘pattern of inhuman good’. In The Inhuman, Lyotard quotes Adorno: ‘Art remains loyal to humankind uniquely through its inhumanity in regard to it.’7 Lyotard goes on to distinguish between the inhumanity we do to each other and that form of the inhuman that he, Adorno and MacNeice are describing: ‘The inhumanity of the system which is currently being consolidated under the name of development (among others) must not be confused with the infinitely secret one of which the soul is hostage.’8 This second deeply personal experience of the inhuman, whether of Soul, God or

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Nature, is beyond our comprehension and control, is contradictory in its terms (personal and inhuman), but profoundly necessary in its message. In ‘Train to Dublin’, we are set free in a moment of vision when the inhuman ‘idol’ within us steps outside the train’s force. Lyotard declares: ‘Nothing is closer to infinite divine grace than the mechanism these puppets obey.’9 Or, as MacNeice writes in ‘Prayer in Mid-Passage’: O Thou my silence, Thou my song, To whom all focal doubts belong And but for whom this breath were breath – Thou my meaning, Thou my death. One can creatively and instructively imagine the poet speaking to the driving force of the railway line itself. It is a species of what is now called techno-paganism, described by the OED as ‘an interest in specialized technologies with an involvement in a modern religion derived from or modelled on pre-Christian nature worship’.10 This version of nature and technology is inhuman in many senses: non-human, potentially brutal, of artificial intelligence, or simply of a challenging nature. These are the ideas that traverse the post-war era in which we live. Is the ‘Unwelcome Idea’ in Elizabeth Bowen’s short story of the same name the war? Modernity? Or the fact that inhuman nature will survive us all? The story takes place on the last line of the old Dublin trams, already outmoded in Bowen’s time, overtaken by bus and motor travel, and very soon to be abandoned. This obsolescence is ironic when we consider the re-emergence of the light-rail system in the guise of the Luas. Bowen quietly shows how a tram-ride during the Second World War underlines the velocity of the changes taking place, and shows how, implicitly, the experience of the war is the end of the modern and the emergence of the ‘post’. All the old rituals are threatened by the war, and implicitly by the future it presents: the horse show, the trip to the country, the old political and social realities of upper-class Dublin will disappear, at least in their long-established forms. What will remain is the landscape we leave behind. For Bowen, as usual, it is a part of a tragicomedy of manners that unfolds in the conversation between Mrs Kearney and Miss Kevin, representatives respectively of the old and the new. More importantly, Bowen captures the speed of the changes by using the speeding tram as her dominant trope, inviting the landscape, as she so often does, to speak the profound truths: After inland Ballsbridge, the tram from Dublin speeds up; it zooms through the residential reaches with the gathering steadiness of a

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launched ship [. . .] Looks from trams and voices from public gardens invade the old walled lawns with their grottos and weeping willows. Spitand-polish alternates with decay. But stucco, slate and slate fronts, blotched Italian pink-wash, dusty windows, lace curtains and dolphinlions seem to be the eternity of this tram route. Quite soon the modern will sag, chip, fade. Change leaves everything at the same level. If it ended here, the description would indeed echo a postmodern aesthetic, but in the next line it reaffirms the old Modernist sense of the possibility of redemption, of the ontological verities of nature’s cycles and seasons: ‘Nothing stays bright but mornings.’11 The tram will vanish, but the landscape through which it travels (whether or not lace curtain and traditional Catholic Ireland, like Anglo-Ireland, stays or goes) will continue to be the inhuman object that ghosts us and our interactions with others. Though the Luas has yet to accumulate a body of literature as the trams did, the ability of a train-ride to collect the various landscapes it passes through is echoed by various articles written on the Luas in the Irish Times of 30 June 2004 as part of a series celebrating the inaugural voyages of the two lines. One is descriptive of the sights the Luas offers, while another celebrates a fashionable postmodernist pastiche (‘Sipping a cappuccino under the classical canopy of the old Harcourt Street Station’12); neither is, or perhaps can be, very critical, but both clear a path that later writers will follow. The ability of the Luas to unveil new landscapes is important, but there is an inset on one page that warns of rising house prices along the Luas lines. History and society therefore remain to be challenged by those who will have lived the lines over the ensuing years. In the short story ‘After the Race’, Joyce notes how the cars careered through the ‘channel of poverty and inaction’ that was Dublin of his day. Though that has changed, Joyce notes somewhat presciently that ‘Rapid motion through space elates one: so does notoriety; so does the possession of money.’13 One of the aims for Irish artists in the era of the Luas is to chart changing fields of perception amid the ever more expensive and expanding urban sprawl, and to see ‘pure Nature . . . vast and drear and inhuman, though in the midst of cities’. JEFFERSON HOLDRIDGE * * * * People queue with shopping bags, with family and friends, or alone, anticipating the drunkenness of the ride. There and back. In transit. It is not Disneyland, but Dublin, 30 June 2004, at the Luas debut. One car displays ‘Ath an Ghainimh’ as its destination, the other its translation,

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‘Sandyford’. As in language, one is simulacrum of the other. Above, the lines are ready to pass electricity; below, the tracks are ready to be driven on. To the one side of the new LRT (Light-Railway Transit) system is the nature of St Stephen’s Green, to the other, culture in the form of red and grey buildings. On the border of this new beginning, the tram emerges out of its past and re-connects with the street, the city, its people, sliding its doors between the private and the public, the national and the international. The Luas, fashionable emblem of a social and political reality, functions as a ‘nicely polished looking-glass’, a modern Lacanian-like mirror of metal and glass held up to the Irish people to have ‘one good look at themselves’, circulating between the signifier of the street and the imaginary of its citizens. In every revolution – recurring evolution and volition – there is some significant presence of circulation. From the French Revolution to the Chinese student revolution in Tiananmen Square, from the marches of the Civil Rights Movement to the anti-war and G8 protests, from Easter 1916 to the demonstrations in support of the hunger-strikes, social needs and ideals acquire a contingent form in the street, where passersby, the multitude itself, become an engine of desire, and a producer of speed. If holding the streets is a gesture of great consequence in the theatre of social change, mobility, too, is an expression of freedom and an integral part of contemporary culture. Movement is paramount in the circulation of ideals and its agents are in a position of power, as is demonstrated by one of the great battles to go down in the collective memory of Dublin and in Irish labour history, which brought public transport – trams – to a standstill. Having organized many workers into the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, in 1913 (Big Jim) Larkin called for hundreds of tramway men living in conditions of misery to strike. At a time when much energy was spent fighting against colonialism, Larkin saw the fundamental need of fighting the abuses of capitalism. Although a few months later the strikers were humiliatingly forced back to work, the principle of union action and workers’ solidarity had been firmly established in the streets, with the Dublin Lockout marking a watershed in Irish labour history. To this day the statue of Jim Larkin with his outsized hands encouraging the workers to rise up, often photographed against the background of the Millennium Spire, stands as an apt symbol of challenge to capitalism, and as one of the most familiar landmarks of Dublin’s main thoroughfare, O’Connell Street. In its most conventional sense, a street – a site where transportation guarantees social connectedness as a means of travel and communication – represents a link between physical spaces where cultural negotiations

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are made. A street is a space where the informal meets the formal, and the public meets the private. It is a space where unanticipated, sudden encounters may take place, or where ordinary space may be made special. In Ireland, as anywhere else, its utilitarian purpose may be subverted, and the street becomes a space for the Tour de France, charity marathons, Saint Patrick’s Day Parades, bloody revolutions and sectarian/racist violence, sacred processions, street parties and street marches, markets and movie sets, where the lines of history and fiction, leisure and politics intersect at a regular speed. A formal site known for consumption, a street is traversed by lines of desire where entertainment and recreation thrive, or where drugs, alcohol, sex, and gambling are intermittently found in its less visible corners. As the tagline for John Crowley’s 2003 film, Intermission, affirms, ‘life is what happens in between’; and the documentary within the film, called On the Streets, illustrates just that. In the words of the director who is shooting the documentary with the help of a policeman in search of the ‘Celtic soul’, it is about a darker reality. It is ‘about a world people don’t see – the humanity within . . .’.14 But can asphalt or rail lines be a political territory that intersects with the humanity within? Are the new roads that have been built in Ireland in the last part of the twentieth century, together with the new tracks for the trams, the result of a steadfast integration – of people and territory – in the European Union, even though they won’t connect the island to the continent, or, for that matter, Tallaght to Sandyford, Connolly Station to St Stephen’s Green? Can they link the landscape to the ‘Celtic soul’, or the humanity within? Is the bourgeois state and the power of its Celtic Tiger the street, or in the street? Is its model the Luas or in the Luas, with its diverse cargo? What is its religion: the right to accumulate private property or the circulation of the masses? Is it developed along the vertical lines of cranes and the new buildings that are changing Dublin’s skyline, or the horizontal lines of the travelled streets, trams, books? With so many people passing through its city centre, now more than doubled because of the Luas, Dublin’s street spectacle is traffic, the ‘pilgrim’s progress’ movement of progression, of procession – at once voyage and improvement, a movement likened to progress towards something better, as in the Middle Ages. Whatever their labelling, whatever their reputation and naming, or re-naming (Sackville, O’Connell), streets are shaped by social and economic change, and as such they are sites of inclusion and exclusion. All through history, there has been an unspoken, unrecognized dromocratic wondering, the power and organization of mass movement and transportation. Despite accurate examinations of city maps, the city has not been given its full recognition as first and

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foremost a human dwelling-place penetrated by channels of rapid communication (river, road, coastline, railway). The city itself (Baile Átha Cliath: a town on the ford of hurdles) is but a stopover, a point on the path of a trajectory – a road, a tramline, a bridge, a frontier or riverbank – where the spectator’s glance and the vehicle’s speed of displacement are instrumentally linked in what Paul Virilio calls ‘habitable circulation’.15 A synecdoche of the city, the street is thus not simply a line on the map, or a connecting thread, but is a transformative site, given to different cultural practices and a multiplicity of uses. In the same way the tracks of a ‘streetcar’ are a synecdoche of the street; like veins pulsating in the living matter of the city, they have the power to change its very texture. They are a distinguishing mark, but they are also a trace of the absent, of what has just gone by, of what has passed. We define ‘trace’ as the sign left by the absent thing, after it has passed, on the scene of its former presence. Every present, in order to know itself as present, bears the trace of an absent which defines it. To walk, or to move about, step after step, is to lack a place, marking the indefinite process of being absent. Michel de Certeau similarly maintains: ‘the moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place – an experience that is . . . compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City’.16 The re-emergence of streetcars or trams in Dublin city after an absence of more than fifty years is intimately linked to its urban history and daily narratives. As the Luas lines trace both the mark of the future and the past in a present moment which is neither, it is also clear that the origin of this trace is constantly deferred in stripping back the past. There is no absolute past to return to for these tracks, but an eternal circulation. Every footstep, whether it is Samantha Mumba’s or Leopold Bloom’s or Jim Larkin’s, is superseded by a new footstep in this rhizomatic rhetoric of movement. Under the Luas lines ran the old lines of the DUTC (Dublin United Tramways Company), but under these ran many others, as the discovery of various artifacts during the construction work of the Luas has revealed: a collection of pikes dating from 1798, the remains of a medieval farm yard, or Bronze Age cooking troughs.17 Is the Millennium Spire not also on the site of the Nelson Pillar, blown up by the IRA in 1966? And did they not dig out archaeological findings there too? Like the children’s game of hand upon hand, the past is revealed as new, and as ever circulating. In this way the lines move both horizontally and vertically, as in an oneiric figuration, or a symbolic order of the unconscious. Like the mystic

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writing pads described by Freud and reconsidered by Derrida – those children’s toys consisting of a thin sheet of clear plastic that covers a thick waxen board, where a trace can be inscribed and then wiped off – the appearance and disappearance of the trace, writing, or the travelled lines of a tram is similar to the sparkling-up and passing-away of consciousness in the process of perception. The marks on the pad are visible because of the contact the wax has on the reverse side of the sheet of plastic; similarly, as in the intersecting paths of travellers on the Luas, we can only ever experience the world, as it were, after the fact, that is, we attain identity only retroactively, through the indelible traces of our passing. In experiencing the modern tram as hypertext, our sense of the lines ‘unfolding’ as a text before our eyes for ‘the first time’, is underscored by the presence of other rides and other surfaces, other readings and other authors, other versions of identity that throw into question the very concept of being as a unified, coherent and stable whole existing in the plenitude of the present. Entering the unconscious through perception, creating paths and webs which determine the structure of all subsequent experiences, the tram lines are revealed to us as the product of previous memories, previous traces, previous writings. They are revealed to us as the social experience of movement and desire. Those shining new stainless steel trams busying themselves along the streets of Dublin since June 2004 represent a new revolution for various reasons. Once more re-introduced after a lapse of half a century, a beacon of modernity then, and postmodernity now, this new streetcar embodied and embodies speed as reduction of distances, the negation of space, and thus contributes to the reformulation of the concept of homeland, with frontiers passing inside a city. Speed is the meaning of the Irish word, ‘luas’, and speed is time saved in the most absolute sense of the word, since it becomes human time directly torn from death. Even though the experience of the Luas is not one of great speed (earning it the nickname of ‘snail on the rail’), the mobility of masses of people through the city has facilitated exchanges and, still, torn time away from death. The political and economic consequences of the reduction of distances are remarkable. Territory tends to lose its significance in favour of the power of movement. The strategic value of the non-place of speed has supplanted that of place, and, with the movements of the masses, the old imperialist saying of the Romans, ‘ubi pedes, ibi patria’ (‘where the feet are, there is the homeland’) has a new, urgent meaning in Dublin’s contemporary transnational scene. The question of territorial appropriation and liberation is linked to speed, exchange, mobility; the transitional spirit is the challenge of the polytropos, like Homer’s Ulysses,

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not occupying only one place. Ulysses desires not just to be identifiable, but especially to identify with nothing. He is no one because he wants to be no one, and to be no one you have to be everywhere and nowhere. His taste for ubiquitous absence, in a city that is rapidly expanding its horizons and perceptions along the new routes and electrical wires of the tram, also realizes itself in the wireless surfing of waves in cyberspace. If Ulysses is no one, he is, however, a champion of mobility and is engaged with the odyssey that is both inside and outside him. Between the immobility of the inside and outside of the Luas, there is the moving vehicle’s dividing border of glass and metal: the windowpane is what allows one to see, and the tramline is what allows one to move through, inventing a new space. The windowpane creates the spectator’s distance (a dispossession of the hand, the touch, in favour of a greater trajectory of the eye), while the tramline obliges one to leave behind a place by losing one’s footing. From this threshold – in movement – we have a kind of dissolving and doubling view, where the aesthetic of disappearance renews the enterprise of appearance. Looking at our own reflection in the tram, traversed by the tumult of a landscape fleeing like an arrow, this double exposure provokes in us, urban voyeurs-travellers, an effect of vertigo, with the impression of being projected into the image. The window-glass and the metal divide the traveller’s interiority from the silence of the landscape that passes by at a distance, making our memories speak, or drawing out of the shadows the dreams of our secrets. This partition highlights the relationship between more or less unknown landscapes and the strange fables of our private stories, leading to the establishment in displacement of the very fixity of life. The speed of transport only multiplies the absence. The Luas, thus, becomes an urban illusion that allows the voyeur-voyager to project his/her own fantasies beyond the screen of the windshield, as in cinemascope. Those fantasies and desires, projected to and through that moveable and seemingly transparent border, reflect the postmodern world, apparently borderless, but only so for the Western elites who have the wealth and power to travel, consume and freely choose their lifestyles. In contrast to the holiday travellers and flâneurs, there are refugees and asylum seekers endeavouring to cross the increasingly patrolled borders of richer nations, struggling to escape the poverty, danger and oppression of their homelands for European countries like Ireland of the Celtic Tiger, which promise freedom and prosperity. Similarly, together with the postmodernism of free lifestyle and consumer choice there is, necessarily, another postmodernism: that of a culture that has gone off the rails, a culture of deregulation, dispersal of values and disruption as the securities

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of tradition and community are continually fragmented by the spread of capitalism and by its complex theories and outlandish cultural productions, which mark an abdication, a disengagement from the real world. The technological, topographic and economic challenge embodied by the Luas marks a plurality of definitions that has become crucial to the sense carried by the term ‘postmodern’. If one is to begin to understand it, it is important to grasp both its multifaceted nature and its propensity to open up debate between the various parties in Ireland that have a stake in its definition. WANDA BALZANO

Notes The Luas (Irish for ‘speed’) consists of two unconnected on-street light rail lines in Dublin. Services commenced on the Green Line on Wednesday, 30 June 2004. The Red Line opened on 28 September 2004. 1. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 201. 2. Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (New York: Bramhall, 1950), p. 277. 3. Declan Kiberd, ‘The Celtic Tiger: a Cultural History’ (2003), in The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 276–7. 4. Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1979), pp. 27–8. 5. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 163. 6. MacNeice, Collected Poems, p. 212. 7. Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 2. 8. Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 2. 9. Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 163. 10. See ‘techno-paganism’ in the Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), http://www.oed.com/ (accessed 3 April 2006). 11. Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Unwelcome Idea’, in Irish Stories (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1978), pp. 55–6. 12. Pat Liddy, ‘Green Vistas into the Capital’, Luas Day (Supplement to the Irish Times), 30 June 2004, p. 3. 13. James Joyce, Dubliners (London: Dover, 1991), p. 25. 14. Intermission (2003), dir. John Crowley, wr. Mark O’Rowe (DVD; MGM Home Entertainment, 2004), Scene 5, ‘Just a Bit Darker’. 15. See Paul Virilio, ‘Circulation Habitable’, Architecture Principe, 3 (April 1966): unnumbered pages [46–7]. 16. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 103. 17. Tim O’Brien, ‘Stripping Back the Past’, Luas Day (Supplement to The Irish Times), 30 June 2004, p. 4.

Part III Diaspora

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9 Cinematic Constructions of Irish Musical Ethnicity Christopher Smith

While in rehearsal for the Hollywood blockbuster Titanic (1997), the film’s music directors happened upon a nondescript Irish pub band playing in a Santa Monica bar, and enlisted them on the spot to portray the ‘steerage band’ in James Cameron’s soft-focus epic.1 The traditional dance music depicted in their scene became a touchstone for many of the film’s fans, despite the fact that the performance was anachronistic in instrumentation, repertoire and execution, that the director insisted the band get drunk before recording, and that one musician quit immediately afterwards in protest at the musical results. Irish traditional dance music and song have often been employed to construct complex cinematic representations of Irish ethnicity, with results that range from comic to heartrending, insightful to absurd. However, in contrast to earlier, more generic, or more ambiguous portraits of musical ethnicity, several films released in the 1990s depicted actual traditional musicians playing a fairly close approximation of traditional Irish music. What do traditional music and musicians mean in the context of such films? How does film use depictions of music to construct ethnicity? These are the questions this chapter seeks to address. One disclaimer: this chapter does not focus upon film criticism or analysis, but rather upon traditional music practice and the congruencies or incongruities with which it has been depicted in film. I seek to explain how the idea of traditional music in these fictional films may help us understand the makers’ understanding of cultural ethnicity. I likewise omit both non-diegetic appearances of traditional music on film soundtracks (the Chieftains on the Barry Lyndon soundtrack, Clannad in Braveheart, for example) and the various documentary films which include traditional musicians.2 Let me begin by offering a working definition of ‘Irish traditional music’, by which I mean a music that originated in low-income clachan 115

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communities, originally Gaelic-speaking, in the west and south of Ireland, in the eighteenth century. For a significant portion of its history this music was primarily passed along using traditional processes: demonstration, learning-by-ear and memory. In the twentieth century, recording technology made possible the dissemination of the music as tangible object, but, even to the present day, the majority of persons involved in traditional Irish music are still practitioners and participants in local, person-to-person contexts. In such localized settings there is a strong and flexible interplay between players and listeners, and the music entails a high degree of participation. In contrast, despite the high visibility of mass-media events such as Riverdance and the various shows of dancer Michael Flatley, traditional music in recordings, films, television and on Broadway is typically treated as a peripheral factor – a kind of ‘ethnic window-dressing’ – whose treatment does not represent most participants’ experience or priorities. Prior to the 1990s, representations of traditional Irish music on-screen were comparatively limited, relatively stylized, and typically involved an active ‘performer’ and passive ‘observer’, that observer often including the audience itself; an example would be the ballad singers in The Quiet Man (1952). When they did appear, such representations typically failed to capture the communal participation of singers, players, dancers and listeners, which is such a notable factor of traditional music usage in local communities. Of course, the physical dissociation between audience and players upon which film depends is contrary to traditional music behaviours, and traditional musicians can be singularly un-photogenic. Hence, the ‘paddywhackery’ with which traditional music was (infrequently) represented in film is no surprise – but it does distort traditional music’s intent, style and experiences. More recently, however, several films endeavoured to use more ‘authentic’ traditional music as a marker of Irish culture. In the films under consideration, relatively accurate representations of traditional music, sometimes played by actual traditional musicians, make a significant on-screen appearance. Of all, three which demonstrate the most highly visible, yet uneasy, interface between the film industry and the infrastructures of traditional music are Titanic, The Devil’s Own (1997) and Waking Ned Devine (1998).3 The balance of this chapter addresses the cultural, cinematic and appropriational perspectives these three films express about traditional music. Throughout the history of Euro-American concert music, composers from Mozart to Beethoven and Glinka to Satie have borrowed ‘exotic’ melodies, rhythms and topics to create novelty for their own original compositions, or have found novelty in the folk traditions of their own countries. Such borrowings became a standard practice by which

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composers generated new sounds for audiences craving the ‘exotic’, ‘primitive’ or ‘authentic’, and they shaped works as diverse as Ravel’s Bolero (1928), the ‘new age’ compact disc Deep Forest (1993) and the twentieth-century revivals of ancient and medieval music as ‘historical performance practice’, just as much as they shaped Man of Aran (1934), Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959) or Lord of the Dance (1998). In Titanic, the music and its performance are presented, as is the dance itself, as a kind of cultural tourism, and for the audience a kind of voyeurism. The viewer as outsider is invited to contemplate the ‘primitive vitality’ of an alien, multi-ethnic, and lower-class culture. In Cameron’s screenplay, Rose (Kate Winslet), a young society woman, ‘meets cute’ with Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), a poor artist who has won a lottery earning him a passage on the maiden voyage of the fated liner. Conventionally, the heroine is under pressure from her mother to respond favourably to the advances of a cold-hearted millionaire (Billy Zane), but finds Jack’s directness, humour and animal vitality more appealing. After one particularly demoralizing exchange – subtitled in the DVD chapters as ‘Snake Pit (First Class Dinner)’ – she meets Jack, who asks her: ‘Want to go to a real party?’ That loaded adjective keys us to Cameron’s simplistic dichotomy: ethnic poverty below-decks is more vital, more open, more communal, more ‘real’, than the lives of the Anglo-Saxon wealthy in the saloon. This is a problematic set of presumptions, as we will discover. In the next scene, we cut from the saloon to steerage class below-decks, zooming in immediately on a musician’s hands flailing at the bodhrán (Irish drum), as its thunderous voice fills the soundtrack. Though use of the bodhrán in 1912 is anachronistic, through the drum’s presence Cameron immediately signals to us that we have moved to a more ‘primitive’, vital, or ‘real’ environment. The next shot is of the Irish pipes, whose voice, together with that of the bodhrán, provides a distinctive marker of ‘Irish music’. Accessible exoticism is thus signalled immediately, and borne out as the next wide-frame shot depicts two men (one wearing a fur Astrakhan hat) dancing an odd, arms-linked, whirling do-si-do. The camera swings around the outskirts of the crowd, like a newcomer to the celebration, to show us the musicians, including fiddles, melodeon, pipers, mandolin and bodhrán. Jack is revealed – jacketless, his stiff wing collar unhooked and his previously-slicked-down hair fetchingly awry – dancing with a curly-haired little girl. As the camera pans past, we see Rose, seated in the foreground, as a young man asks her: ‘Talla frikken svenska?’ (‘Do you speak Swedish?’). He repeats himself, as the band’s spoons player sits down with several pints, but Rose, before turning away and picking up a drink, replies: ‘I can’t understand you.’

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As Jack and the little girl dance, Rose begins to clap along to the music, only to be interrupted by the sound of glass shattering as a dancer falls to the floor. Rose registers shock, but the dancer’s laughing friends, all holding pints, pull him to his feet. He reaches out drunkenly for the drink that is handed to him: no harm done there. The camera circles the dancers, capturing the visible ethnic diversity of their garb and the catholicity of their dancing, until the music pounds to a halt. A new set of tunes starts – once again with a bodhrán solo – and a brief but clangingly-artificial sequence has Jack say to the little girl (indicating Rose): ‘I’m going to dance with her now.’ He pulls Rose to the dance floor as she says: ‘Jack wait . . . I can’t do this.’ Pulling her pelvis and chest in against his, he replies: ‘We’re going to have to get a little bit closer.’ The big-eyed little girl looks visibly jealous until Jack glances back at her and says: ‘You’re still my best girl, Cora.’ The band begins a very fast set of polkas, and Rose blurts: ‘I don’t know the steps’ – to which Jack replies: ‘Neither do I . . . Just go with it; don’t think!’ They dance faster and faster, bumping through the crowd; the camera cuts between the dancers and the band playing a particularly unmusical pipes-with-spoons section. Jack pushes their way into the centre of the raised dance floor, and begins improvising hard-shoe dance steps, and Rose screams: ‘No, wait, Jack! Wait!’ As he begins this (particularly poorly-executed) solo, she watches in apparent awe, then snatches off her shoes and throws them into the crowd, lifts her skirts, and begins improvising steps of her own; it is his turn to be awe-struck.4 At the climax of the dance scene, the two are so smitten with one another’s revealed dance talents and animal vitality that they link arms and begin whirling in place. In the midst of this accelerating, spinning pasde-deux, we cut unexpectedly to the hushed and masculine environment of the full-dress men’s smoking room in first class, where Zane’s character debates, over brandy and cigars, how his corporate lawyers will help him circumvent the Sherman Antitrust Act. We cut back to steerage, where another group of men are engaged in another kind of masculine contest: the spoons player and the Swede are now locked in an armwrestling match, which ends with the entire table of drinks toppling over. Jack rescues two pints from the fray, and, while another set of tunes begins in the background, makes another discovery about Rose: panting from the dance, in profile she slugs down a good portion of the pint (for effect, the Foley artists exaggerate the sounds of swallowing), before saying: ‘What? You think a first-class girl can’t drink?’ The arm-wrestlers begin another match, but Rose barges in between them, snatches the hand-rolled cigarette from between the musician’s lips, and, before taking a deep drag

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on the cigarette, says: ‘So . . . you think you’re big tough men?’ She backs away to the dance floor and assumes a prima ballerina’s first position. The camera moves in tight on her stockinged feet as she levitates, as if by magic and watched by the dumbstruck audience, until she is (apparently) standing on the tips of each large toe before shrieking with pain and collapsing into Jack’s arms. A shawled woman at the table exclaims: ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!’ As well might we. This scene is riddled with classist presumptions, revealed in dialogue, costume, conduct and casting, and its treatment of traditional music and dance reflects these presumptions. Like those New Yorkers who in this same period began slumming ‘Uptown’ in Harlem nightclubs or ‘Downtown’ in Hell’s Kitchen, Rose is portrayed as entitled to participate simply because she is moving down the social scale, to the more ‘real’ situation in steerage: the glass ceiling is permeable from above. Although the dialogue emphasizes that Rose ‘doesn’t understand’ even the simplest conversation, she is still permitted to eschew social expertise, tact, or even ordinary politeness. All she has to do is smoke a cigarette, drink some porter, hash out some improvised toe-tapping or cinema-assisted en pointe, and her welcome is assured; the implication is that the peasants in the more ‘authentic’ world of steerage class will afford an uncritical welcome to any gatecrasher. This is of course a profoundly comforting presumption for any audience crossing cultural boundaries from a mainstream to a minority community. The fantasy is that those of the lower social class are more democratic, less critical, less exclusive and more ‘real’ than those of the higher class. Anyone in flight from upper-class pretence, rigidity, hierarchy or artificiality can find an immediate ‘in’ lower down the social scale. Hence, the ‘slumming’ of New Yorkers touring Five Points in the 1840s or Harlem in the 1920s. Like the illustrated newspapers which titillated middle-class readers with depictions of these minority cultures, Cameron suggests that steerage culture is vital, immediate, open, indiscriminate, physical, primitively sexual and open to those entering from above. The participatory music and dancing below-decks reveals no other social function than to provide a kind of voyeuristic satisfaction for a slumming society girl – or for a slumming film audience. The chamber music heard in the first class scenes is backdrop – a mere marker of social hierarchy. Traditional music in steerage is treated, erroneously, as the same thing. The most blatant departure from reality in the steerage scene is in the abysmal dialogue and the conglomerate dancing. For the purposes of this chapter, however, the music usage reveals a consistent directorial perspective on what traditional music ‘means’. In Titanic (as in The Devil’s Own and

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Waking Ned Devine, which will be considered shortly) a crucial contrast can be drawn in terms of traditional musical style and performance practice. The anachronisms are especially obvious and egregious in Titanic, and traditional musicians in pub sessions around the world have taken great satisfaction in tearing them apart. Instruments, combinations of musicians, dance steps, and the very fact of multiple musicians playing together are all hopelessly out-of-date – in this period, for both dancing and listening, the absolute standard was that a single player of flute, fiddle or pipes be heard unaccompanied. Thus, what is presented here is in reality a badlyplayed, ill-conceived, costumed impersonation of the post-World War II pub session, translated to a pre-World War I steerage compartment. But the dissonance goes much deeper. The band featured in Titanic is a nondescript Irish pub band which the producers heard playing in California, happening upon them at a moment when the band themselves admit they were so drunk that one side of the stage was playing one part of the tune and the other side was playing another: Randy Gerston, the music producer, asked for a demo but didn’t like the results. He didn’t like the tape and asked us why it sounded so different from when we were on stage. [ . . . ] We told him it was because we were drunk on stage. He wanted the music to be really fast with lots of yahooing and screaming, like we did live. He told us to come to Sony Studios in Santa Monica and to bring our own beer. So we arrived there with 120 cans, three crates of Guinness and two of Murphy’s. We recorded eight tracks in 18 hours. The worse we sounded the better they liked it.5 In other words, presumptions about the lower classes, and the assumption of ready appropriational access by those with the power to ‘authentic’ lower-class experience, were as present in the film’s creative team as they are visible on-screen. Following the film’s 1997 release, the band was able to exploit their enhanced visibility to greatly expand the extent of their touring and recording, in almost every case touting themselves as ‘the band from Titanic’. Beyond the (negligible) impact of Gaelic Storm on the actual style and practice of traditional music, their appearance in the film also provided enhanced, if limited, awareness of traditional music on the part of the general filmgoing public. For the next several years, traditional musicians often heard such comments as ‘Can’t you play something like what they played in Titanic?’ or, ‘Oh, that’s just like the music from Titanic’. Such statements drove traditional musicians crazy, because, contrary to the film’s inanities, it is a complex, subtle, centuries-old idiom

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of both great immediacy and great profundity, and it takes years to learn to play, sing, dance or listen to it effectively. The exploitative portrayal of traditional music in Titanic is like the importation of whole Third World villages to the Chicago and Paris Expositions of the 1890s: an appropriation and decontextualization of traditional culture for fetishistic purposes. Cameron’s objectification of traditional music – with the band’s willing collaboration – transforms the meaning of the music from a process of participatory community to an object of passive consumption. The musical oddities in Devil’s Own are subtler than those of Titanic.6 The film-makers did put some effort into finding extras drawn from the Irish-American traditional music community – most notably, the ‘grand old man’ of New York immigrant fiddlers, Paddy Reynolds. In the ‘Morgan’s Confirmation’ scene, the middle daughter of Police Sergeant Tom O’Meara has just been confirmed, and we enter the post-ceremony house party in full swing. With traditional music sounding in the background, we are introduced to the crowd of O’Meara’s priest, relations, friends and police colleagues. Musical instrumentation, performance practice and repertoire roughly fit the setting of an Irish-American house party. We may notice odd imbalances; for example, although two fiddlers are prominent on the soundtrack, only Reynolds is depicted on-screen, and only momentarily. Music coordinator Don Meade described the reason why: ‘I got Paddy to come with me because I knew that they’d go for his looks. [ . . . ] Many of the extras seem to have been similarly chosen for their leprechaun looks.’ However, one of the actresses, who had a band on the side, insisted that she and her flute player should be prominently featured. Meade, who with ponytail and full beard looks more like a 1960s hippie than a 1930s farmer, got bumped off-screen altogether: ‘There is one brief full-screen shot of Paddy looking very unhappy. That’s because he was pissed off about me being taken out of the scene! [ . . . ] They didn’t know or care that Paddy really was a great fiddler. They just liked his looks.’7 It is of course inevitable that Hollywood would cast musicians more for the aptness of their visual appearance to the fiction being portrayed. In both Titanic and Devil’s Own the producers try to have it both ways: they want to use actual traditional music and musicians for their authenticity, but then try to dress up that authenticity so that it is more photogenic – to scrub away the rough edges, bad complexions, and prickly insularity of the actual experience. That Titanic’s abuse of music is more flagrantly crass and that of Devil’s Own more subtle should not obscure the exoticist perspectives from which both operate. Only in Waking Ned Devine (1998) is music presented as integral to a variety of social processes, rather than as mere spectacle or scene-dressing. There’s no question that

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the film, a fable about a tiny west of Ireland village which conspires to defraud the Lotto out of a dead man’s winnings, is rather ‘twee’ – that is, somewhat prone to the rural romanticism that gave us leprechauns, fourleaf clovers and The Quiet Man. It’s of course ironic that Ned was filmed on the Isle of Man – that repository of ‘hyper-Irish’ locations – and, for those who are fans of Irish film, the preponderance of venerable Irish character actors is clearly distracting. The film also, and appropriately, captures the slyness, ‘taking the piss’ humour and interpersonal tensions of village culture.8 Throughout, music appears, often unremarked, as part of a range of other community behaviours: for example, these appearances include a tin whistler leading a funeral procession, a drunk serenading his unrequited love with ‘The Parting Glass’ on the walk home, and an old man dancing in the street outside a pub where music is being played. Such brief scenes, each focused on music but devoid of spectacle or exoticism, more closely replicate the way that traditional music worked in rural culture: as a matter-of-fact part of a varied social fabric.9 In Ned, performance, conduct and context fit within the tradition – and not only in terms of how participants play, sing, dance or respond. Beyond its depicted social mechanisms, here music takes its place, not as display but rather as a means of social negotiation, in the midst of other complex social business. A most notable characteristic of Irish music in traditional settings is that it is not set apart for display; in fact, the usual markers of such separation – a stage, microphones, stage lights or a compere – can be precisely those things which make traditional musicians uncomfortable and reluctant to play. They will resist being set apart, being presented ‘in a performance’. Trad musicians recognize that the music, to fulfil its social function, is more effective as a catalyst for social interaction, rather than a replacement for it. It would be like setting the laughter, bad jokes and conversational interruptions of the pub session on the concert stage under lights, or putting the soundstage under camera and telling the musicians to ‘act natural’. Of course Hollywood depends on precisely this sort of artifice – on just this sort of photogenic ‘authenticity’ – but it is anathema to traditional music. Even those few traditional musicians who make a living wage from touring and recording themselves will say that ‘the concert is the performance – the session is for us’, drawing a clear distinction between the performed object versus the participatory process. There is thus a kind of opacity to traditional music in its original participatory contexts. Because it is played by the locals, for the locals and for no one else, traditional music doesn’t really care if the outsiders ‘get it’. It certainly does not care whether, for example, the ‘high class’ girl from the Titanic’s saloon deck can drink, smoke, or cut a step – and traditional

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musicians will usually cringe if she tries. Musical traditions are accustomed to handling novices who wish to gain entry. Like all others, the Irish tradition has developed effective pedagogies for the music’s transmission and for enculturating outsiders. The music is thus receptive to beginners, but only in so far as those beginners display a minimal awareness of and polite respect for the music’s aesthetics, meaning and social value. Gatecrashers or blow-ins are not welcomed. Treating the music as exoticism, as window-dressing, as ‘the flavour of the month’, does violence both to the tradition and to the community of which the music is an expression. For a film-maker to understand trad music in a way that works on the big screen, she or he needs to know what it means.10 In Ned, the tin whistler at the funeral, the drunk on his way home, even the fiddle/bodhrán duo in the pub at the film’s climax, are in each case only one part of the social interaction. And the opacity of their conduct – the lack of clarity/ambiguity as to the ‘point’ of their presence – is itself more true to traditional music, which resists the physical spotlight of the stage or the semantic spotlight of linear explanation. A social or musical behaviour is foreign, alien or inexplicable to the outsider precisely because the observer lacks insider’s perspective; the behaviour makes sense to the insider, and, because it is created by and for other insiders, it takes no responsibility for accessibility or explicability. The great traditional piper, flutist and fiddler Peadar O’Loughlin said of the music: ‘There’s nothing so like the thing as the thing itself.’11 This sounds like a kind of ‘bog koan’, but it is in fact a very acute statement about the way that traditional music, like violence, love, sex and death, can be almost anti-metaphorical: nothing else is like traditional music, and it is not like anything else. This is because the human needs that it serves – for community, communication and ferocious celebration in the midst of sorrow – themselves are so fundamental. The contrast between music as objectified spectacle (in Titanic) or ethnic window-dressing (in Devil’s Own) versus participatory process (in Ned) operates analogously in the case of popular versus traditional musics. In the pop world, music is much more likely to be commodified: an object designed for reproduction, sale and consumption. In the traditional world, music is created, usually by members of the community itself, as a process seeking participation. A parallel can also be seen through a detailed examination of these films’ treatment of musical performance practice. It is a virtual truism in traditional music circles that chordal accompaniment, on guitar, piano, mandolin or similar instruments, has been since its inception a sop to a non-expert audience. Prior to the twentieth century, it was extremely unusual, if not unheard of, to employ accompaniment at all in the rural

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dance-music tradition. Accompaniment appears in the music simultaneously with its capture in audio recordings, and for related reasons: because A&R men at New York recording studios operated from a presumption that the commercial listening audience required the ‘upscale’ sound of a vamping piano. Accompanists for traditional musicians were thus most frequently recruited from the ranks of salaried studio pianists, with predictably dire results. Since the folk revival of the 1960s and 1970s, guitars, bouzoukis and electronic keyboards have made their way into the listening experience, but all of these accompanying instruments are essentially superfluous, essentially ‘window-dressing’ for the irreplaceable centrality of the melody. In Devil’s Own, the presence of fiddles, whistle and guitar on the soundtrack of the party is logical and within the expectations of the setting (though, as I have said, the visual focus upon guitarist and whistler, at the expense of the fiddlers actually heard on the soundtrack, betrays the film-maker’s biases). However, as it was in the 1920s, so it was in the 1990s: the accompaniment is there at the insistence of the producers, supplied to fulfil perceived expectations of the listener/viewer – not because the musicians, singers or dancers want or need it.12 It’s only in Ned that the music is presented in as unvarnished a fashion as it might actually appear – nearly the sparsest sound imaginable: solo whistle, unaccompanied song, fiddle with bodhrán. Even the physical posture of Ned’s musicians, with eyes closed, telegraphs an absence of accommodation to ‘the show’. This seems to parallel the ‘impersonality’ – and thus the traditionality – of music’s usage throughout the film. Given its brevity, lighting and framing, the lovely short clip of the old man dancing in the street outside the pub serves no particular narrative purpose, yet it makes a key point about the participatory and kinaesthetic response to traditional music. From the perspective of the player, student and teacher of traditional music, I would suggest that Ned manages – even with its gestures towards accessibility – to convey what traditional music ‘feels’ like better than nearly any other big-budget film. Films like Devil’s Own and Titanic invite the viewer to see music as one more object for contemplation or possession. In traditional contexts, and in Ned Devine, music inhabits many different shared social contexts and experiences: mourning and celebration, joy and sorrow. It is therefore not coincidental but apt that the climactic scene in the pub, intercut as it is with the defeat of the ‘witch’ who has put Tullymore’s Lotto scheme at risk, employs music to screw the tension to the highest possible point. The scene opens with a conversation in which all the villagers await the Lotto man’s departure, hoping against hope that no last-minute slip

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will reveal the deception: the musicians tune and the publican warns them: ‘Tighten up your strings, boys.’ There is a last bit of tense dialogue involving Jackie and Michael, architects of the con, with the Lotto man, who walks to his car and drives away. Cut to the pub’s interior, where silence reigns as Jackie enters and pins the six-million-pound cheque to the dartboard, to a burst of cheering, and the music resumes.13 The focus of the action disintegrates for a few seconds as we pan through the party and watch villagers dance, talk and interact with one another and the musicians. All are convinced that Lizzie, the antisocial ‘witch’ who has threatened to betray the scam, cannot telephone the authorities because all the village’s phone lines are down. But a quick cut, and an anonymous drone which clashes with the fiddle music, reveal that Lizzie is riding her electric cart to the telephone box outside town. She looms into the frame as the drone rises chromatically, while we cut back to the raucous celebration in the pub: the musicians play more and more fiercely; the crowd begins to respond, and Finn shouts: ‘Give it a lash!’ Cut to Lizzie, the breakdown of whose electric cart reveals the falseness of her disability when she kicks it and strides off down the road, and the orchestration continues its ominous chromatic ascent. Cut to the Lotto man’s car speeding down the road toward the cliff-top phone box; cut to the pub: the fiddle music is storming ahead and the crowd presses in towards the musicians, shouting encouragement. Cut to the cliff-top, where Lizzie enters the phone box and looks up the Lotto number. The orchestra swells, with the fiddle riding above it, while Lizzie begins dialling. The Lotto man’s car speeds toward the curve, the pub crowd listens intently, and the hay-fever stricken Lotto man begins to sneeze. He looks up to realize his car is skidding toward the phone-box and screams, yet manages to swerve past without incident. We cut to the fiddler, clawing his way up the fingerboard to an impossibly high note, as the orchestra swells, and we see Tullymore’s returning priest in a van heading directly for the Lotto man’s windshield. They veer past one another, and the priest’s van crashes into Lizzie’s phone box – which in a reverse cut soars like a bird off the edge of the cliff, as the fiddler holds the impossibly high note. His string breaks with a loud report, and the phone booth crashes onto the sand with an even louder one. And the villagers, unaware of Lizzie’s treachery, the nearness of their escape, or of her deserved demise, begin to cheer. The artful editing of the two scenes – the fiddler sailing up the fingerboard for an impossible high note while the witch, the priest and the Lotto man all race toward a collision – brings all the threads of the story together, as the shared experience of traditional music weaves together the inexpressible or the impossible in the lives of ordinary people. And the string’s

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snapping, while the phone box sails into space, lets both the villagers and we, the audience, celebrate the impossible: the defeat of the witch, the success of the con – even, we might say, a triumph over death – all without meanness of spirit.14 Traditional music has always understood the mixture of striving and frustration, exultation and tears, black humour and shining beauty, geantraí, suantraí and goltraí – the laughing, sleeping and weeping music – that makes human societies possible. Hollywood seldom does the same – but, as we have seen, it sometimes intuits the vitality and immediacy that actual traditional music can bring to a story. When film-makers trust the music, the results can be unique, effective and remarkably true to the tradition’s human values.

Notes 1. Titanic, dir. James Cameron (Twentieth Century Fox, 1997). 2. For discussion of the latter, see ‘Documents in Celluloid: Non-fiction Films’, in Lance Pettitt, Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 71–94. 3. The Devil’s Own, dir. Alan J. Pakula (Columbia Pictures, 1997); Waking Ned Devine, dir. Kirk Jones (Fox Searchlight, 1998). 4. Winslet is also revealed to be a substantially better dancer than DiCaprio. 5. Brian Walsh, quoted in Jan Battles, ‘Drunken Gig Landed Band Movie Role’, Sunday Times, 18 January 1998, https://listserv.heanet.ie/cgi-bin/wa?A2⫽ind 9801&L⫽irtrad-l&T⫽0&P⫽67527 (accessed 15 February 2006). 6. The following commentary, focusing on music usage, leaves aside various narrative absurdities, more properly the province of conventional film criticism: Harrison Ford’s overage-in-grade status as a New York sergeant; his cavalier offer of lodging to an unmarried illegal immigrant in a house with three young women in it; Brad Pitt’s portrayal of an IRA gunman with movie-star looks and a portmanteau accent; and the incoherent garble of history and rhetoric the film-makers use as back-story. 7. Don Meade, ‘Re: Devil’s Own’, e-mail to the author, 5 May 2000. 8. Ian Bannen, David Kelly, Fionnula Flanagan, James Nesbitt, Paddy Ward and James Ryland are just a few featured players known from other films. 9. It is no coincidence that, of the three films under examination, only Ned had the advantage of a soundtrack composer – Shaun Davey – familiar with traditional music’s practices, and the consultation of Nicholas Carolan, director of the Irish Traditional Music Archive, as to its meanings. 10. I am indebted to Moynagh Sullivan for questioning, and thus helping me clarify, this specific point. 11. Peadar O’Loughlin, personal interview, Kilmaley, Ireland, 15 July 2003. 12. Many aspects of the setting, context, instrumentation, repertoire and performance practice in Titanic are so wrong that singling out accompaniment for punishment seems egregious. I will, however, comment in passing that the use of mandolin for accompaniment, or of the spoons at all, says more about who wanted screen time than about what actual traditional players in 1912 would

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have used. I might add here that, in addition to their self-admitted musical incompetence, Gaelic Storm is a trad band led by a spoons player. This inversion of the music’s melodic emphasis in favour of percussion confirms the group’s lack of a traditional approach. 13. It should be noted that there has been some confusion as regards whether the musicians depicted are ‘real’ trad players actually being heard. In fact, they are: the scene employs very artful sound-editing, so that the fiddle/bodhrán duo heard on the soundstage at a crucial moment blends seamlessly into the orchestral soundtrack. Thus, both actor Eamonn Doyle and studio musician Nollaig Casey are heard playing fiddle within the scene. Throughout the course of the scene’s remainder, many musical elements – from the tonal centre of the orchestration to the pitch of the dial-tone in Lizzie’s phone box, to the pitch of the various car horns – have been compositionally integrated to build the climactic tension. 14. I am indebted to Angela Mariani for insightful comments on this last point.

10 St Patrick’s Day Expulsions: Race and Homophobia in New York’s Parade Katherine O’Donnell

When the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization (ILGO) applied to march in the New York St Patrick’s Day Parade of 1991, they were told that there was no room by the organizers of the parade, the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH). ILGO’s ongoing struggle for inclusion in what was then the world’s largest celebration of Irish ethnicity became a major news item that rumbled on seasonally for a number of years across the USA, in Ireland, in the international gay community and amongst the international Irish diaspora. Now, fifteen years after its first application to join the parade, ILGO is even legally prohibited from holding a protest at its own exclusion. The unquestioned assumption that being homosexual is antithetical to being Irish provided the fundamental premise from which it was successfully argued in US courts that the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization is a violent, obscene enemy bent on the destruction of Irish ethnicity and Irish communities. The argument was not made initially by lawyers employed by the Ancient Order of Hibernians, but by the influential American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which describes itself as working ‘to extend rights to segments of our population that have traditionally been denied their rights, including Native Americans and other people of color; lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered people’.1 This chapter investigates the historical and immediate social contexts that generated the stereotype of the Irish-Americans in New York and Boston as bigoted (racist and homophobic), a stereotype that I argue functioned as the unspoken ground on which the ACLU rested their case in defending the AOH’s homophobia as a traditional expression of Irish ethnicity. Perversely this led the ACLU and other liberals in New York to give unsolicited support to the homophobic AOH through making an analogy between the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization and the racist Ku Klux Klan. The chapter concludes by 128

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looking at the strange effect of this controversy as it played out in Irish political and cultural life: how it had an impact on lesbians and gays and even on the celebration of St Patrick’s Day in Ireland.

How the New York Irish became white Irish St Patrick’s Day parades in Chicago, San Francisco and other cities throughout the USA included lesbians and gays without controversy throughout the nineties while in New York and Boston participation was marked by threats of violence and actual assaults. The contrast highlights the local differences that mark the history of the Irish-American diaspora, which shares an Irish-American story of an origin of enforced exile due to English greed and misrule, of solace found in and fidelity to the Catholic religion and Irish culture, and allegiance to America, the land of open economic opportunity.2 Irish-American identity in the major east coast cities, particularly Boston and New York, has an added and defining dimension: the memory of surviving systematic sectarian oppression at the hands of the Protestant oligarchies there. The Catholic Irish fleeing the famine came to the long-established, largely Protestant city of Boston where ‘The Order of the Ancient and Most Benevolent Friendly Brothers of St Patrick’ and ‘The Charitable Irish Society’ were open only to Irish Protestants or the descendants of the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who came to the city throughout the eighteenth century.3 These societies were avowedly anti-Catholic, sharing in the city’s general distress at the unwanted hordes from Ireland who were landing on their shores. Scorsese’s film Gangs of New York (2002) depicts New York Irish-Americans’ survival of the brutal sectarian onslaughts of the Protestant Nativists or Know Nothings in mid and late nineteenth-century America, where Free Blacks were an established social and economic presence in the east coast cities, and the Catholic Irish were regarded as ape-like carriers of disease.4 In The Invention of the White Race, Theodore W. Allen ‘look[s] into an Irish mirror’ to understand the ‘paramount issue in American history’, that is, ‘the invention of the white race’, and examines how English colonization of Ireland from the seventeenth century racialized the Irish in ‘a deliberate ruling-class policy’.5 Giving a detailed description of how the Irish in nineteenth-century Ireland had a kinship with the enslavement of African-Americans, he shows how one nationalist leader in particular, Daniel O’Connell, the beloved ‘Liberator’, risked the Irish nationalist cause to agitate for the abolition of slavery. The most disturbing aspect of his study reveals how these same politicized Irish became white supremacists in America.

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Before the American Civil War the Irish committed themselves to the American political order whose logic rested on the rhetoric of racial distinctions to claim equality and justice for all on the white side of that colour line. Allen shows how the Democratic party machine, the party of the slave-holders in the South and long-time holders of power in American government, rewarded Irish-Americans for their vote with government jobs, systematic patronage and favour, and a guarantee of those other two antebellum white-skin privileges: the presumption of liberty and the right of immigration and naturalization. The rhetoric of Irish-American whiteness argued that the Abolitionist movement was ‘un-American’, that the Irish in Ireland should understand that it was the duty of the Irish-Americans to be ‘patriotic’ to their adopted country and to support the Democrat-led status quo, particularly as it was hoped that the USA would give aid to throwing the British out of Ireland.6 So, the appeal to both transcendent nationalisms (Irish-America) becomes hyphenated on the issue of whiteness. The political leadership of the Irish in antebellum and Civil War New York was tightly controlled by the archbishop, John Hughes. A labourer before he became a priest, the Irish-born Hughes had written poetry in which he expressed the kinship he felt between his heritage and the plight of the African-American slave.7 However, Allen shows that for the sake of political expediency and economic advantage Hughes’s anti-Abolitionist stance slid from careful equivocation into an eventual posture of white supremacy. This was eagerly taken up by his flock who, under the fosterage of the Democratic party headquarters at Tammany Hall, increasingly organized themselves as a self-protective white labour force haunted by the phantom threat of non-existent black workers – a performance that occasionally flared into the violent slaughter of African-Americans by the white Irish-Americans of New York.8 So, the Irish became white, and joined a political and symbolic order dreamed by the Virginian Democrats, Jefferson and Madison, where equality and justice for all was assured ‘above the racial line’, but at the cost of denying the poverty and precarious social status of Irish-American workingclass lives.9 In the east coast cities of America, Irish-American poverty with its attendant high level of drug and alcohol addiction, organized crime, unemployment, school drop-out rates, poor housing and health were denied by projecting these ills as germane to African-American communities: to complain about the oppression of poverty is to be black. This informed the racist anger that flared during the ‘busing crisis’ in South Boston, in which the desegregation of Boston’s public schools led to full-scale violence against African-Americans. The TV and photographic

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images of Irish-Americans rioting against the school buses carrying AfricanAmerican children into schools in Irish-American neighbourhoods remain the iconic examples of white racism in east coast USA.10

‘. . . and all the World is Bright and Gay’: New York St Patrick’s Day The New York St Patrick’s Day Parade still bears the hallmarks of its roots in the troubled 1850s. The Ancient Order of Hibernians was founded in America in 1836 at New York’s St James Church to protect the clergy and church property from the Know Nothings and their followers. This is still a male-only fraternal organization who claim their origin in the misty days of the sixteenth century when the members were needed, in the words of their official historian, ‘to protect the lives of priests who risked immediate death to keep the Catholic Faith alive in occupied Ireland after the reign of England’s King Henry VIII’, even though the name AOH ‘can only be traced to 1641’.11 While its origins in both Ireland and America lay in ‘the purpose of defending Gaelic values, and protecting Church and clergy’, its role changed with the influx of Irish immigration following the famines of the 1840s, after which it sought ‘to aid the newly arrived Irish, both socially and politically’.12 By 1854, the Irish were on red alert from violent attacks by the Know Nothings, and as the AOH’s Deputy National Historian Gerry Curran puts it, the St Patrick’s Day Parade of that year contained an ‘unusually large number of Irish units of the state militia [. . .] The inclusion of these military units helped transform the St. Patrick’s Day procession into the parade we recognize today’.13 The AOH has been the prime organizer of the New York parade since this time. The parade quickly grew in size and the AOH spread rapidly in the cities where the Irish were to be found; soon both the AOH and St Patrick’s Day parades became a feature of every substantial American city, and the AOH became the largest Irish society in the USA. The parade thus came to demonstrate the pride of Irish Catholics, in both their ancestral heritage and their (white) American citizenship. In Curran’s words: ‘The celebration of St. Patrick’s Day has become a symbol not only of devotion to our patron saint and ancestral home but also of our constitutional right to freely assemble in our streets as respected American citizens.’14 However, by the early 1990s, the AOH and Irish-Americans felt that their church was under attack; this time it wasn’t ultra Protestants but radical homosexual activists who were to blame. Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) had shocked with a protest in St Patrick’s Cathedral during

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their ‘Stop the Church’ action in December 1989, where an activist allegedly spat out the host during a mass officiated by John Cardinal O’Connor. While mass was disrupted, nobody spat out the host; nonetheless, the story was universally believed.15 Many (including liberal Irish Catholics) might have felt that the virulently homophobic cardinal, who did his utmost to exert his considerable power in New York politics, was fair game to be targeted by protesters, but there was general agreement that the action of spitting out the communion was a desecration that must be condemned. For many Irish-Americans, the (misreported) pollution of communion in their beloved St Patrick’s Cathedral was considered injurious. The anger of the Irish-American community was misguided, but was informed by collective historical memories of sectarian oppression, and this configured the emotional atmosphere when ILGO applied to march in the parade. The clash between the AOH and ILGO can be understood as a cultural clash between Irish-born immigrants and Irish-American natives. Anne Maguire, a founder member of ILGO, notes that even within ILGO from its earliest inception, Irish-born lesbians and gay men resented what they perceived as being romanticized and patronized by their fellow gay Irish-Americans, and there ‘were rumblings [within ILGO] about how unfriendly the immigrants were towards Irish-Americans, and there was a grain of truth to this assertion and no simple explanation’.16 When the parade controversy broke the leaders of ILGO were largely Irish-born lesbians and gays, who didn’t readily think of themselves as the descendants of the survivors of a nineteenth-century famine, and most of whom were indifferent or opposed to the Catholic Church or, if engaged with it, tended to be critically engaged. Some of the key members involved in establishing ILGO had been radicalized through direct experience of British militarized oppression of Catholic communities in the north of Ireland or through involvement with Republican politics. However, even this potentially common ground with Irish-America was complicated because the Irish-born activists understood the inequities in the north of Ireland as civil rights infringements, a model that owed an intellectual and political debt to the US Black Civil Rights Movement.17 Given that this was before the world was wide-webbed, and that many of the Irish-born ILGO members came out as lesbians and gay men after they had arrived in the USA, their first point of contact was not the lesbian and gay social scenes and communities of the urban US, but the IrishAmerican and so-called ‘New Irish’ communities. It was on this community that they depended for jobs, housing, social life, emotional support and connection with home through news, information or Irish goods.

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Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization It was precisely this faultline between being Irish and being gay that ILGO sought to address. As Maguire describes it: In the spring of 1990, we had our first meeting in a Japanese restaurant . . . Our mission was to make it possible for the predominantly immigrant group to be Irish and gay at the same time. Before ILGO we were forced to choose; we could be Irish if we were closeted (which most of our members were), or we could be lesbians and gay men so long as we gave up the benefits offered by the Irish community to immigrants to this city [New York]. ILGO changed all that. Women and men from all walks of life flocked to the group. When spring passed into summer we celebrated by marching in the Lesbian and Gay Pride parade in Manhattan. Self-identified Irish lesbians and gay men seemed to come as a surprise to many in the gay community and jokes were made about how our existence was an oxymoron. This made us wonder if Irish people knew we existed at all. We naively thought the St Patrick’s Day Parade would solve everything and sent in our application to march in October.18 In the same manner that Irish-Americans used the parade to assert their twin allegiance to Irish Catholic nationalism and American citizenship, ILGO members wished to assert pride in nationality and membership of the lesbian and gay community. However, this was to prove an impossibility: the difficulty that many in ILGO experienced in expressing being both Irish and (at the same time, in the same place) gay was to be prevented by the public discourse that arose from the earliest days of the parade controversy. ILGO did get to march in the 230th New York St Patrick’s Day parade in 1991, at the invitation of the Manhattan-based Division 7 of the AOH. As guests of Division 7 they were not allowed to carry their own banner, but ILGO reasoned that their visibility would be ensured as the first, and as yet only, African-American Mayor of New York, David Dinkins, was to march in solidarity with them. The Division 7 contingent was isolated from the rest of the parade up Fifth Avenue, which was clear for blocks ahead of and behind the group. Screams of hatred accompanied their procession up the Avenue. People shouted ‘AIDS! AIDS!’ as if wishing the disease on the group. The violent and vocal hatred was echoed in placards: ‘Die Faggots’, ‘Beware the AIDS of March’, ‘We’re going to get you, We know who you are’, and prophetically: ‘Dinkins – One term Mayor’.

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Beer cans were the most frequently thrown items. Keith Moore, a gay man from Donegal, describes the experience of standing amongst the crowd of onlookers at St Patrick’s Cathedral when ILGO arrived: ‘They were shouting, “Faggots. Queers. You’re not Irish. Your parents must be English.”’ Describing how those standing beside him shouted and screamed, then turned to look at him and smile, he comments: ‘They would’ve wanted to kill me if they’d known I was gay. Standing in front of the cathedral felt like being raped.’19 John Cardinal O’Connor’s outspokenness, power and dogged hard work in opposing ILGO’s participation in the parade was ultimately to prove supremely effective in barring lesbians and gay men from the party on Fifth Avenue. Maguire evocatively describes one of the 1991 parade’s pivotal moments, as it reached St Patrick’s Cathedral: Traditionally the cardinal would come down to greet the mayor, who in normal times would be honoured by being placed at the head of the parade. These were not normal times. For these two powerful men in New York City, this day would prove to be memorable in their political careers. The mayor, an African American, stood with the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization. The Cardinal, an Irish American, snubbed him for it.20 At the end of the parade the visibly shaken Mayor held a brief press conference. He had in fact just walked a few blocks with ILGO, joining them before they came to St Patrick’s Cathedral, but he compared marching with ILGO to the 1960s’ civil rights marches in Alabama: ‘It was like marching in Birmingham. I knew there would be deep emotions, but I did not anticipate the cowards in the crowd. There was far, far too much negative comment.’21 In the run up to the parade the following year, 1992, the Irish Voice newspaper, a weekly newspaper read by tens of thousands of the ‘New Irish’ immigrants to the USA, ran an op-ed piece by ILGO who wanted to make clear that, contrary to what the AOH were saying, ILGO had not been established specifically to disrupt the parade. Marching in the St Patrick’s Day Parade was regarded by ILGO as an appropriate cultural activity for the group to celebrate its Irish heritage [. . .] We see this as a fight for the full participation of all Irish people in the annual celebration of our heritage. The Parade Committee shouldn’t be trying to determine who is Irish enough to celebrate St Patrick’s Day.22

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ILGO recognized that their exclusion was sought on the grounds that they were not representative of an Ireland or Irish identity that the AOH claimed the right to determine.23

How ILGO Became the KKK In the fallout from the 1991 parade, a legal hearing was held by the Human Rights Commission of New York to determine if the AOH was discriminating against ILGO. An unsolicited amicus brief was filed on behalf of the AOH from the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU). The NYCLU are a regional branch of the influential American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The ACLU has a membership of over 400,000, and prosecutes over 6000 cases a year in the USA and describes itself, without irony, as America’s ‘guardian of liberty’.24 It was all the more breathtaking then that NYCLU’s brief, written by Norman Siegel, supported ILGO’s exclusion from the parade. Siegel sought this exclusion on the grounds that ILGO was by definition anti-Irish – not just the opposite of ‘Irishness’ but its antithesis, a violent self-defined enemy of the Irish: Could the organizers of the Israel Day Parade be compelled to accept German born neo-Nazis to its ranks? Would the Gay Pride Committee be required to accept heterosexual homophobes and skinheads to its contingency? Can the AOH exclude on the grounds of national origin an English born group which wishes to march with the banner ‘England Stay In Ireland’? Must the AOH include non-Catholic groups who wish to express their anti-Papal beliefs?25 A major victory of the Civil Rights movement in the USA was the ending of the segregated school system in the Southern states; the legal argument accepted by the Supreme Court leading to desegregation was that separate systems could not be equal. Remarkably, in light of this landmark decision, the brief of the NYCLU argued that ILGO be awarded a permit for a separate parade on St Patrick’s Day – separate but equal. NYCLU would go on to make this same argument against ILGO in other courts and the ACLU would eventually be on the winning side in the American Supreme Court which successfully overturned lesbians’ and gays’ right to be included in the Boston St Patrick’s Day Parade.26 The support of the African-American Mayor for ILGO, despite the cardinal’s opposition, arguably fed into Siegel’s assumption that ILGO were not quite Irish. Certainly, the NYCLU implicitly assumed that homophobia was intrinsic to the expression of Irish identity, and so a proud claiming

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of homosexual identity could not be performed as an Irish identity; the two discourses were antithetical. The battle as to who was really Irish continued in the hearings of the Human Rights Commission. Their judgement, written by Judge Rosemary Maldonado, rejected the AOH argument that the parade was a private affair. Attended by over 500,000 people and costing well over a million dollars to the taxpayer, the Commission ruled that the parade was a public accommodation. The judgement also ruled that the AOH’s claim that they had ILGO on a ‘waiting-list’ of would-be participants was a sham and that the AOH had discriminated against ILGO.27 Despite this, Judge Maldonado’s final analysis was that, as the parade was a celebration of Irish ethnicity, the AOH had a right to discriminate against ILGO, based on the tacit acceptance that an a priori condition of being Irish was an active intolerance of homosexuals, and therefore no expression of an identity that was simultaneously Irish and homosexual was possible. This effectively asserted that the AOH’s right to be homophobic because they are Irish outweighs Irish people’s right to define themselves as gay. When a three-judge panel at the New York City Commission on Human Rights overturned Moldonado’s original recommendation, concluding that, given the secular nature of the annual Irish celebration on Fifth Avenue, the ILGO should march, the media echoed the argument of the NYCLU and the analogy between ILGO and the Ku Klux Klan was welded into a short-hand trope. New York Newsday asked: ‘Would anyone force a civil rights group to let David Duke [of the KKK] march in a parade honoring Martin Luther King Jr.?’28 Such is the power and danger of analogies that they can so readily slip from being a comparison to being an aphorism that can be substituted for the truth. Though ILGO can hardly be said to resemble the KKK except for the fact that they are a largely white group, the idea that ILGO was analogous to the KKK came to characterize public and media commentary. For instance, the New York Times gave right-wing conservative Pat Buchanan the column inches to fulminate that: ‘Martin Luther King Jr. could not have been compelled to let the Ku Klux Klansmen march with him’,29 while the President of the New York County AOH, Timothy Hartnett, filed an affidavit to reverse the Human Rights Commission decision, exploiting the same rhetorical tactic: ‘Constitutional protection is not reserved for zealots. It is not the only the Nazis and the KKK and the gay groups that have the right to shape their message.’30 Court rulings eventually decreed that ILGO was not allowed to march in 1992, but granted permission to stage a protest at the sidelines. This was to be the last time that ILGO were allowed the right to protest. Since 1993, ILGO has been put in the position where

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organizing any kind of protest on Fifth Avenue is interpreted as civil disobedience and results in mass arrests.31 The American media took an extraordinary interest in the controversy and were largely very sympathetic to the Irish Lesbian and Gay organization: ‘mild mannered’ became the epithet most associated with ILGO. However, while expressing ‘genuine sadness’ for ILGO’s plight, most media commentators and print editorials were happy that ILGO had not been ordered into the 1992 parade by a court decision; as the New York Times put it, that would have been the cure that ‘looked worse than the disease’.32 Fifteen years after the first parade controversy, the 2006 New York parade chairman, John Dunleavy of the AOH, in an interview with the Irish Times again recycled the analogy of ILGO and the KKK, declaring that an African-American parade could hardly be expected to have the KKK march; therefore, why should New York’s St Patrick’s Day Parade include ILGO?33

Conclusion: backward Irish-Americans and the dawn of the Celtic Tiger Irish-Americans have had a long struggle to be included in the white and middle classes of east coast USA. Irish ethnic pride in Boston and New York has traditionally been articulated within the context of an active participation in trade unionism, policing, pub culture, white racism, class shame, Democratic party politics and Catholicism. At the same time the Irish in Boston and New York have also had to negotiate the negative portrayal of the Irish as a drunken, brawling and racist working class with their leaders depicted as a network of corrupt union officials, crooked cops, tribal politicians and elected officials, ruled by creepy, secretive and reactionary Catholic clergy. It is perhaps no surprise then that the American courts and media were most comfortable in maintaining the status quo representation of the Irish AOH as intrinsically bigoted and homophobic and ILGO, perversely, as having a racist potency, a representation expressed through the media associations of ILGO with the KKK. The ethnic Irish were again depicted as bigots: the comfort that New York liberals found in their own ethnic and heterosexist supremacy had once again found a selfconfirming foil in the Irish. A key cross-class touchstone for Irish identity in Boston and New York is rooted in the status of being the descendants of exiled victims of the famine, refugee survivors of the British Empire, and Irish-America takes seriously its role of keeping this memory alive. It is this backward-looking aspect of Irish-America and its concomitant fundraising for the IRA that

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has most embarrassed the Irish living in the Republic of Ireland. At the time the ILGO controversy broke, in the early pre-economic boom nineties, Ireland was still a country desperate to ‘modernize’, to join Europe, to disavow kinship with Northern Irish Catholics, and was, furthermore, engaged in a complex struggle to remove the influence of the Catholic Church from state affairs. The desire both to retain the ideological aspiration as enshrined in law and constitution and to fulfil contemporary aspirations to modernization and reform have frequently resulted in a somewhat self-contradictory Irish polity. Michael G. Cronin has written eloquently on how Irish gay men politically and symbolically constructed themselves as totems of ‘modernity’, harbingers of Irish modernization, though at the height of the dispute between ILGO and the AOH, those years between 1991–93, the expression of a gay male sexual identity was criminalized in the Irish Republic.34 With the migration of the New York controversy to Ireland a group of lesbians in Cork decided to apply to march in that city’s 1992 St Patrick’s Day Parade. Thirty-two lesbians marched as a contingent behind the banner that read ‘Hello New York’, and were awarded a prize as ‘best new entry’. This prompted Kieran Murphy, of the organizers, Cork Junior Chamber of Commerce, to tell the Washington Post that, in an implicit contrast to the Irish-American diaspora, ‘we are fairly progressive down here in Cork’, recognizing ‘that this group are part of our society and have as much right to march as anybody else’.35 The following year, lesbians and gay men (still criminalized until June of that year) paraded not only in Cork but also in Galway and Dublin, and the Dublin St Patrick’s Day Parade expressly announced itself as an inclusive multicultural festival, even hiring an organizer of the Dublin Gay Pride Festival. Two years later, in November 1995, the state stepped in and took over the running of the Dublin Parade as part of what is now called ‘St Patrick’s Festival’, a week-long promotion of the new, forward-looking, ‘multicultural’ Ireland, its brief being to ‘[p]roject, internationally, an accurate image of Ireland as a creative, professional and sophisticated country with wide appeal, as we approach the new Millennium’.36 For well over a hundred years the St Patrick’s Day Parade in New York had been the world’s largest celebration of Irish ethnicity, but in the wake of the liberal Irish media’s denunciation of the ‘backward’ IrishAmerican expulsion of Irish-born lesbians and gays, allied to the desire to project the Republic of Ireland as a ‘modern’ nation, the St Patrick’s Festival, centred on Dublin, was born. A strange but potent legacy of ILGO’s stand against the AOH is the impetus it gave the Irish state to claim St Patrick’s Day for the Irish Republic: ‘it was a strange fact of life that the

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celebrations held in Ireland for St. Patrick’s Day prior to 1996 paled in comparison to those held abroad, especially when one considers what an ideal opportunity the day represented to showcase Ireland and Dublin to the world. We set out to seize that opportunity, and completely transform the national and international perception of St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin.’37 Ten years on, over 4000 performers parade at the Mardi Gras style parade while over 1.5 million come to watch. At the height of the Celtic Tiger it should be no surprise that the main festival events are ‘GE Money Oíche’, ‘Irishjobs.ie Céilí’ and ‘The Economist Boat Race’. Meanwhile, fifteen years later, ILGO is still fighting for inclusion in a parade that is still a significant Irish space, however much the forward-looking Irish state might wish to deny it and the Irish diaspora that the NY parade includes and excludes.

Notes This chapter relies on the Irish Lesbian and Gay Archive, IQA, which has a comprehensive news clippings archive of over 250,000 clips from Irish national, regional, and some international media, spanning over three decades. 1. ACLU, ‘About Us’, http://www.aclu.org/about/index.html (accessed 21 March 2006). 2. Thomas O’Connor, The Boston Irish: a Political History (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), p. 61. 3. The website of the Charitable Irish Society claims that, founded in 1737, it is the oldest Irish society in the US, but omits mention of its sectarian history. Charitable Irish Society website, ‘History’, http://www.charitableirishsociety. org/history.htm (accessed 21 March 2006). 4. See Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control (London and New York: Verso, 1994), p. 139. 5. Allen, Invention, p. 23. 6. Allen, Invention, pp. 182–4. 7. For an example, see ‘The Slave’, in Allen, Invention, Appendix K. 8. Allen, Invention, pp. 159–99. 9. Allen, Invention, p. 19. 10. For an astute personal account of racialized conflicts between Irish-American and African-American working-class communities, in this case in Boston, see Michael Patrick MacDonald, All Souls: a Family Story from Southie (New York: Random House, 1999). 11. ‘What is the Ancient Order of Hibernians in America?’, http://www.saintpatricks dayparade.com/AOH/AOH.htm (accessed 21 March 2006). 12. Mike McCormack, ‘The Ancient Order of Hibernians’ (21 September 2005), http://www.aoh.com/history/index.htm (accessed 21 March 2006). 13. Gerry Curran, ‘St Patrick’s Day and the AOH’, http://www.aoh.com/history/ index.htm (accessed 21 March 2006). 14. Curran, ‘St Patrick’s Day’. See also Mike Cronin and Daryl Adair, The Wearing of the Green: a History of St Patrick’s Day (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), p. 37.

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15. Emily Nahmanson describes Tom Keane, the alleged miscreant: ‘he was the Sacrilegious Wafer Smasher, when in fact he just simply said, “Communion? I don’t think so” ’. Emily Nahmanson, ‘The Sacrilegious Wafer Smasher’, Interview 23, ‘The ACT-UP Oral History Project’ (27 April 2003), http://www. actuporalhistory.org/interviews/interviews_04#nahmanson (accessed 21 March 2006). ILGO were encouraged to resolve their dispute with the AOH by disavowing the ‘Stop the Church’ action. See Anne Maguire, Rock the Sham! (New York: Street Level Press, 2006), pp. 138–9. 16. Maguire, Rock, p. 42. 17. See, in Maguire: Lucy Lynch, p. 18; Tarlach MacNiallais, p. 20; Anne Maguire, pp. 28–9; and Marie Honan, p. 32. See also Brian Dooley, Black and Green: the Fight for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland and Black America (London: Pluto Press, 1998). 18. Maguire, Rock, pp. 12–13. 19. Quoted in Maguire, Rock, p. 17. 20. Maguire, Rock, p. 17. 21. Quoted in Maguire, Rock, p. 19. 22. Quoted in Maguire, Rock, p. 79. 23. See Kathryn A. Conrad, Locked in the Family Cell: Gender, Sexuality and Political Agency in Irish National Discourse (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), pp. 63–9. 24. For the ACLU ‘mission statement’, see http://www.aclu.org/about/ aboutmain.cfm (accessed 21 March 2006). 25. Quoted in Maguire, Rock, p. 94. 26. For the summary of the argument in the ACLU amicus brief, see October 1, 1994 U.S. Supreme Court case of Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston (GLIB), 63 U.S.L.W. 4625 (June 19, 1995)(9–10). 27. Maguire, Rock, p. 110. 28. Quoted in Maguire, Rock, p. 130. 29. Quoted in Maguire, Rock, p. 130. 30. Maguire, Rock, p. 133. 31. For a summary of the ILGO court cases see Maguire, Rock, pp. 203–4. 32. Quoted in Maguire, Rock, p. 120. 33. Irish Times, 16 March 2006, p. 6. 34. Michael G. Cronin, ‘ “He’s My Country”: Liberalism, Nationalism, and Sexuality in Contemporary Gay Fiction’, Éire-Ireland, 39/40:3&4 (Fall/Winter 2004): 250–67. 35. Quoted in Maguire, Rock, p. 107. 36. ‘St Patrick’s Day’, http://www.stpatricksday.ie/cms/history_stpatricksday.html (accessed 21 March 2006). 37. ‘St Patrick’s Day’.

11 Fantasy, Celebrity and ‘Family Values’ in High-End and Special Event Tourism in Ireland Diane Negra

Placing its focus on the ways that (white) ethnic affiliation is put into practice in a luxury economy, this chapter constitutes in part a response to Jane Desmond’s call for ‘further research on tourist industries as crucial arenas of public culture where embodied notions of identity are sold, enacted, debated, and occasionally contested’.1 Beginning in the mid1990s, and moving forward to the present, I examine a variety of popular American cultural discourses that conceptualize Ireland as a national site in which one can re-make or fortify one’s ‘family values’. While in previously published work, I have tracked the correlations in broadcast media between an American obsession with family values and fantasized versions of Irishness, arguing that Irishness has repeatedly been linked to a kind of ‘ethnic enchantment’, this essay extends these observations in light of celebrity discourse, material culture and a clear expansion of the upper end of the Irish tourist market perceptible to American consumers.2 The fantasy status of Ireland in American entertainment news and celebrity journalism shifted decisively in the period of the Celtic Tiger. As the cachet of Irishness surged, accounts of celebrity tourism and property ownership in Ireland proliferated, with a large number of film, television, fashion and popular music stars making publicized visits to Ireland, sometimes to shoot films, sometimes to purchase or consider purchasing property, sometimes to vacation. Numerous accounts cited travel to Ireland by celebrities in the process of negotiating transitional moments in their careers and the positioning of Ireland as an antidote to professional difficulties and family or couple dysfunction. In a remarkable number of cases, accounts of celebrity tourism in Ireland centre on stars who had recently weathered scandal associated with disrupted families and/or couples. From Marlon Brandon to Elizabeth Hurley and from Julia Roberts to Mia Farrow, 141

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a large number of celebrities turn up in Ireland not long after public revelations of personal crisis. In the late 1990s, a romanticized, restorative Ireland increasingly served as the setting for celebrity weddings, a trend that perhaps culminated with the extraordinarily lavish nuptials of Victoria Adams and David Beckham at Luttrellstown Castle in 1999.3 To some extent, such celebrity behaviour has ‘trickled down’ to the American middle class through the mainstreaming of destination weddings in Ireland. Where stars seek privacy in Ireland, non-celebrities would seem to be differently motivated, yet what the celebrity and non-celebrity destination wedding frequently hold in common is the apparent recognition that Ireland is a place in which one can legitimately perform aristocratic privilege. Accordingly, one American travel agency which specializes in arranging tours to Ireland for the purpose of ‘antiquities, heritage, weddings, reunions and vow renewal’ bills itself under the name Patrician Journeys Inc. ‘Where Dreams Become Reality’, and at the Posh/Becks wedding the celebrity pair famously presented themselves to their guests seated on thrones. Even as a moderate post-Celtic Tiger waning of interest in ‘all things Irish’ may be setting in (and the effects of the weakened dollar on tourism starting to be felt) destination weddings in Ireland appear to be thriving. Irishweddings.com, for example, boasts that over 120,000 people have visited and availed of the services offered by its merchant members. This chapter analyses the ‘double displacement effect’ of bridal tourism identified by Mary G. McDonald, who observes that the global tourist wedding industry moves ‘social rituals to distant stages’ and overwrites ‘prior social landscapes at the destination’.4 Toward that end I also incorporate Laws of Attraction (2004), a film which contrives to bring its stars to an Irish castle who then discover themselves inadvertently married after a night out, analysing how the setting of ritualized, quasi-aristocratic behaviour in Ireland continues up to the present moment.5 Analysis of this and other texts will help elucidate the nature of the ‘laws of attraction’ that continue to govern the relationship between American identity and Irishness in popular culture formulations.

Scandal, recovery and celebrity real estate in Ireland Bearing in mind how tourism and concepts of national identity are inflected by other contemporary phenomena such as stardom, it is evident that Ireland has been constituted in celebrity discourse as a national reference point in opposition to various forms of contemporary disorder. In the 1990s Ireland was regularly situated as a cultural location where

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ethnicity could be rediscovered/acquired and consequently mobilized as a form of response to scandal associated with divorce, infidelity and other threats to a couple or family relationship. By examining press accounts of celebrity tourism, we can trace the way in which stardom serves as a register for the linkage of Irishness with the maintenance of ‘family values’, observing the dependence of such accounts on a fantasy Ireland untouched by the social and economic changes normally associated with postmodernism. There seem to be three primary categories into which discourses on contemporary stardom fell when linked to an Irish context: 1. The first highlighted unsettledness in a female film star’s romantic life (she has either not chosen a partner, or has made a problematic choice). In either case, Ireland’s stabilizing influence is represented as a solution to romantic strife. (Thus Julia Roberts is reported spending time in Ireland after her breakups with Keifer Sutherland and Lyle Lovett while reports that Elizabeth Hurley planned to buy property in Ireland appeared not long after the Hugh Grant/Divine Brown scandal6). 2. The second positioned Ireland as a sanctuary amid family crisis (as when Mia Farrow went to Ireland after the Woody Allen/Soon-yi Previn scandal, Angela Lansbury relocated her family to Cork as a means of combating her children’s drug dependency, and Marlon Brando was reported to have abandoned Tahiti, associated with a family tragedy, in favour of Ireland7). 3. The third (and sometimes overlapping) discursive category represented time spent in Ireland as a professional respite. Even if a celebrity is there to work, this is a healing labour of love, not work in the Hollywood sense. (Thus Mia Farrow speaks of the Widow’s Peak shoot in these terms, as does Julia Roberts who reportedly does Michael Collins ‘for free’8). In all of these narrative trajectories, Ireland’s placement is that of either a figurative or literal homeland, available as a site of rejuvenation and restoration. In celebrity tourist discourse, Ireland serves as an ahistorical, conservative site of familial restoration and recuperative leisure. A segment on the syndicated half-hour tabloid entertainment programme ‘Extra’ revealed how consistently Ireland was being offered up as a refuge for beleaguered celebrities in this period. Included in the broadcast on 7 November 1995, the segment leads viewers through a stunning visual tour of Ireland, authenticating itself with supplementary commentary by a Cork publican and an Irish real-estate broker to the stars. The piece’s primary focus is on Elizabeth Hurley’s reported attempts to purchase

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an estate in Cork and the increasing popularity of Ireland as a destination for celebrities because of its ‘splendid isolation’ and ‘fiscal friendliness’. According to the report, Hurley was involved in something of a bidding war for the property with Brando who had ‘announced plans to put down roots’ in Ireland. The timing of such coverage was decisive for both stars, for not only was Hurley the ‘wronged woman’ in the massively publicized scandal over Hugh Grant’s infidelity, Brando had recently suffered personal troubles of his own, when the actor’s son murdered the boyfriend of his sister, who herself then later committed suicide. Celebrity journalism of this kind thus consistently presented Ireland as a refuge space for beleaguered celebrities, associating it with therapeutic tranquillity.

Laws of attraction, Ireland and the fantasy wedding Laws of Attraction, starring Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore, awkwardly grafts together a number of narrative formulae including the screwball romance, courtroom drama, and elements of what I have identified elsewhere as the ‘expatriate romance’ in which a US heroine resolves her identity dilemmas overseas.9 The film casts its stars as bickering divorce attorneys, Daniel Rafferty and Audrey Woods, whose attraction to one another is overridden by Audrey’s sense of professional obligation to her client. In their most high-profile case a petulant rock star, Thorne Jamison and his fashion designer wife Serena are on the verge of a settlement agreement that founders when both insist that the one piece of property they want to retain from the marriage is their Irish castle. When the attorneys are obliged to travel to Ireland in an attempt to gather evidence to prove that each of their respective clients is entitled to the castle, they are swept up into a romantic haze brought on by the impact of local lore, the social warmth of the community in which they find themselves and the effects of large amounts of poitín. The next morning they wake to find that in the course of the evening they have seemingly got married. Upon returning to the USA, they continue the case until their respective clients reconcile at the castle where they have both taken refuge. Although the Jamison marriage has been rocked by infidelities on both sides and the couple are seething with anger on every single prior occasion we have seen them, the castle’s housekeeper, Mrs Flanagan (having apparently kept track of such things better than the couple themselves) wishes them a ‘happy anniversary’ and a reconciliation is immediately effected. Daniel and Audrey track the couple down at the castle, learn that the marriage ceremony they went through was a sham and Daniel departs, leaving Audrey subject to an unlikely bit of relationship counselling by her formerly

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fractious clients. In a well established ‘chick flick’ convention, the film then closes with Audrey reuniting with Daniel and confessing her misguidedness and sense of loneliness without him.10 At the centre of the film in many ways is the castle Thorne and Serena contend over. This piece of high-end Irish real estate (and its accompanying staff) is sufficiently talismanic that it centres a double romance plot, not only drawing together Daniel and Audrey but also restoring the relationship of Serena and Thorne. Indeed, the film can be seen as thematizing celebrity real estate from the outset – its opening scene consists of Audrey and her mother casing the Manhattan townhouse of a client’s wealthy husband, who has been served with a $97 million divorce case. The loving camerawork devoted to Audrey’s luxurious Manhattan apartment might well be said to serve the same function, conspicuously drawing our attention to its vast space and tasteful high-end decoration. But the Irish castle stands apart in several crucial respects. For one it is located in what Serena terms ‘the most magical place on earth’. Audrey herself is moved at first sight of the castle to say ‘Forget about Thorne and Serena – I want it.’ The castle is also located in a village conveniently celebrating its founders’ festival, the founders according to myth being a pair of runaway lovers.11 When Audrey awakes believing herself married to Daniel she hears in her head one of the castle’s staff relaying the founders’ story of a couple so ‘deeply in love they ran away here and got married in secret’, a characterization we are clearly invited to extend to Daniel and Audrey, particularly when Daniel tells her that ‘when one’s inhibitions are down, one acts on one’s true feelings’. In the film’s imagination America is a place where identity politics are taken altogether too seriously and gender relations have grown unnecessarily combative. By contrast, the castle, its staff and the town in which it is located come to symbolize a hyper-romantic Ireland ultimately powerful enough to reverse Audrey’s anti-romantic philosophy. There is another sense in which Laws of Attraction particularizes Irishness, and this becomes evident in the care it takes to contrast Irishness with other ethnicities and to underscore the enlivening, aphrodisiac effect of ethnicity itself in the film’s understanding. From the outset, Audrey – as that familiar cinematic archetype, the neurotic New York career woman – continually eats mass-produced ‘white-bread’ foods such as Hostess Snowflakes, Cheetos, Candy Corn, Oreos and Fiddle Faddle (through repetition the film ensures we don’t miss this motif) and her impulses for control and frustrated desire for travel are represented in her obsessive watching of the Weather Channel. ‘This is how you’re spending Saturday night? Eating junk food and watching the Weather Channel?’ exclaims

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Audrey’s mother at one point in alarm. ‘Let’s be honest. You were lost before I came along’, says Daniel at a later stage. Daniel, meanwhile, lives in Chinatown, an ethnically exotic part of New York City and takes Audrey to a Cuban restaurant where they sample unusual cocktails. Both ethnic categories are conceived as exotic but overstimulating – in what amounts to a racist sequence Audrey flees Daniel’s office, where she is snooping, and runs out into the streets of Chinatown only to be overwhelmed by the physical chaos and confusing sights and sounds around her.12 Likewise, after numerous cocktails at the Cuban restaurant Audrey loses her sexual inhibitions and sleeps with Daniel. In contrast to the ‘messy’ ethnicities on display in Chinatown and at the Cuban restaurant, Irishness proves exhilarating but also emotionally restorative. While as an ethnic category it brings aphrodisiac effects, it steers these effects toward a safe conclusion. That is, while the couple have sex after dinner at the Cuban restaurant a night out in Ireland sees them getting married.13 A final element in the film is the high degree of self-awareness that it manifests about the coveted status of high-end real estate in Ireland. Exemplary in this regard is a mock episode of the MTV series ‘Cribs’ that Audrey and Thorne watch as they are attempting to build his case and evaluate marital assets. This parody of the now clichéd celebrity domesticity genre takes on board many of the tropes of commercialized Irishness. While Thorne translates the name of his home as meaning ‘castle of rock’ and attempts to relate a stirring history of the dramas of conquest in which the castle featured (and which culminate with his ownership) his language breaks down as he proves himself merely a ‘dumb’ rock star. This film has mixed feelings about the idea of Irish landmarks under ownership by nouveau riche Americans but it points the way toward more authentic, entitled visits to Ireland by Americans in need of spiritual replenishment and a necessary prompt toward the good practice of family values. Laws of Attraction thus conceptualizes a restorative/conservative white Irish ethnicity, distinguishable from postmodern ‘chaos’. It can also be seen to digest concepts of celebrity real estate, making room for the smaller scale and scope of the destination wedding, a phenomenon to which I now turn.

Destination weddings and family vacations in Ireland The power of the Irish wedding fantasy is such that it plays through multiple media forms as well as material culture. Its relevance to the collectibles

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industry, for instance, may be seen in the ‘Wedding at Kilkenny Castle’ porcelain bride doll, designed by Sandra Bilotto and sold through mail order by the Ashton-Drake Galleries in Illinois. A promotional brochure for the doll features the following description: With her clear blue eyes gazing out over the Irish countryside and her shining, dark hair touched by a gentle breeze, this lovely Irish bride celebrates her wedding day on the grounds of Kilkenny Castle. Surrounded by the majesty of this famous Irish landmark and its beautiful fountain and gardens, she is proud of her Irish heritage, and pleased that she is able to express it in the elegant and symbolic bridal ensemble that she wears on this special day. Both the brochure and accompanying letter are at pains to emphasize that every detail of the doll’s costume and jewellery reflect heritage symbolism, from her Claddagh tiara to the elaborate Celtic knotwork pattern of her gown. However, even this careful accessorization of Irishness may be insufficient without an actual heritage destination as bridal backdrop. Strikingly, the letter observes that ‘[a] bride of Irish descent may seek out wedding attire and symbolic bridal accessories that reflect her heritage in a personal way. The bride’s connection with her Irish roots often extends beyond just her bridal gown, and might include the flowers, the music, the text for the marriage ceremony, and even the physical setting of her nuptials.’ While the promotional material clearly fetishizes white Irish femininity (details such as the doll’s blue eyes and freckles are singled out), the doll is named for a site-specific ceremony in a gesture that would seem to underscore the power of the destination wedding to enact ethnicity in contemporary culture (Figure 11.1). Building on the previous observations about the celebrity vacation in Ireland and the reading of Laws of Attraction, this section will expand the analysis by considering several more recent texts staging American couple and family identity in Ireland. Notably, these claim to depict ‘real people’ engaged in key social rituals. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the American wedding dramatically intensified and expanded its remit as social theatrical. As the matrimonial industry experienced vast gains in an era of neoconservative social retrenchment, ‘the lavish wedding shifted from a testament to the bride’s purity, virginity, and fertility to a celebration of luxury, romance and magic’.14 The dramatic rise in the cultural profile of the wedding is attributable to both the affluence of the period and a more general gravitation

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Figure 11.1 Irish theme wedding fantasies circulate through the collectibles industry as well as through special event tourism (courtesy Ashton-Drake Galleries)

toward luxurious display, but equally to a crisis of middle-class intimacy. As Eva Ilouz writes: Romantic passion has been further ‘disenchanted’ by its very triumph in the mass media and consumer culture. Because of the ubiquitous use of romance to sell commodities, romance in real life has become an empty form, acutely conscious of itself as code and cliché. We have become deeply aware that, in the privacy of our words and acts of love,

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we rehearse cultural scenarios that we did not write. The formulas of romance now compel the belief only of the culturally deprived.15 In such a climate the stage is set for the incorporation of Irishness as a previously-established mode of ethnic enchantment, one that particularizes and authenticates overplayed bridal rituals. Clearly, one of the developments related to the expansion of the wedding franchise in 1990s American culture was the heightened profile of the ethnic theme wedding with its promise of mitigation against the overcommodified, mass-produced nature of weddings in an era when some couples were going so far as to obtain company sponsorship of gowns, cakes, music and other bridal paraphernalia when they reached the limits of their finances.16 Employing an ethnic flourish or two in their ritualizing behaviour enabled a couple to particularize otherwise clichéd bridal formulas. As Natasha Casey has observed, ‘despite a generally ailing economy, by 2004 the Irish-themed goods market was still developing helped in part by the growing trend of Irish-themed weddings’.17 At an Irish ethnic theme wedding an Irish blessing might be offered, an Irish-themed toast made, kilts worn or Irish-identified iconography employed in the mise-en-scène of the ceremony. The cultural authenticity or purity of such flourishes does not need verification and more than one ethnic heritage may be invoked simultaneously. As Cele Otnes and Elizabeth H. Pleck argue: even though many middle-class or professional couples have no direct knowledge of the ethnic traditions of their ancestors’ countries of origin, they nevertheless would like a lavish wedding with a few ethnic touches. Moreover, couples often incorporate ritual elements that have nothing to do with their own heritage but simply stand for something they find aesthetically or politically pleasing, and they co-opt artifacts or ritual scripts from other cultures for their own ceremonies. In this age of bricolage, the creative recombination of products and/or rituals to give them new meaning, ethnicity is an exercise in selective consuming.18 Internet research reveals a vast number of options available to the couple that wants to thematize their wedding in terms of Irish heritage. Ask Ginka, the Wedding and Party Guide, for example, offers links to apparel (where to obtain traditional Irish costumes, shamrock veils, Irish musical garters and St Patrick’s ‘nail art’), books (how-to and advice texts detailing Irish wedding customs and traditions, Irish blessings, prayers, love poems and sayings), invitations (with Claddagh Ring motif, with Four Leaf Clover pattern or simply ‘Historical Irish Wedding Stationery’), wedding favours (chocolate

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claddaghs, shamrock medallions) and real-life stories in which descriptions are provided of other couples’ Irish theme or destination weddings. For those without recourse to means of ethnic differentiation, it may well have seemed by the late 1990s that the spectacle of the affluent ‘white wedding’ had become one of the biggest cultural clichés going.19 In this period wedding fictions threatened to swamp the American market with a proliferation of bridal-themed romantic comedies, season-ending primetime television weddings and morning television vote-in weddings in which a couple is married on/by ‘The Today Show’ or ‘Good Morning America’. A more recent wave of bridal fictions has demonstrated an increasingly self-conscious, performative and at times ironic, critical and deconstructive relationship to the wedding as social theatrical and ‘family values’ display case. The reality genre has been particularly adept at this, inventing hoax series such as Fox’s ‘My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé’ (2004) in which a young Colorado woman (Randi Coy) is compelled to convince her family that she loves and will marry a boorish, obese man with low social capital in order to win a million dollars for both herself and her family.20 The series’ formula lays bare the economic incentives to wed and the white middle-class family’s deep although generally unspoken desire to reproduce or elevate its class status through marriage and to validate its ideological precepts. In ‘My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé’, the near-wedding becomes a trauma whose survival strengthens the family and Randi is ultimately awarded the windfall despite a last-minute revelation that prevents the couple from actually taking vows. While the ceremony is lightly ethnically themed with the Coy brothers in kilts and bagpipers providing the music, more significant for my purposes is the fact that a closing title in the final episode announces that Randi Coy plans to spend some of her winnings to take her family on a trip to Ireland for her father’s fiftieth birthday. In this way, an Irish vacation acts to restabilize familial identity after it has been dangerously cast into doubt by the mercenary mock wedding. This resolution to ‘My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé’ thus confirms two of the observations made in Otnes and Pleck’s analysis of the fantasy economy of bridal culture. It illustrates on the one hand how much dynamics of ‘celebrity [and I would add here even the fleeting and disposable celebrity of reality television] and spectacle are reshaping modern nuptials’ and, on the other, the fact that ‘far from eliminating national identity, the luxurious wedding has often encouraged it’.21 Notably in this case, however, the Coys reconsolidate their sense of familial and national identity beyond US borders, in a fashion highly reminiscent of arguments I have made elsewhere about the trend for Americans to locate their Americanness in encounters with Ireland and fantasy versions of Irishness.22

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If, as I have suggested, the meanings of the wedding in recent American popular culture have been in constant jeopardy of trivialization, overcommodification and overexposure, and the ethnic theme wedding represents one effort to re-secure and personalize an event that feels dangerously mass-produced, another recent phenomenon, that of the destination wedding, deserves scrutiny in a similar context. Destination weddings are indisputably on the rise; a report by the Associated Press reported a 200 per cent increase in the practice in the last decade with some 10 per cent of the two million American couples that marry each year now choosing to marry away from home.23 In autumn 2004 the practice was ratified by the high-profile morning programme ‘The Today Show’, which tweaked its wedding franchise to broadcast ‘Today Hosts a Destination Wedding’, adding possible locations to the variety of wedding elements to be decided by call-in voters. Clearly, a large number of US couples seem to perceive American towns and cities as increasingly incapable of generating the enchantment effect expected at a contemporary middle-class wedding ceremony. How does a wedding in Ireland extend the enchantment effect beyond that of an at-home ethnic-theme wedding? Does it confer a higher grade of authenticity on an event to stage it outside of US borders given that heritage meanings for Americans are so often tied to fantasies of a noncommodifiable intimacy? Karen Durbinsky’s sociological study of Niagara Falls and its status as a honeymooning destination draws attention to how selected local, regional and national geographies have factored in the ritualization of marriage in ways that chime with my arguments here.24 Similarly, Mary G. McDonald has examined how both American and Japanese destination weddings in Hawai’i generate a pleasurable liminality, a way of staging adherence/answerability to tradition/convention while also insisting on independence/idiosyncrasy. Destination weddings also entail a localized sense of theatre. As McDonald argues, ‘in the tourist wedding ceremony, the tourists themselves are the stars, but they grant the image of the place itself, a strong degree of performativity, or power to act upon them’.25 As the representational tradition of conjoining a visit to Ireland with the celebration of a marriage is longer than I have space to examine here (we should bear in mind that from its earliest days cinema was treating this theme – witness Gene Gauntier and Sidney Olcott’s 1910 film The Irish Honeymoon) my focus is exclusively on contemporary manifestations of this phenomenon. The appeal of the destination wedding may rest in part in its ability to effect a negotiation of the new terms on which social obligation is now discharged in American middle-class life – in an era in which very large

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weddings have become the norm, its defining features include a smaller number of guests and a scaling back of ceremony and celebration. Thus, its attractiveness is tied to its convenience as a formula to restore intimacy to the event by trimming the scope of the contemporary large wedding without appearing offensive or exclusive to would-be guests. The concept of the destination wedding is linked most often to the attractions of gathering a group together in a reliably beautiful setting than to heritage-seeking practices. However, in recent years a variety of national and regional tourist offices have successfully innovated a new travel concept, expanding the repertoire of established tourist practices to encompass the notion of a wedding away from home. A quick internet survey finds sites devoted to weddings in Prague (with accompanying information about Czech wedding traditions), in Santorini (praised for its ‘mystic beauty, its legends, and its breathtaking romantic atmosphere’) and seaside weddings in Italy (a section of the website detailing convenient locations lures couples to incorporate a stop at Matera, the shooting site for Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ into their itinerary).26 Yet, the commercial/promotional discourses of Irish destination weddings stand out for their assumptions about the salutary effect and traditional features of a ceremony in Ireland. In such accounts all that is commercialized, ersatz and generic about the contemporary wedding in the US is overturned in favour of an authentic, individualized and fully meaningful event in Ireland. In short, destination weddings in Ireland rely more heavily than destination weddings elsewhere on assumptions and expectations about heritage, and they tend to inflect the ceremony with fantasy ethnic/national meanings in a way that would be atypical for similar weddings in Italy, Hawai’i or Jamaica. Dreamweddingsireland.com for example details the features available in a ‘Celtic Themed Wedding’, referring to the ‘ancient Celtic ritual of the rite of marriage’ and outlining a wedding package comprised of a priestess’s blessing and a ceremony in which the couple symbolically unite themselves with the elements of nature. Ireland-based wedding professionals are rather open about their assumptions that a destination wedding in Ireland is conceptualized (implicitly or explicitly) as an antidote to the formulaic style and sterile sense of personal intimacy that is understood to characterize a corporate American culture. A column written for ultimateweddings.com by Anne Lanier, a County Clare wedding planner, stresses exactly this point. She asserts: ‘[t]he days of quickie Vegas weddings, cookie-cutter ceremonies and corporate hotel receptions are on the way out. Modern couples want a unique wedding location and vacation they can enjoy together with their intimate circle of family and close friends.’27

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If my discussion up to this point has stressed the bridal ritual, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that the destination wedding remains a tourist practice. The complex way in which the wedding ceremony extends the practices of tourism is hinted at, for example, in dreamwedding ireland.com’s ‘Celtic Cliffs Package’, which culminates in a Celtic-themed ceremony at the Cliffs of Moher with a tour of the area and photographs taken in scenic spots. If the destination wedding decontaminates the marriage ritual of the tinge of commodification and commercialism, it similarly exonerates its participants of the guilt of tourism. This may be a particularly important feature at a time when ‘regular tourism’ to Ireland seems to be depreciating in status and the numbers of Irish-Americans willing to leave their ‘homeland’ and cope with the weak dollar are dropping off somewhat. Such a practice may also insist upon the desirability and exclusivity of heritage at a time when the tourist industry in Ireland has emphatically split into budget and luxury categories and surveys reveal American tourists to be less and less enchanted by Irish hospitality. With the growth of a business travel market in Ireland to rival traditional tourism and a shift by Bord Fáilte to cultivate the high-end market, American travel to Ireland has decidedly lost its previously latent heritage cast. Indeed, heritage travel itself may be somewhat at odds with the new Irish glamour and politically out of step with the times. The intimate, emotional resonances of a wedding thus help to move this particular version of tourism away from its more hackneyed and even politically suspicious meanings. In this light it is important that some of the commercial/promotional discourses of the Irish theme wedding explicitly relieve prospective brides and grooms of the anxieties that leisure travel to Ireland might put into play at this point in time. Lanier, for instance, assures her readers that their destination wedding will not be in breach of any codes of taste or culture that might make it seem as if they were engaging in an identity masquerade or ‘horning in’ on another culture without invitation: ‘[w]hether you are married in an ancient 16th century castle tower or in a quaint chapel next to the crashing Atlantic Ocean, the Irish will embrace your desire to experience their rich and vibrant culture.’28 In my reading the destination wedding as social practice appears as ‘paradoxically both a resistance to, and at the same time a product of . . . global forces’.29 Drawing from a globalized conceptualization of Irishness and an attendant sense of geographical mobility, such a practice nevertheless insists upon the power and uniqueness of the local. I would suggest that the Irish destination wedding in particular may enable its participants

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to move between two increasingly problematic positions, safely avoiding the semiotically/ideologically exhausted categories of the white middleclass wedding and Irish-American heritage tourism. This mediation surely represents an impulse to retain (or wrest) intimacy and meaning from ritualized behaviours that if they have not become outright clichés have certainly lost much of the lustre ascribed to them a decade ago. At the same time, it offers more evidence of the ways in which Irishness remains available to Americans as a means of negotiating the problematic aspects of contemporary US cultural experience.

Notes 1. Jane C. Desmond, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. xviii. 2. See Diane Negra, ‘The New Primitives: Irishness in Recent US Television’, Irish Studies Review, 9:2 (August 2001): 229–39. 3. Here and elsewhere I take up examples of British celebrities only to the extent that coverage of their activities entered into American popular culture discourse. 4. Mary G. McDonald, ‘Tourist Weddings in Hawai’i: Consuming the Destination’, in Seductions of Place: Geographical Perspectives on Globalization and Touristed Landscapes, eds Carolyn Cartier and Alan A. Lew (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 171. 5. Laws of Attraction, dir. Peter Howitt (Dreamtime, 2004). 6. John Heilpern, ‘Elizabethan Style’, Vogue, 186, March 1996: 390–7. 7. Angela Lansbury (as told to P. Nolan), ‘I Had to Save My Family’, 50 Plus, 20, 10 October 1988: 20–2; James Brady, ‘In Step with Angela Lansbury’, Parade, 8 December 1996: 18. 8. Maureen Downey, ‘Allen Affair Puts Spotlight on Non-traditional Families’, Atlanta Constitution, 27 August 1992: D8; Jeannie Williams, ‘Roberts Hard at Work With a Song on Her Lips’, USA Today, 30 July 1996: 9B. 9. This hodgepodge generic stew was not well received by critics. Typical of the poor notices the film received upon its release is Michael Wilmington’s assessment in the Chicago Tribune: ‘It’s a movie so determined to emulate Wilder, Hawks and Lubitsch – but so ill-equipped to muster the bemused bile, shrewdness or wit that underlay their crafty romanticism – that it becomes soporific.’ See http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/movies/mmx-040430movies-review-mw-lawsof (accessed 25 March 2006). For a discussion of the expatriate romance, see my ‘Romance and/as Tourism: Heritage Whiteness and the (Inter)National Imaginary in the New Woman’s Film’, in Keyframes: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies, eds Amy Villarejo and Matthew Tinkcom (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 82–97. 10. The casting of Pierce Brosnan is decisive for the film. Not only does Laws of Attraction maintain consistency with a string of the star’s prior roles in which he ‘corrects’ the independent behaviour of a female protagonist through romantic seduction, Brosnan’s status as an enigma (here posed in terms of the issues of romantic trustworthiness central to the chick flick) and association

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11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

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with the theme of fakery, as Ruth Barton has pointed out, is also nationally and ethnically inflected. In other words, his character here is not Irish, but his familiarity and ease in Ireland invites a slippage between actor and character. See ‘Pierce Brosnan: the Bonds of Authenticity’, in Barton’s Acting Irish in Hollywood: From Fitzgerald to Farrell (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006). The myth is flexible enough to be read simultaneously by female and male members of the castle’s staff as on the one hand ‘very romantic’ and on the other ‘a lame excuse for a three day booze-up’. Upon discovering that Daniel lives and works in Chinatown Audrey asks: ‘Why am I not surprised?’, in a question that seemingly links Daniel’s ‘over the top’ approach to the law to the ethnic excessiveness of Chinatown. This is in keeping with the pattern displayed throughout the film of associating Irishness with emotional caretaking and ‘natural’ family values. In this context, the ‘open secret’ of Navan-born Pierce Brosnan’s Irishness informs the film (although never directly referenced, his character displays inexplicably adept Irish pronunciation). Daniel is a divorce lawyer who declares that he ‘doesn’t believe in divorce’, and schools Audrey in the belief that emotional commitments require work. Celes Otnes and Elizabeth H. Pleck, Cinderella Dreams: the Allure of the Lavish Wedding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 251. Eva Ilouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 293. On the phenomenon of ethnic-themed weddings in America see Doreen Iudica Vigue, ‘Brides Reclaim their Ethnic Roots’, Boston Globe, 14 June 1998: B1. On new bridal sponsorship practices see Shelley Emling, ‘You May Kiss the Bride, Now, a Toast to Our Sponsor’, International Herald Tribune, 19–20 March 2005: 15. Natasha Casey, ‘ “The Best Kept Secret in Retail”: Selling Irishness in Contemporary America’, in The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity and Popular Culture, ed. Diane Negra (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 131. Otnes and Pleck, Cinderella Dreams, pp. 246–7. For those not in a position to host or attend an ethnic-theme wedding, popular cinema in the early 2000s provided numerous opportunities to consume one vicariously. Two of the biggest film hits of the period were My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) and the Indian-themed Monsoon Wedding (2001). At the time of writing the similarly themed Bride and Prejudice has just been released in the UK. ‘My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé’, dir. Bryan O’Donnell (20th-Century Fox Television, 2004). Otnes and Pleck, Cinderella Dreams, pp. 237 and 226 respectively. See for example ‘Consuming Ireland: Lucky Charms Cereal, Irish Spring Soap and 1-800-SHAMROCK’, Cultural Studies, 15:1 (January 2001): 76–97; ‘Ethnic Food Fetishism, Whiteness and Nostalgia in Recent Film and Television’, The Velvet Light Trap, 50 (Fall 2002): 62–76; and ‘Irishness, Innocence and American Identity Politics before and after 11 September’, in Keeping it Real: Irish Film and Television, eds Ruth Barton and Harvey O’Brien (London: Wallflower, 2004), pp. 54–68. See ‘Destination Weddings on the Rise’, 5 June 2004, http://www.msnbc. msn.com/id/5111569 (accessed 25 March 2006). On the expansion of the trend

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24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture to European couples, see A. Labi, ‘Fly Me To the Moon’, Time, 162: 2, 14 July 2003: 56–7. Karen Durbinsky, The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymooning and Tourism at Niagara Falls (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999). McDonald, ‘Tourist Weddings in Hawai’i’, p. 175. While this intensely masochistic film would seem to present an odd contrast to the general emotional expectations of a wedding or honeymoon, this suggestion makes clear just how flexible a destination wedding can be in the kinds of meanings it adds to bridal rituals. In this case, presumably, the religious connotations of a wedding or honeymoon are fortified by a visit to Matera. Anne Lanier, ‘Getting Married in Ireland’, http://ultimatewedding.com/ (accessed 25 March 2006). Lanier, ‘Getting Married in Ireland’. Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location, eds Erica Carter, James Donald and Judith Squires (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1993), p. ix. In this respect the destination wedding might be compared to the very active middle-class trend toward holiday home buying and retirement in other countries. While the holiday home buying trend is particularly pronounced in Britain, a growing number of American retirees are opting to relocate outside the US. Although such work lies outside the boundaries of this study, it seems likely that theories of tourism, national identity and cultural geography could be fruitfully applied to understanding how such practices entail the negotiation of fixed national identity.

12 A Mirror up to Irishness: Hollywood Hard Men and Witty Women Claire Bracken and Emma Radley

Irish men sell: Colin Farrell, Cillian Murphy, Jonathan Rhys Myers and Stuart Townsend are all hot Hollywood products, selling a version of metrosexual masculinity that is not only in contrast to the ‘manlier’ versions favoured by Hollywood in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, but also to the strong male bodies needed to build America – the mode of Irish masculinity exported to the US during the nineteenth and early twentieth century.1 The current popularity of Rhys Meyers, Townsend, Murphy and Farrell reflects in part the contemporary Hollywood fantasy of desirable masculinity – the young, gorgeous boy. Such a preference for the boy-man appeals simultaneously to a range of niche markets (young girls, older women, gay men), reflecting the incorporation of masculinity into the web of commodified representation, where the requirements of the Hollywood system, print and televisual media and the fashion and beauty industries intersect and sustain each other. Ireland, once characterized by poverty and emigration rates unparalleled in Europe, has become ‘Celtic Tiger Ireland’ – young, fresh and vibrant. Physical strength is no longer the exchange value of the Irish man, and Ireland is now well positioned to supply the international stage with the dream of future possibilities instead. Historically, signifiers of Irish femininity such as the wild Irish girl and the Irish mammy have had more use value in the Hollywood imaginary. Diane Negra notes that during the 1910s and 1920s, ‘Hollywood colonized Irish femininity for representational purposes that supported certain cultural goals. Not the least of these goals was the attempt to check the emerging power of the “New Woman”.’2 Here, Negra identifies a culturally conservative response to the suffragette movement, a response also evident in the post-war 1950s and 1960s, where the signifiers of Irish femininity operated as corollary supports to a patriarchal American culture. Figures such as Maureen O’Hara, Maureen O’ Sullivan, Kathleen 157

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Ryan and Maureen Cusack, invariably cast as either upstanding Irish mammies who guide wayward sons toward the right path or ‘wild’ girls only too willing to be tamed by the hand of the right man, were the cultural face of the political drive to persuade women to leave the workplace, to which they had had unprecedented access during World War Two, so as to make room for returning veterans (such persuasion included the removal of the state-funded crèches provided to enable women to carry the economy during the war years). These shifts in the value of gendered Irishness in the global cultural market can be usefully explored through contrasting the international movie star persona of Colin Farrell with the nationally well-known cameo actress and stand-up comic Deirdre O’Kane. While acknowledging the different registers in which Farrell and O’Kane are operating – Farrell’s persona as a product of the Hollywood corporate machine, O’Kane’s (primarily) as self-produced, in the more alternative genre of stand-up comedy, and as a product of involvement with Irish film and television companies – their performances facilitate further comment on a contemporary cultural situation which sees the growth of an international Irish male stardom in contrast to a dearth of Irish women actors on the world stage. O’Kane’s scripted acting roles enact the inverse of stereotypical configurations of Irish women favoured by the pre-global Hollywood imaginary, despite the fact that most of her work is done within the burgeoning Irish film industry. O’Kane’s subversive comic performances, however, are a way of speaking back to such stereotyping, addressed directly to the national frame in which she is constructed and indirectly to the global cultural imaginary set by Hollywood.

Globally Oedipal The fascination with the stardom of Colin Farrell reveals the capacity of Celtic Tiger Ireland to act as a global Oedipal moment. Celtic Tiger Ireland can be said to operate Oedipally in the Hollywood imaginary due to its ability to open its borders to the global while simultaneously charting a bordered national territory. Global investment and EU integration have helped create this ‘new Ireland’, with its markers of economic prosperity and international cosmopolitanism combined with conspicuous signifiers of essential nationality, as in Bord Fáilte Ireland’s fusion of the old and the new, the rural idyll and the hyper-urban.3 Farrell enacts this global casting consistently as an Oedipal boy, simultaneously capable of border construction (separation from the mother) and deconstruction (closeness to mother), the paradox upon which the globalized Hollywood system so heavily relies. In this enactment of the Oedipal moment,

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constructions of Irish femininity function primarily as the mother, who holds an ambiguous position in this moment – she is both the phallic and the de-phallic – fixed and moving – the border and borderless. In contrast to the global appeal and desirability of this version of Irish masculinity, it is crucial then that the Irish feminine is returned home – if she moves too much the Oedipal moment itself will collapse and be foreclosed, resulting in cultural psychosis, the most significant threat to a globalized space attempting tentative boundary constructions.

Mummy’s boy, father’s son The Oedipal dynamics operating in Farrell’s persona are consistently highlighted in press coverage which fixates on his image as a sexual predator. ‘I come into town and bang whomever I can’, boasts Farrell, but this assertion of himself as ‘the man abroad’ seems strikingly at odds with the similarly persistent public projection of Farrell as a self-described ‘Mummy’s boy’ in Ireland.4 In line with this, when asked about his mother’s reaction to his exploits with women, he reveals that she knows very well what he is up to, but tolerates it because she knows ‘her little boy’ to be a ‘messer’. She even apparently keeps a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings about his escapades: here the feminine in Farrell’s construction seems to enjoy, even encourage, its own abjection within his symbolic register. In contrast, Farrell’s relation to the Law of the Father is marked by ambivalence: ‘my dad and I get on alright you know? We’re not as close as me and my mother, but we get on ok.’5 Similarly, on the commentary feature for the DVD version of The Recruit (2003), he notes that the childhood pictures of his character and his father are in fact those of himself and his own father. Responding to the director’s comment that the photographs are a good representation of the father/son relationship, he indicates how difficult their relationship was by asserting that the picture must have been taken at ‘a good moment on one of the holidays’.6 Since entry into the Symbolic Order is predicated on acceptance of the authority of the paternal metaphor through abjection of the maternal, that is, Oedipal resolution, Farrell’s position as Oedipal boy, perpetuating the Oedipal moment, means that this abjection is never complete – the mother is (literally) never out of the picture – as shown by the frequency of Farrell’s mother’s presence at premieres and photo calls.

An American story The Oedipal dynamics that haunt Farrell’s star persona are matched in his many film roles. Although making regular appearances on the Irish

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film and television circuits with roles in the series Falling for a Dancer (1998) and Ballykissangel (1996–2001), Farrell came to national attention when he came to international attention in Joel Schumacher’s Vietnam War drama, Tigerland (2000).7 Here he plays Bozz, in the stock Hollywood role of the young recruit, who reluctantly emerges as an unlikely hero for his fellow soldiers, through fierce independence and resolute fraternal values, and his staunch belligerence in the face of authority represented by a pair of paternalistic drill sergeants – one good, one bad – who eventually come to respect his refusal to bow down to any rule of law but his own. In The Recruit he is James Clayton, a highly intelligent loose cannon in the CIA training programme, a smart-ass with a problem with authority, struggling with the death of his real father and in his relationship with a surrogate father in the shape of the enigmatic handler Walter Burke (played by a real-life Hollywood ‘father’, Al Pacino).8 In Alexander (2004), he is a young man making his mark on the world, marauding across Europe conquering everything in his path, gaining possession of lands, men and women to prove a point to his indifferent father.9 Such roles are not of course special to Farrell; he is merely the latest young man to be recruited to Hollywood’s ongoing romance with the Oedipal crisis, which partners established star ‘fathers’ with up-and-coming, maverick ‘sons’, in which younger men ‘learn’ masculinity, a repeated narrative of which the ‘buddy cop’ action film is a useful example. This type of partnership is still prevalent in Hollywood today, necessarily so for commercial reasons, although the emphasis has shifted towards the son as the father’s cultural authority becomes problematic in an America involved in a controversial overseas war. What is special about Farrell is that he brings a mode of masculinity associated with the (film-historical) drinking, fighting Irish, a ‘hard man’ masculinity defined by combative physicality, ethnically different but not too different. His star persona is emphatically defined through the marker of Irishness, which operates as his ‘brand’ while travelling the international film circuit and behaving like a ‘holy terror’: ‘Being Irish is very much a part of who I am . . . I take it everywhere with me.’10 However, in an Ireland re-imagining and ‘reinventing’ itself in the wake of the peace process and the ‘Celtic Tiger’, such Irishness has a different cultural valency. Farrell plays Lehiff in Intermission (2003), a criminal who is told: ‘you just don’t have the requisite Celtic soul, man’.11 Here, it is clear that not only does Farrell’s performance of Irishness lose specificity when he returns to Dublin, but that the Ireland he returns to is explicitly uncomfortable with his behaviour on the world stage. Indeed, the Irish public’s opinion of Farrell is frequently negative, his bad-boy antics marking him

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out as an object of derision. The Dublin radio station FM 104’s morning programme ‘The Strawberry Alarm Clock’ (in sketches such as ‘Pretty Fly for an Irish Guy’ and ‘Doctor Wha?’) regularly satirizes his Hollywood persona.12 In the Hollywood imaginary however, which historically helped cultivate this stage-Irishness, the contemporary embrace of the stereotype of the ‘wild Irish boy’ is extremely useful, as it facilitates a flexible response to the waning of the Law of the Father (through its Oedipal functioning), while also preserving a nostalgic link to a more traditional past (through its historical recognizability), helping to maintain a conservative discourse which privileges white male bodies and the national parameters which support them. Farrell operates simultaneously as immigrant, in his very obvious ‘Irishness’, and non-immigrant, in that this Irishness is a Hollywood construct. Although Farrell appears to be an ‘outsider’, in actuality, his operability as bearer of law is very much an inside job, functioning instead to keep the real outsider of globalized multiculturalism out. Like the terrorist within, he smuggles a dangerous edge into the centre of American cultural power, but is knowable, familiar and nostalgic in his register.

Mirror, mirror on the wall As it stands there is no female version of Farrell, Murphy or Rhys Meyers. What became of the Irish Mammy and the wild Irish girl? Where did they go? In Deirdre O’Kane’s roles in Intermission, Paths to Freedom (2000) and Fergus’s Wedding (2002), all Irish produced, she literally acts out the abjection of the ‘wild girl’ version of the Irish feminine from the Hollywood imaginary, as it is imported back home and forced to take on the unwanted, pejorative face of global internationalism.13 In her capacity as an actress, she tends to be typecast as caricatures of patriarchally defined ‘types’ of women produced by Ireland’s implication in neo-liberal global ‘modernity’: Noeleen-the-hysterical-wife in Intermission, Helen-the-middle-classsnob in Paths to Freedom, Lorraine-the-affected-PR-girl in Fergus’s Wedding. These are the dominant cultural representations that configure the ‘modern Irish woman’ of Celtic Tiger Ireland as neurotic, narcissistic consumer. ‘What’s wrong with me? [ . . . ] Is it my age? Is it something I wouldn’t do? Is it my looks? Don’t you fancy me anymore? What did I do, or didn’t I do?’ So asks Noeleen (played by Deirdre O’Kane) in the film Intermission, as her husband Sam trades her in for a younger, sleeker model. His response succinctly sums up a paradigm of culturally accepted and rejected femininity: ‘it’s got nothing to do with you, you don’t even come into the

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equation’.14 Thus, by denying her the dignity of recognizing her as an individual outside of the role of wife (‘not in the equation’) and by a refusal to recognize her as his wife, she is cast into the abject space of non-reflectivity. She cannot ‘see’ herself, her mirror (Sam) is absent, but sees herself instead as not-wife, whose place in the symbolic order is one without use or exchange value: she doesn’t count; she’s not in the equation. Thus the wild Irish girl operates outside the Irish symbolic, her wildness no longer a tameable spunkiness, but now a wild madness. Deirdre O’Kane’s persona works on two registers. The first is the space of the stage in which, as a stand-up comedian, she can trouble the stereotypes she finds herself type-cast as in the second register, the films and television series in which she acts.15 In her stand-up act, O’Kane unravels the representational economy on which the reinvestment of such stereotypes depends when she incorporates and re-contextualizes Lorraine, Helen and traces of Noeleen in her sketches. The stereotype of woman as neurotic consumer is playfully foregrounded in such one-liners as: ‘The main difference between the sexes is that man is a hunter and woman is a bargain hunter’; ‘One of the differences between male and female comics is that male comics would never admire your shoes’; ‘Why is it that diamonds are a girl’s best friend and man’s is a dog – our needs are very different aren’t they?’16 O’Kane frames these stereotypes in terms of the stories that construct them, the ‘feminine fairytales’ which train women in the ways of patriarchy: ‘What does a story like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs say to a little girl? Hey, if you happen to come across seven lads in the woods, be sure to stop and clean the house for them.’17 In ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, a fairytale that establishes the mirror as a medium of truth, configuring the ideal of feminine identity, the mirror spectacularly endorses the virginal Snow White, and relegates the ‘evil’ queen to its sidelines. However, there is no Lacanian schema in the Snow White tale – no misrecognition of the ‘evil’ queen; her desire to be what she is not (the most beautiful woman in the land) is refused in the story, and replaced by a recognition of ‘truth’ between heroine and mirror.18 Significantly, the mirror loses its central narrative place by the end of the tale, as Snow White becomes queen and the mirror image of her superior femininity merges with ‘reality’, so that the space between self and self-recognition is quite literally bridged. Reading O’Kane’s performances through the lens of the Snow White tale, what we have is a coincident movement towards the space of the banished ‘evil’ queen (the embodied threat to an endorsed form of ‘fairytale’ femininity), and the idealized imaging of Snow White herself. The simultaneous holding of seemingly mutually exclusive spaces in her performance comes about

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by bringing the representational frame of the mirror itself into the picture, through examining the narrative patterns that frame internalization of gender roles: ‘It’s inevitable, you know, that women would fall in love with powerful men, since we’ve been indoctrinated to that way of thinking since we’ve been old enough to read the fairytales – I think we should just upgrade them a little: Cutie and the Priest?’19 O’Kane identifies feminine identity as an alienating structure, which can be problematized, and/or ‘updated’ (‘Cutie and the Priest?’). Another sketch performs a similar move with an explicit challenge to woman-as-hysteric, linking such hysteria to PMS, with the emphasis on syndrome and the (in this case, ‘biological’, medical and psychiatric) discursive constitution of normative gender on and through the female body. Furthermore, traditional and non-traditional Irish womanhood are constructed as marking and competing for guardianship of the boundaries of O’Kane’s performance, when in the DVD recording of her Live at the Olympia show (2002), she impersonates Dana (conservative, insular, anti-feminist, über-Catholic) and Mary Robinson (radical, European, feminist, ecumenical) as audience members who interrupt the footage.

Trembling edges Transgender, transsexual and intersex are all categories that Judith Butler sees as potential sites of articulation through their problematizing of gender norms.20 O’Kane’s embodied performances enact the very transgendering of Butler’s new imaginary mirror, straddling the masculine and feminine of gendered configurations through drag: in Live at the Olympia she is wearing a pinstripe suit, in Live at Vicar Street (2003) a pair of jeans, shirt and trainers, and, in her most recent show, Startled (2005), a white shirt, jeans and workman-like brown boots.21 However, the subversive potential of transgendering is not matched in her acting roles. In Intermission, Noeleen becomes increasingly aggressive, moving into a space of performative anger, but instead of challenging the ways in which women are expected to minimize anger, Noeleen’s aggression towards a number of other characters (‘bloody state of ye, what I should do now is speak to your manager and have you fired, if I could only be bothered’) reinvests stereotypes of strident women by underwriting female assertiveness as undesirable, and trivializing female anger, functioning as she does as a caricature in a film full of sanctioned aggressive male characters and sympathetic meek women.22 In contrast, O’Kane’s onstage presence troubles the borders of heteronormative gender roles – feminine caution about claiming space is replaced by an assertive striding across the stage,

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commanding it in a manner associated largely with men. Furthermore, her ‘failure’ in the arena of heterosexual romance is simultaneous with her ‘failure’ to correctly ‘perform’ a culturally proscribed version of femininity – in one comic sketch she details a conversation with her mother who tells her that her boyfriend left her because ‘she is too loud,’ and that he will probably go and find ‘a nice quiet girl’.23 Deirdre O’Kane’s gendered performances work on a faultline constructed by the Hollywood imaginary which requires configurations of the Irish feminine to go home and stay there. The Oedipal dynamics upon which the global entertainment industry so heavily relies necessarily position the feminine, the mother, as the threat to the stability Oedipal resolution requires. However, the Oedipal moment is an inherently unstable one as the grounding of the feminine (the mother) is not yet fully complete, and thus she retains some power – the potential to challenge and subvert the representational edifices which attempt to fix her in place. Reinventing the ‘wild Irish girl’ role prescribed to her in acting roles, O’Kane’s comic performances revel in such subversions – questioning the very ways bodies are constructed as desirable/undesirable objects in the international cultural imaginary through embodied performances. For instance, O’Kane challenges the conventional association of woman and land, through a merging of masculinity and the Irish landscape: ‘Irish men have never been described as classically good looking . . . and that’s because you’re not! – You’re unkempt – you’re rugged like the landscape. I wouldn’t know whether to fuck ye or frame ye!’24 Here, she speaks from the moment before objectification, from a space of indecision about whether to ‘fuck’ or ‘frame’. There is a pause (‘I wouldn’t know’) as O’Kane refuses to simply objectify men in the stead of women, whilst showing the operability of this representational system at work. The ‘framing’ of the object cannot be separated from its sexualization, and it is according to such representational edifices that the female body has been historically positioned. By making visible the desiring dynamics of objectification, this piece denies it as such, drawing us towards the trembling edges of the representational mirror and away from its image centre, challenging not just the traditional positioning of woman as desired object, but also, more specifically, a current cultural climate which sees Irish masculinity (the Farrell fetish) being framed as the face of the Hollywood mirror.

Homeward bound The Irish mammy resurfaces in O’Kane’s most recent roles, when O’Kane plays mothers, and just as her stand-up comic work parodies the neurotic

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consumer roles written for her in TV and film roles, her comic performance in the new show Startled challenges the normative configuration of motherhood she plays in both Boy Eats Girl (2005) and Dandelions (2005). O’Kane stars in Boy Eats Girl, which is directed by her husband Stephen Bradley, and co-stars in Fiona Looney’s play Dandelions, with ex-boyband member Keith Duffy. While in Boy Eats Girl she plays the typical role of self-sacrificing mother devoted to her boy-child, Looney’s play does attempt a criticism of the confinements imposed on motherhood, the restrictions placed on the suburban mother-housewife, but to little reinventive end.25 In contrast, O’Kane’s show Startled representationally redefines motherhood and the maternal function: her show concerns her experiences as a new mother, and she acts out mothers who are subjects and not merely foils for the realization of the subjectivity of others, refocusing the perspective to centre on the mother in early motherhood experience (rather than the child-centre which traditionally defines such discourse). The tyranny of the self-sacrificing mother is overturned: ‘The one question I am always asked when people hear I have had a baby is “what did you have?” – an epidural thankfully!’26 O’Kane’s career itself signifies a challenge to an understanding of motherhood as singular and self-sacrificing, for O’Kane, as successful actor, comedian and mother, embodies the creative possibility of being other to the mother as Irish woman: working, competent and balanced. But, despite the subversive potential of O’Kane’s work to exceed the frames she herself questions, popular representational modes continue to reframe her in the places she wishes to escape. Hanging with Hector, a TV series in which the presenter Hector ‘goes behind the scenes’ of famous people’s lives, recently featured O’Kane. The end of Hector’s show emphatically attempts to retrain O’Kane, returning the self-assured mother to an infantilized space of girlhood by bringing her (with baby in tow) ‘back to her childhood’ to Irish dancing lessons and then on to an Irish dancing feis (in which she regularly participated as a young girl). O’Kane is returned to the space where the Irish girl is taught to be a performing object, acting out scripted moves in straitjacket costumes, in ringlets and silence, the ‘ideal’ signifier of Irish maidenhood, the blueprint for the ‘ideal’ Irish mother which she is being taught to ‘naturally’ learn.27 Hector’s attempt to bring O’Kane’s back to her roots, to home, make clear the reasons the Irish feminine has been sent home in the first place. The meanings of the Irish mother, as one register in this Hollywood representational economy, shifts as the Law of the Father wanes and the Oedipal romance breaks down: daddy leaves and mammy is left alone. However, due to her unstable positioning in the Oedipal moment, the

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mother cannot be trusted with the job of law-making, so the ‘boy’, the Irish Oedipal son, takes her place and becomes one of the protectors and guarantors of what is now the global cultural imaginary. Straddling the positions of the pre-Oedipal mother and symbolic father at once, this boy succinctly embodies the contradictory, opposing and at times fragile tendencies of Hollywood and US expansionism itself – law-breaking and law-making at once. In the Hollywood imaginary Colin Farrell operates as a virtual embodiment of an Oedipal moment: Celtic Tiger Ireland. However, examining the Irish film and television scripted roles Deirdre O’Kane performs, it seems that the literal embodiment of Ireland, how the Irish film industry is attempting to position itself, tends towards Oedipal resolution. The prevailing concept of an Irish national cinema, supported and promoted by both a state-supported industry and an academic critical establishment, is one which seeks to situate itself as a coherent autonomous and separate subject. The Irish Film Board, the primary source of funding for indigenous film, states that its mission is ‘to support an Irish cinema which tells stories, both contemporary and historical, that engage specifically, though not exclusively, with the cultures and communities indigenous with this island’.28 Furthermore, academic Irish film criticism supports such national separatism, focusing as it does on defining the meaningful parameters of Irish cinema.29 In line with the gendering of Oedipal resolution (the Law of the Father), this conservative industry constructs representative roles for Irish femininity which attempt to keep it fixed-as-ground so as to preserve the ‘health’ of the nation.30 However, attempts at finalized Oedipal resolution, attempts to keep the national separate from the international, will ultimately fail in a space which is in fact operating in the terms set out by a global Hollywood imaginary. Accepting the imported objects of femininity back is just one of the ways the Irish film industry is actually operating and participating in the global representational economy, which is marked by the liminality of the Oedipal moment.31 Within such a scheme, the Irish cultural imaginary is overlooking a dynamic to which Hollywood is wise: the use of ‘Irish woman’ as a representational symbol within such an economy is a dangerous tool, as she has the power to speak back, to challenge and subvert. O’Kane’s comic performances are the literal embodiment of Hollywood’s fears, Farrell’s their virtual abeyance.

Notes Claire Bracken acknowledges the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences for PhD scholarship funding.

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1. The metrosexual defines a contemporary masculinity which, generated by the proliferation of mass media and the beauty industry, describes a maleness (of any sexual orientation) with an increased self-consciousness of image and the stylized body. While in many cases the term implies youth, it is not only to be read in these terms. 2. Diane Negra, Off-white Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 25. 3. For a discussion of Bord Fáilte advertising see Luke Gibbons, ‘Coming Out of Hibernation? The Myth of Modernity in Irish Culture’, in Across the Frontiers: Ireland in the 1990s, ed. Richard Kearney (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1988). 4. Variety Fair interview, cited online at http://www.unreel.co.uk/features/featurecolinfarrell.cfm (accessed 14 March 2006) as an example of reaction to his bad-boy behaviour; Matthew Turner, View London, http://www.viewlondon. co.uk/home_feat_int_colinfarrell3.asp (accessed 14 March 2006). 5. Matthew Turner, View London. 6. The Recruit, dir. Roger Donaldson (DVD; Touchstone Home Video, 2003). 7. Ballykissangel (BBC Northern Ireland and World Productions, 1996–2001); Falling for a Dancer, dir. Richard Standeven (BBC Northern Ireland, 1998); Tigerland, dir. Joel Schumacher (Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 2000). 8. The Recruit. 9. Alexander, dir. Oliver Stone (Warner Bros and Intermedia, 2004). 10. www.colinfarrell.org (accessed 14 March 2006). 11. Intermission, dir. John Crowley (DVD; MGM Home Entertainment, 2003). 12. For audio samples go to http://www.fm104.ie/Article.asp?id⫽61144 (accessed 14 March 2006). 13. Paths to Freedom, dir. Ian Fitzgibbon (RTÉ and Grand Pictures, 2000); Fergus’s Wedding, dir. Ian Fitzgibbon (RTÉ and Grand Pictures, 2002). 14. Intermission. 15. Our study of Deirdre O’Kane’s comic performances focuses primarily on two DVD/video releases: Deirdre O’Kane: Live at the Olympia (EMI, 2002) and Deirdre O’Kane: Live at Vicar Street (EMI, 2003). 16. Live at Vicar Street. 17. Live at Vicar Street. 18. For the functioning of the mirror in the Lacanian Imaginary, see Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage’, in Écrits: a Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1985), pp. 1–8. 19. Live at Vicar Street. 20. See Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 1. 21. Startled, Vicar Street, October 2005. 22. Intermission. 23. Live at the Olympia. 24. Live at Vicar Street. 25. Boy Eats Girl, dir. Stephen Bradley (Odyssey Distributors Ltd, 2005); Dandelions, written by Fiona Looney, first performed at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin, 2005. 26. Paraphrased from Startled, Vicar Street, October 2005. 27. Hanging with Hector, dir. Ross O’Callaghan (RTÉ, 2004–06). For a discussion of the ways in which the maternal operates as signifier of nostalgia in the

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28. 29. 30.

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Part IV Aporia

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13 ‘Let’s Get Killed’: Culture and Peace in Northern Ireland Colin Graham

When the text of the Good Friday Agreement was circulated to households in Northern Ireland just before it was put to a referendum in May 1998, its cover suggested that a new, peaceful leisure time awaited the North’s citizens. The cover image was of a silhouetted family group, holding hands and looking out to sea at the setting sun. The wholesomeness of the photograph’s warm tones wasn’t entirely undermined by the oddness of the metaphoric connotations of a family fondly watching a sunset when a new political dawn was approaching. However, the cover image did have a peculiar provenance, one that encapsulates the paucity of thinking around cultural identity which haunts the Peace Process and tells of the enervating effects it can have on Northern Irish culture. On the day of the publication of this glossy version of the Agreement, the editors of Source magazine, a photography journal published in Belfast, contemplated with some envy the coup of having one’s photograph appear on the doormat of every household in the North. Out of this envious haze of jealousy came the question of who the lucky photographer was, and the more curious question of which seaside view in Northern Ireland he or she had found which allowed an uninterrupted western vista. After calls to the Northern Ireland Office, then a photographic agency in Germany, and finally to a bemused photographer who didn’t entirely know what the Belfast Agreement was, the image which embodied the North’s future turned out to be a standard agency shot which was actually of a white South African family somewhere near Cape Town – Cape Town having the advantage of a clear western Atlantic view. It would be reassuring to think that some kind of subliminal Peace Process analogy of hope was behind this transposition of one state’s conflict onto another’s, but the truth is more prosaic and haphazard. That the NIO designers neutralized the North by stepping outside it (indeed stepping outside the entire 171

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northern hemisphere) for an appropriate image reveals exactly the vision which the politics of the Agreement and the Process more generally have when the specificities of Northern culture need to be addressed. Such inadvertent analogy is one step away from platitude and dead language on the issue of cultural identity. This is not to start out by saying that the Peace Process, the staccato end of direct rule, or the Agreement, are bad things. What I do want to suggest, though, is that the course of events in the Peace Process in terms of cultural thought matches the history of the cover image of the Agreement – the North’s culture, or cultures, is/are understood through a mixture of exigency and accident, and by the elision of real difference; culture in a lived and ideological sense is relegated to a place below and beyond the touch of the political. The laudable push to peace ended up with having only one possible way to proceed, and its goal was the nuclear harmony of the undifferentiated family group, not the complex and conflictual lived place. The ultimate and dangerous poverty of this view is only underscored by the fact that the North’s geography, the actual place, could not offer a graphic designer an appropriate image of Northern Ireland’s future. The unintended analogy with post-apartheid South Africa is as close as the official documents, tactics or policies of the Process and its administration can come to a coherent view of ‘identity’ in Northern Ireland. Because the embedded and unshifting irony is that while identity, in some unspecified way, may be thought to be at the basis of the conflict, identity has simultaneously been cauterized in the language and practice of the process’s implementation. Both the intractability of cultural identities of affiliation and the fluidity of cultural identity as a lived process seem to be beyond the scope of the political discourse applied to the North’s situation by those charged with directing its fortunes. It is in no way the case that ‘identity’ or culture are ignored in the Peace Process on an official level. There are the important issues of the status of minority languages, for example, or marching, which stand as reminder that cultural identities are central to the problem (and also that cultural activism, or, more precisely, involvement in the generation and perpetuation of existing identity in its ‘recalcitrant’ forms, is generally treated as an eccentricity to be indulged as safely as possible, as if it were paramilitarism by another means). Cultural identity as affiliation to a nation-state can similarly be comprehended within the official momentum of the Process, though it is most often treated as an embarrassment by the states to which the affiliation is avowed. The Peace Process, inasmuch as it is a politically cogent set of events, has always found itself coming back to the undefined issue of identity, precisely

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because it has been so badly defined, and sometimes doing so with an interesting myopia. The Joint Declaration on Peace, or Downing Street Declaration of December 1993, is a document of real historical revelation and change, which in many ways introduces, in a public arena, the political thinking and language which came to dominate the Peace Process. Looked at with hindsight, the Declaration reveals how governmental regard for ‘cultural identity’ has since calcified. The Downing Street Declaration takes that trite line on the British-Irish conflict once parodied by Joyce (‘it seems history is to blame’1), or as the Declaration puts it in its first paragraph, the governments will work ‘to overcome the legacy of history’.2 Later in the Declaration the possibilities of what this history might mean are shuffled off into the description of two ‘traditions’ – traditions being implicitly a noble but dated form of culture.3 And these ‘traditions’ are then imagined in the future as ‘communities’,4 a benign concept in many ways, but one which also cordons off the people who constitute those communities, trapping them in arenas where they are no better understood, though they may exist more quietly and more peacefully; or, to paraphrase the seeming logic, traditions riot, communities don’t. In paragraph 4 of the Declaration the Taoiseach, ‘on behalf of the Irish government, considers that the lessons of Irish history, and especially of Northern Ireland, show that stability and well-being will not be found under any political system which is refused allegiance or rejected on grounds of identity by a significant minority of those governed by it’. There is no disputing the truth of this, but that final phrase, ‘on grounds of identity’, is a contorted way for identity to be defined at this crucial moment in the development of the Process. This phrase, ‘on grounds of identity’, certainly has some currency in the discourse of governance, and more particularly in describing rights legislation; it has appeared in recent years in debates in Canada concerning the status of refugees.5 The phrase also appears in Australian electoral law and, in 2003, the Falls Community Council, in a submission on electoral fraud to the Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs, noted that the Electoral Commission for the UK advises that the presiding officer in a polling station can challenge a person’s vote only ‘on grounds of identity’.6 While this last example shows how the language of the Peace Process finds itself thrown into cultural circulation, what binds together the Australian, Canadian and Irish usages is that the ‘identity’ in question is that of the individual; its activation and its grounds are not of cultural identity but of personation and impersonation. So when the phrase ‘on grounds of identity’ was used in the Downing Street Declaration, it was as if the administrative

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discourse of the two polities was struggling to find a descriptive term for a phenomenon which it knew was called identity, but which governmental politics had only a legalistic definition for. It is this gap between the complexity of affiliation to a fluid group of people, and the state’s insistence on that as a tradition outside itself that leads to identity being hastily defined, in a quoted and cited language, which deracinates the very idea of an ideological collectivity, and allows for the transformation of traditions into communities. That the Downing Street Declaration found that the opening gambit in its textual game of political chess left no space for a contemplation of what it is to belong to one of what it calls the ‘traditions’ is understandable – but the consequences of this when it came to negotiating the final Agreement were more damaging. It is well known among political scientists that the negotiations towards the Good Friday Agreement were carried out through what is called the consociational model, derived from the theories of the political scientist Arend Lijphart.7 Political scientists such as Paul Bew, Brendan O’Leary and Rick Wilford amongst others acknowledge the importance of this model.8 Wilford describes the key aspect of Lijphart’s negotiating methodology in the following way: ‘In the shorter run, a heavy premium is placed on mutual trust and confidence, initially among the relevant elites, which [. . .] descend to envelope contending communities.’9 It is obvious that such a descent has not subsequently happened, as Wilford himself ruefully notes, and it very evidently has not happened in any ‘enveloping’ way. If the Downing Street Declaration used an awkward political parlance to describe the cultures it was hoping to ‘solve’, then the Agreement went a step further, giving up on the possibility of getting its hands dirty in dealing with the actual cultures and identities in conflict and opting instead for a meeting of ‘relevant elites’, placing all bets on a trickle-down effect. The wonder of the Peace Process, politically, is that it has come this far. The pity of it is that it has done so by eliding what it knows to be the murky substance of the problem: a set of cultural identities that defeat the terms allowed by the political language which has been used to nudge the Process forward. Northern Ireland has been left then with a period of merciful peacefulness, but also a knowledge that that peace was bought at the price of dissociation rather than consociation, in which the political process drifts further off from the everyday, and in which there is a structural necessity for cultural identities to be put in abeyance. This apparent achievement of the middle ground, coupled with the outcomes of the consociational model, narrowed the cultural possibilities for reflecting on the peace, and more importantly the future.

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The broad consensus is rightly that the Peace Process is a good thing; that it’s the ‘only game in town’; that it is the result of the investment of time and energy by those working for it at the worst of times; and, most importantly, and because of all the above, that the process is fragile, breakable, and sensitive to loud noises. It is this last that is troubling and pervasive and which suppresses productive dissent. There is and never could have been a single cultural response to the post-1994 situation in the North. The political scene since 1994 has been chaotic and always inclined to fall back into the pre-Agreement direct rule arrangements, minus the violence, and with the always-deferred promise of a new democratic polity. The process has largely given up on the late 1980s Cultural Traditions model, which included the implication that a shared but buried culture could be uncovered in the North, and that, if it were brought to light, then some Damascene conversion to pluralism might just take place. Edna Longley suggests as much in her defensive but elegiac account of the ‘expression-education-exploration-exchange-debate’ motto of the Cultural Traditions Group, and in her qualified acceptance of the transformation of Belfast’s public sphere into something resembling the rebuilding of Germany after the war.10 The notion that there is a chasm between cultural identity (in the broad sense in which cultural criticism speaks of it) and the political process is equally reinforced by branches of the political science that have accompanied the process, and to which some of Longley’s views are beholden – Paul Bew, Henry Patterson and Paul Teague, for example, in their book Between War and Peace start their final chapter with a castigation of Patrick Mayhew’s 1992 speech in Coleraine, ‘Identity and Culture’, for the very reason that it strayed into the territory of trying to talk about and maybe even show an understanding of the republican ‘tradition’, a foray which, they assure their readers, even Mayhew himself was embarrassed by later.11 The direction of the process at a political level was never thence into these conflictual ideological territories, the places where marches come from and go to. Bew, Patterson and Teague calm themselves by the end of the chapter with a figurative language which imagines politicians around a table, hammering out the constitutional conundrums in age-old fashion. And Longley can say that the victory of all the liberalizing pre-ceasefire impulses leave us with one kernel of truth: ‘“simple beliefs” are simply wrong’.12 The undecidability of the post-ceasefire situation leads, not surprisingly, to contortions of what Richard Kirkland calls the ‘morbid symptoms’ of Northern Irish culture.13 In the post-ceasefire period some of these manifestations on the edge of Northern culture have revealed that the contours

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of the new terrain are landmarked by the distance between official political discourse and the society it discusses and decides on. Into this gap have filtered signs of what is often, literally, missing, what is forgotten or halfremembered, and signs of recognition that the materiality of the place, Northern Ireland, needs to be reclaimed from this arid conceptual landscape. But presiding over all is the powerful tone of voice and message of the warning liberalism which now threatens crisis rather than living nobly within it, a voice resembling that once hopelessly and embarrassingly used by Terence O’Neill’s television rebuke to the Northern populace in 1969 (‘What kind of Ulster do you want?’).14 And that note of warning, at its most banal a ‘don’t rock the boat’ threat, is central to the ways in which all forms of cultural expression now emerge in the North. Jacques Derrida suggests that a ‘Nation-State, indeed a community of Nation-States, can only condition peace, just as it can only limit possibility, refuge or asylum’.15 This conditioning is not merely a matter of clearing away the historical detritus left by the Troubles. It is an ever-moving process of concealing and containing the wounds and disruptions which persist in defining the peace itself. Derrida reminds us of the premise of such peace, its heritage and its dependence on the conflict of which it is still a part: But as soon as peace is instituted, politically deliberated, juridically constructed, does it not indefinitely and inevitably retain within it a trace of the violent nature which it is supposed to break, the nature it is supposed to interrupt, interdict, or repress?16 Arising from this right but fragile peace are those very traces of the repressed, formations which act as conscience of and reminder to the new orthodoxy, cultural texts which inhabit that evacuated no-man’s land between those who have simple beliefs and those who do not. In its fateful structure the Peace Process in the North replicates certain inevitable strictures placed upon culture in the controlled devolutionary environment of the British Isles. In the broadest context of British devolution Tom Nairn suggests that Britain’s ‘Greatness’ is now bought at the cost of the estrangement of the state from society, with the bureaucratic forms of devolution effecting a breach in the body politic; rather than democratize the Celtic fringes, devolution has, in a variety of ways, diluted the bond between the citizen and governance.17 Writing specifically of the post-devolution years in Scotland, Cairns Craig sees Scottish Arts Policy as existing under the ‘threat of a culture of compliance’, one in which the newly devolved consensus protects itself fiercely against dissenters.18 In the North such anxieties surface in the mainstream political

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parties in a variety of ways, as they try to work the increasingly constricting consociational model. So, for example, prisoner release, decommissioning, and policing have all been seen as issues which disrupt the Process; yet, because they were all issues within the Process, they were already encapsulated by the Process at its outset, and in that sense arguably maintained its momentum. There are, of course, minor keys of political dissent to the Process’s consensual policy, and the current impasse is, like the last impasse, marginally different in nature to its predecessors. However, if peace, as Derrida argues, suppresses but is traced by the very violence it follows and fails to end, then we might expect some more extreme re-manifestations of that violence at the level of the cultural text. If we accept that this democratic deficit in the Peace Process is a deficit which can be configured as a silence or a space emptied of its excessive meaning, then how do these vacant landscapes become repopulated? A now well-known example of the springing into being of post-ceasefire culture in the North is the Portadown News, a web-based ‘newspaper’ edited by Newton Emerson.19 A less celebrated product of Portadown is Darryl Sloan, an IT teacher in a Portadown school who in 2002 published a horror novel, entitled Ulterior.20 In the novel a young boy and his friends discover that, under their school, is buried an alien spaceship which crashlanded in 1701, and from which the aliens appear to enter the world around Portadown, disguised as humans, and speaking, not surprisingly, three hundred years after their ‘plantation’, in Northern Irish English. Only physical pain makes the aliens visible to humans, and the adventure yarn involves the schoolkids uncovering this secret world, saving the hero’s father and sister from death by aliens and loan sharks respectively, and destroying the living, breathing space ship, largely by using petrol bombs. The story begins with a news report supposedly from the Portadown Times about the disappearance of three children in 1972, and then jumps to post-ceasefire Portadown. Farcical as this may sound, the novel is riddled with themes which recur in post-ceasefire culture: the return to the beginning of the Troubles; the need for a social cleansing of some kind; the displacement of confused feelings of repulsion and compassion for the alien other; and, ultimately, the cataclysmic transformation of society. Sloan’s narrative is largely devoid of historical or political specificity; yet its ending is a reminder of how the politics of the North are an infectious burden on its cultural production, and how popular cultural forms reflect and give voice to the edgy concerns which the Peace Process leaves unresolved. The explosion, which (probably) destroys the aliens and their craft, also destroys the school, and the whole event is covered

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up, X-Files style, by the government, who blame it on an earthquake. The novel closes as it begins, with a report from the Portadown Times: Another resident who wishes to remain nameless expressed a radical opinion. ‘All this talk about earthquakes is nothing more than a government cover-up. This isn’t the first time the IRA has set off a bomb in our town, only now the truth’s being hidden to keep the so-called Peace Process going. They must think we’re stupid. Earthquakes don’t happen in Northern Ireland!’21 Ulterior’s slippage into political allegory is less interesting than its need to frame its attempted generic meaninglessness with either end of the Troubles, and then to attempt to purge a society of its hidden aliens, and of what lies beyond and under the landscape. In its own way its conspiracy theory registers what eats away at a society propelled towards normalization and wary of what it may be leaving itself as a legacy. Ulterior’s tongue-in-cheek Gothic is heavy-handed enough to point explicitly, in its title and narrative, to the traces of violence which mark and constitute a time of peace – its anxiety over what is ‘ulterior’, over what might happen to sustain the ‘so-called Peace Process’, parodies but articulates in another way the fears which exist in a society being formed in such a way as to ‘overcome the legacy of history’. Sheila St Clair is a collector of ghost stories. Her book Unexplained Encounters: Exploring the Paranormal in Ulster (2001) is made up of a series of supernatural tales collected from around Northern Ireland and thrown into categories such as ‘The Radiant Boy’, ‘Signs and Portents’ and so on. The first words of the book are: ‘The whole world knows that Ulster is a fairly paranormal place in more ways than one’, and she excitedly calls the province ‘a veritable treasure house of paranormal experience and diversity’.22 St Clair also has a curiously partitionist view of the spectral, suggesting that Ulster has ‘a lot of poltergeistic and apparitional activity, more so perhaps than the rest of Ireland’.23 Taken as a whole the stories in Unexplained Encounters checklist a series of landmarks in Northern Irish history: the United Irishmen, the Act of Union, the Ribbonmen, the Somme, Roger Casement, the blitz on Belfast and the Troubles all make appearances. This unintentional and reflexive history explains how the North got bound into the British state, recording the traumas of the political history of the union in Ulster without ever acknowledging that it is doing so. One story in the book is a particular revelation; ‘The Narrow Water Castle Massacre’ tells of various locals seeing the ghosts of British soldiers killed in an IRA ambush at Narrow Water Castle, near Rostrevor,

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in August 1979. St Clair explains these spectral appearances as a ‘classic “time slip” experience’, and suggests that even though the local community said ‘prayers and rosaries’ at the site, this was not ‘cleansing’ enough; she suggests that the trauma experienced at Narrow Water set off ‘vibrations’ which were ‘strong enough to have form, and to have intervened in contemporary “reality”’.24 St Clair reveals something simple, something which appears throughout the culture of the Peace Process – that this is a society which is haunted, and that figuratively, and here literally, needs a form of exorcism, a profound facing up to its past. St Clair’s book, like many other manifestations of post-ceasefire textuality, is both an inadvertent plea for that exorcism to happen, and a despair at the marginality from which that plea is made. So even while St Clair’s attention is turned to the disbelief which she has encountered in her investigations, she binds the ghostly into the political when she emphasizes the loneliness of the furrow she has ploughed, noting that there has been no systematic study of the paranormal in Ulster since the Belfast Psychical Society folded in 1970. The date is darkly humorous in a way, as if the psychic disturbances of that year were too much for the investigators and mediums to contain; or maybe this is a simple recognition that, as the Troubles gathered momentum, the ‘contemporary reality’, as she calls it, had overwhelmed the supernatural. That St Clair’s book appears within the new interregnum is no surprise – the textual surfacing of its ghosts exists within the vacuum between the official discourse of the Process and the need for catharsis which a post-conflict society has. St Clair’s ghostly soldiers, whether patrolling a spectral Troubles or returning from the Somme, are examples of what Adorno, with some cruelty, describes as an ‘asocial twilight phenomena in the margins of the system, [ . . . an attempt] to squint through the chinks in its walls [which], while revealing nothing of what is outside, illuminate[s] all the more clearly the forces of decay within’.25 The place of St Clair’s Unexplained Encounters outside the mainstream of Northern cultural production is reiterated inside the book’s cover, where the publisher, with grim humour, has made a point by printing the words: ‘This book has received no financial assistance from the Cultural Traditions Programme.’ And St Clair herself lets us know how she had to face ‘prejudice and ridicule, if not downright abuse’ in pursuing her ‘researches’.26 The word prejudice here, of course, ties her self-narrative of the psychic investigator back into the very fabric of the Troubles. The ‘outsider’ status which is repeated in Sloan and St Clair’s texts is of a particular kind – it is a disenfranchised and disturbed, even persecuted, consciousness; it embodies the history of the Troubles and does so with

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an even longer view of Northern history; and it does this in a period when history was to blame, and was to be overcome. These texts then simply show the patterns of repression and recurrence which can infect a society after thirty years of violence – and they show, too, the dangers of constructing a political process which forgets rather than remembers, which detaches itself for survival, which regards identity, in its widest sense, as a danger rather than as the very substance of the matter, because without that acknowledgement identity deforms into the spectral, the contorted, the tortured, the fugitive, and, to echo the most resonant phrase of all from the Process, the missing. And in Sloan’s and in St Clair’s texts there is an appeal to history to restore itself – St Clair’s humiliated loneliness as a psychic investigator dates to 1970; Sloan’s kidnapped children are lost in 1972. The beginning of the Troubles is the beginning of a lost narrative time, while the peace is the beginning of stories, testimony and tentative hopes for restitution. But not all in this landscape is darkly embattled. There are strands of culture within the North which are finding new ways and forms to transform themselves, not at the behest of the Process and its confinements, but with energies which outstrip the constrictions on offer; photographers and visual artists such as David Farrell and John Byrne and arts organizations such as Factotum in Belfast take on the trauma of the new as a deformation and continuation of the past.27 Another way of thinking of an emergent Northern popular culture can be seen tangentially in action in an interview with Brad Pitt in Esquire magazine in 2000. Questioned about his role as an IRA volunteer in Devil’s Own, Pitt sounded off about ‘the British Empire’ ‘promoting this pain’ in Northern Ireland. ‘Why can’t the Empire make right its wrong?’ Pitt asked, obviously slipping back into character.28 In the course of the interview he and his unsettled English interviewer do a tour of Tower Records in Hollywood (LA, not County Down), and Pitt buys a CD by David Holmes, a Belfast DJ who was then just about to score the Steven Soderberg version of Ocean’s Eleven in which Pitt was to star. David Holmes’s fortuitous appearance on the CD racks, as a resolution to an awkward political moment, is a kind of compression of the force which his work might represent. Holmes is continually claimed as a product of the North, and specifically Belfast, yet his musical ecleticism seems to have little connection with the North, testifying to the way in which dance music seems to offer a new, unencumbered outlet for Northern culture to become part of a global, unrooted enterprise and to lose rather than confirm its political locality. Holmes himself, while certainly not disavowing his origins, sees no connection between his work and the Troubles, or indeed the peace. Yet his

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albums, such as This Film’s Crap Let’s Slash the Seats (1995), Let’s Get Killed (1997) and Bow Down to the Exit Sign (2000), have an aesthetic which circles around urban violence and bodily terror of various kinds, and, perhaps more tellingly, which returns again and again to a late sixties’ and early seventies’ black music, which is both an alternative to Northern particularity and a reminder of the roots of civil protest in the North in the sixties. Holmes’s sense of urban life is fascinated by subversion, subcultures, the police, the illicit, the addictive and the decaying. If his music can be seen as freed from the cages of Northern atavism then that liberation is still inflected by the concerns which animate Sloan and St Clair, and which attempt to understand a post-sixties’ world of disappointment, social chaos and the violent perpetuation of sectarianism, in various guises. The hollowing out of cultural identity which the Peace Process has found necessary for its furtherance brings the best and the worst of a liberal consensus – peace, but also a quietism, in which there is a genuine oppression of the idea of cultural identity, creating the simulacrum of identity while silently turning traditions into communities into consumers. There is currently a proposal to turn the largely disused Queen’s Island site of Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast into the so-called Titanic Quarter, regenerated through office blocks and apartments, bars and cafés. It suits the developer’s purposes for the ‘Titanic’ to be a brand name – indeed it is used shamelessly so, and its relationship to the city will be replicated as if it were a symbol of an easy, agreed past; and so the darkness of the shipyard’s economic present, its often sectarian past, and its appalling, often fatal working conditions, can be sidelined. Its identity, in other words, will be deracinated. The history of the shipyard will be turned into a ghost, haunting the city in which it was once the centre of economic energy. If the architects’ plans are to be taken as anything more than a computer-generated fantasy, then the Titanic will become exactly that: a computer-generated fantasy, enclosed within a museum. At the centre of the site it is proposed to have a holograph of the Titanic. The gap between the holograph and the actual ship is all too predictably symbolic and symptomatic; symptomatic of the gap between a time of industrial certainty and the flowing labour markets of the information age; symptomatic of the gap between the politics of the post-ceasefire world and those who live in it. The emptier and larger that gap the more quickly it allows entrance for the forces of global capital, which were once held partially at bay by the Troubles. As these forces enter the arena, the already marginalized will become more marginal still. Yet the unsayable does find ways to be spoken, because, as Derrida says in The Gift of Death, ‘This concern for death, this awakening that keeps vigil over death, this

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conscience that looks death in the face is another name for freedom.’29 In the symptoms of morbidity, the ghosts and the aliens, the missing and the forgotten, may also be the reawakened ethics that will allow for a fuller looking into the face of death, its aftermath, and its living legacy in the future.

Notes 1. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Declan Kiberd (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 24. 2. The most accessible version of the Joint Declaration can be found on the CAIN website, http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/peace/docs/dsd151293.htm (accessed 20 March 2006). 3. Joint Declaration, paragraph 2. 4. Joint Declaration, paragraph 4. 5. The phrase has been used in various contexts in Canadian debates over immigration. See Canadian Council for Refugees, Refugees and Non-citizens in Canada: Key Concerns Regarding Canada’s Compliance with the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR): Submission to the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations (16 September 2005), http://www.web.net/⬃ccr/CCPR 2005.pdf (accessed 20 March 2006). 6. http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200203/cm select/cmniaf/619-i/3040213.htm (accessed 1 April 2006). 7. The consociational model is most influentially set out in Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: a Comparative Exploration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). 8. See, for example, Brendan O’Leary, ‘The Nature of the British-Irish Agreement’, New Left Review, 233 (1999): 66–96. 9. Rick Wilford, ‘Aspects of the Belfast Agreement: Introduction’, in Aspects of the Belfast Agreement, ed. Rick Wilford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 4. 10. See Edna Longley, ‘Multi-Culturalism and Northern Ireland: Making Differences Fruitful’, in Edna Longley and Declan Kiberd, Multi-Culturalism: the View from the Two Irelands (Cork: Cork University Press/Centre for Cross Border Studies, 2001). 11. Paul Bew, Henry Patterson and Paul Teague, Between War and Peace: the Political Future of Northern Ireland (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1997); see Chapter 8, ‘A Framework for Peace?’, pp. 205–16. 12. Longley, ‘Multi-Culturalism and Northern Ireland’, p. 42. 13. See Richard Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland since 1965: Moments of Danger (London: Longman, 1996). 14. O’Neill’s ‘Ulster Stands at the Crossroads’ speech was broadcast on BBC, 9 December 1968. See Jonathon Bardon, A History of Ulster (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1992), p. 658. 15. Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 89. 16. Derrida, Adieu, p. 89. 17. See Tom Nairn, After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland (London: Granta, 2000).

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18. Cairns Craig, ‘Scotland: Culture after Devolution’, in Ireland (Ulster) Scotland: Concepts, Contexts, Comparisons, eds Edna Longley, Eamonn Hughes and Des O’Rawe (Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona, 2003), p. 43. 19. See http://www.PortadownNews.com (accessed 20 March 2006). See also Newton Emerson, The Portadown News (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2004). 20. See Darryl Sloan, Ulterior (Portadown: Midnight Pictures, 2002). 21. Sloan, Ulterior, p. 225. 22. Sheila St Clair, Unexplained Encounters: Exploring the Paranormal in Ulster (Dundonald: White Row, 2001), p. 12. 23. St Clair, Unexplained Encounters, p. 12. 24. St Clair, Unexplained Encounters, pp. 71–2. 25. Theodor Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 173. 26. St Clair, Unexplained Encounters, p. 13. 27. See David Farrell, Innocent Landscapes (Wachter: Dewi Lewis, 2001); John Byrne’s ‘Border Interpretive Centre’ is discussed in Colin Graham, ‘Belfast in Photographs’, in The Cities of Belfast, eds Nicholas Allen and Aaron Kelly (Dublin: Four Courts, 2003), pp. 152–67; Factotum’s work can be viewed at http://www.factotum.org.uk (accessed 20 March 2006). 28. ‘The Esquire Interview’, Esquire, September 2000. Available on various websites, including http://pittcenter.com/articles/2000/esquire.php (accessed 20 March 2006). 29. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 15.

14 Boyz to Men: Irish Boy Bands and Mothering the Nation Moynagh Sullivan

The most popular modes of rock and pop in the United States as well as Britain in the 1990s consciously asserted class, racial grouping or national group identities. For instance, the Britpop of the 1990s was notoriously nostalgic for an idealized pre-immigration pastoral Britain, and re-encoded many of the socially conservative and exclusionary values of punk before it.1 And while manufactured British bands such as the Spice Girls or Take That were openly patriotic in their iconography and in their dress, manufactured Irish bands, such as Boyzone and Westlife, who stormed the Irish and British markets in the 1990s and the early years of this decade, never draped themselves in the tricolour nor riverdanced. So although the boy bands appear, in contrast, innocently apolitical, they implicitly perform not only the newfound success of Celtic Tiger Ireland, but also the reasons for that success. Boy bands reproduce the sounds and harmonies of others in cover versions, a musical mode that emphasizes safety, stability and the repetitive reliability of tried and tested formulae – factors as important as tax-breaks, low-cost labour and a highly educated workforce for overseas, especially American, investors. So, from being nothing more than successful exploitation of a pre-teen and teen market, the value of boy-band cultural capital lies in implicitly advertising the Ireland of investment welcomes, clean, harmonious and racially homogeneous. And, like a bridge over the Northern Troubles, the boy band offers a counter reality to the advertisements of Ireland produced for the world by the civil unrest in Northern Ireland from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Boy bands did not of course take Ireland from Third World to First World status in the space of fifteen years, but at one level they represent a cultural dimension, and rationale, of the economic and social policies that have converted Ireland from a nation culturally understood as post-colonial to one positioned firmly as a First World contender. 184

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Part of what is at stake in the forging of such a psychic change in national self-fashioning is explored by Homi K. Bhabha, in his celebrated essay, ‘A Question of Survival: Nations and Psychics States’. He writes: The sense of the past, of ancestry, does not produce a resplendent, continuous national present; in the figure of the archaic, out of the alterity of the nation’s historical present, emerges that reference to the future anterior of the nation – that space in which its authority and genealogy is established in relation to that which must have been given.2 A history of revolutionary ancestry cannot be commemoratively established by direct invocation, as shown in debates on the recent speech given by Irish President Mary McAleese entitled ‘The Long Revolution: the 1916 Rising in Context’, and about how the one-hundredth anniversary of the 1916 Rising should or shouldn’t be marked.3 Instead, an ancestry of father-defined lineage is birthed out of the primary alterity of the nation’s historical present, the figure of the archaic, which is the mother. This chapter examines how the boy band has functioned as the mother’s body, a liminal space of entrance and egress, to produce a version of the nation’s resplendent present that supports a political and social architecture that constitutionally and legally disincorporates difference. In its performance of ‘mother’, it also performs citations of the nation’s alterities. In 2006, people from minority groups who do not enjoy full human rights under the protection of the national body-politic: non-nationals, especially non-white peoples, women, travellers, homosexuals, and people who find themselves disabled by non-inclusive policies, inaccessible public spaces and transport, represent the nation-state’s ‘alterities’. The boy band members have the bodies that matter to the nation and perform like the feminized, racialized, homoerotic, disabled bodies that don’t. The boy band promotes family values, even as it performs like those constituted outside the patriarchal family which underwrites the Irish national constitution. Westlife and Boyzone derive from the original family formulas of the first boy/family bands such as the Jacksons and the Osmonds, and the trope of family features heavily, not only in their well advertised loyalty to one another, but also in their allegiance to their fans.4 Their appeal to the constitutional family is obvious in the clean fun and Christian good looks that are associated with the boy bands, and are in evidence when the boys pose for promotional shots in which they goof around, muss each other’s hair, and tease one another

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like one big happy family. ‘I love them like brothers’, and ‘we are a like a family’, are phrases repeatedly asserted in interviews as a core-value of their group identity and, most importantly, as essential to their success. Such repetition functions, in the terms set out by Colin Graham in his 2001 essay, ‘“Blame it on Maureen O’Hara”: Ireland and the Trope of Authenticity’, as ‘authenticity’ itself. Here, Graham argues that authenticity is in fact an operation and not a definable state: ‘authenticity is thus constantly a cultural, textual phenomenon, defining, recreating and projecting’.5 The Irish boy band is a cultural, textual event of national authenticity, despite being musically and culturally inauthentic. So, although the boy band has little credibility in a music industry in which authenticity is measured by the extent to which you produce original music and resist market demands, it plays a crucial role in binding the nation in fellow feeling. Feeling for fellows is evident in the powerful appeal in boy band discourse to republican notions of fraternity and brotherhood. As ‘bands of brothers’, these young men are united, if not by blood, by fierce fidelity to one another. The real object of their love ballads is not the implied woman but the band itself: the ‘you’ addressed by the ‘I’ is another band member, as they make eyes at, flirt with, and croon to each other when they sing. The eroticized band replaces the love of the feminized nation that was the untouchable love object of the romantic nationalist balladeers such as Thomas Moore and James Clarence Mangan. Moore’s success as a composer and performer of sentimental melodies in Britain foreshadows that of Ireland’s boy bands, but, instead of Erin as addressee, the boy himself takes the central role, as he did in many of the cultural activities associated with the Revival. Boyhood and the boy were central to the practices and visions of bodies such as the Fianna and the IRB, and Padraig Pearse’s social experiments at St Enda’s. The band members evoke a cultural nationalist narrative of personal sacrifice and emotional restraint, as they talk about the path to success, but, unlike the balladeers who sang of sacrifice and whose love was never made, the boy band ‘makes it’, and its success is conflated with national affirmation, although it is never an explicit aspect of their performance. ‘Making it’ is ostensibly about continuing the self-sustaining economy of the band. Here are some sample quotes from websites, posted at the height of Westlife’s success: ‘we just want to keep going’; ‘to keep making hits’; ‘to keep on making it’; ‘we just care about staying together’; ‘the band is the most important thing’.6 This is an example of what Graham calls authenticity’s ‘own best scenario’, which is ‘an integrity (or ‘loyalty’) which demands an unquestioning belief in a wholeness

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involving the individual and his/her social context’.7 Fundamentally, the group functions as a social context, a family characterized by faith in itself, and an aura of authenticity is generated from this fierce loyalty (even when band members leave, they are at pains to stress how they will always be there for each other). The boy band, in its lifespan and reproductive habits, like ‘authenticity’, in Graham’s words, ‘falsely construct[s] itself as essence and origin’, that is, as mother, as the figure of the archaic.8 Boy bands follow a pattern of being nurtured by a mother manager, who forms them into an incubating circle from which an individual is eventually born, who then goes on to create his own matrix-band for the spawning of a new individual. Boyzone, the first Irish boy band success created by Louis Walsh, produced Ronan Keating, who, along with Walsh, created Westlife, which in turn spawned Bryan McFadden, who has become the manager of Franklin, a white South African band. The promotional shots for the bands feature circles prominently, often lit from within like the birth pods of science fiction, with the band emerging from tunnels in vignettes reminiscent of the heraldic scenes from films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when the aliens or humans are ‘delivered’ unto earth.9 Other photographic stock shots include the boys dressed like spacemen, dangling like playful infants from umbilical-like ropes, and pouring wide gushes of water over each other – the breaking of the waters. Here, the bands become essence and origin, not in spite of, but because of making a powerful appeal to the modes of masculinity imbricated in nationalist culture. Effectively, the boy band gives birth to his elders, that is, to return to Bhabha’s words, to ‘authority and genealogy’, to ‘that which must have been given’. Irish boy bands have within a remarkably short time created an authenticating background to counter their manufactured status. This occurs via an ostensible Oedipal transmission between generations of fathers and sons, upon which popular accounts of Irish history are based. In the narratives the emphasis is on the journey from boy to man, but the father ‘succeeds’ the son as an authenticating historical presence. For instance, an article in the Now Magazine featured the fathers of Westlife, profiling their personal history and musical ‘talents’.10 Here, the ‘ancestral past’ is established in a line from son to father, in which it appears as if the father’s retrospectively created persona was always pregnant with his son’s success. In other words, tradition is retrospectively created to fit with the needs of the present, which are, according to Brian McFadden’s solo single, ‘Irish Son’, for a patriarchal visitation, from God no less, to set the nation to rights: ‘Our father who art in heaven/Come down here and make your presence known’.11 Masculinity

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and authenticity are in musical terms historically intertwined as the poet and critic Ruth Padel points out in I’m a Man: Sex, Gods and Rock’n’ Roll. She notes that the central concept of authenticity in rock criticism and rock mythology derives from the tropes of blues and folk music, the two predecessors to modern rock.12 In both of these forms of music, which grew out of situations of extreme poverty, oppression, and exploitation caused in the aftermath of slavery in the USA, asserting ‘I’m a man, I’m a rollin’ stone’, as Muddy Waters so movingly did, is rejecting the racist term ‘boy’, and, in Padel’s words, ‘claiming not just sexuality but equality’.13 Padel points out that the trope of oppression, and the assertion of manhood to challenge it, have been invoked by rockers ever since. Although now all but emptied of its original racial politics, it continues to establish gendered inequities in cultural dynamics. For well-fed white middle-class rockers, the source of oppression is usually the preceding generation, conservative family values most often represented by mothers (or any woman who ties a man down) who represent an obstacle to the world of men together. ‘Authenticity’ is a measure in genre and fan distinction, with ‘real’ bands being those that are singer-songwriter based, and which take as long as possible before selling out. For those rockers and fans that take themselves seriously these days, the oppressor is more often than not mass culture, the pop industry itself, which (unlike that of mass sport culture), is tacitly, if not often overtly, considered trivial because overwhelmingly feminized.14 Boy bands are mummy’s boys who underwrite family values and don’t count in the world of authentic rock and men. ‘Reality’ shows such as Pop Idol, and She’s the One (in which Westlife auditioned the public to find a girl to duet with them), now an intrinsic part of pop culture, depend on tweenie and teenage girls who are the primary text and phone voters, and young girls make up the boy band’s largest fan base. To be an authentic man/rocker then is to distinguish oneself in contradistinction to girly mass culture. Male and female fan behaviours are also distinguished in relation to the feminine, in this case, to ‘mother’. Fandom is a behaviour profoundly linked with the oral stage of development, behaviours which in adults manifest themselves not only in the more recognizable actions of kissing, smoking and chewing, but also in the desire for incorporation. The fan wishes to assimilate the qualities of the idol and usually does so wearing a football jersey with a number corresponding to the idol’s position, or using a shampoo endorsed by the hero. But, while indulging in incorporating consumer acts, young men are at pains to be seen to expel the mother, which accounts for the frequency of spitting in male groups. For those men that do not spit out the mother, ridicule awaits. Daniel

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O’Donnell, a hybrid showband and boy singer, whose fanbase is made up primarily of women around his mother’s age, is most often mocked for his close relationship with his mother, in his willingness to continue to ingest her (tea), and to play mother himself by hosting tea parties for his fans. In contrast to the spitting man, it appears young women are keener to ingest, as the rural myth of the ‘spit on me Dickie’, Showband days in Ireland suggest.15 The ‘dickie’ in ‘spit on me’ also signals how gender differences in terms of fan behaviour are configured in relation to the phallus. Put simply, Lacan argues that in the Symbolic, men derive power through having the phallus (the object of desire) and women derive power through being the phallus (being the object of desire through ornamentation and display). In the case of the boy band fan, the young girl wishes to take the young man inside her, to access his power as a female impersonator. The fan feels penis envy because, unlike the young woman who can only be the phallus, the feminized young male can be the phallus and play with it too.16 The penis the fan envies however is not the one Freud imagined, but the maternal phallus, the display of femininity that Marjorie Garber, rereading Lacan, observes at the heart of cross-dressing.17 For the profound desire for incorporation in fanaticism signals that this derives from a time before the Oedipal scene divided women from having the phallus, having power. What the young girl desires is the experience of birthing the public realm, which is ironically most powerfully executed by young men, and she will instead be offered the often-distorted compensatory and affiliative power of the mother in the private sphere. The girl fan must be satisfied as witness to the boy band’s becoming her prohibited future when it spits out a man, who, unlike O’Donnell, spits back at the mother (band) and marks himself through a number of stock signifiers. When George Michael left Wham! to establish himself as a rock auteur and Robbie Williams left Take That, they swapped the smooth-skinned boy visual for stubble. They punctuated their move with the mark of the careless half-beard with its connotations of an unchecked masculinity, and correspondingly shed their glossy locks for tighter haircuts, moves adopted by Ronan Keating and Brian McFadden when they left Boyzone and Westlife respectively. However, these Irish boy band offspring sought not just to be a man, but to be man-agers. As well as rock revolt and artistic individuation, they sought managerial and executive powers. This desire on the part of the breakaway members of Boyzone and Westlife inauthenticates them as rock individuals, but they are otherwise authenticated as the face of the new Irish man(ager): as the rock oppressor. This is a powerful revelation of what Adorno calls ‘the concoctions of

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the culture industry’.18 These, he goes on, ‘are neither guides for a blissful life, nor a new art of moral responsibility, but rather exhortations to toe the line, behind which stand the most powerful interests. The consensus which it propagates strengthens blind opaque authority’.19 Rock revolution is not, in this case, rebellion, but imitation and assimilation, and the Irish postcolonial man is thus initiated as a defender of ‘the most powerful interests’, as ‘The Establishment’ itself, as mother yet again as she is constructed in the Symbolic. Brian ‘I write all me own lyrics’ McFadden combines being a manager with being a rocker-singer-song-writer in a Sex Pistols T-shirts. These seek to mark him as not only authentic, or, in the title of his own song, ‘Real to Me’, but also as authentically Irish. His first, self-penned album on leaving Westlife, was called ‘Irish Son’.20 Explicitly identifying himself as lyrically Irish could only happen after the boy has left the band, from a position of loss. As Bhabha observes, ‘the narrative of melancholia preserves the icon of the Ideal-Nation – but by virtue of identifying with it from a position of loss and absence, exile and migration: the signifying act that gives it meaning cannot be contained or incorporated within the sign’.21 McFadden can only openly construct the nation from a position of exile, from both the band and the country he has ‘left’: I seen so much that has changed me Just break with your past Feed your own mind ’Cos this Irish son has moved with the times.22 The authenticating event of the boy band cannot ‘be contained within the sign’, and its significance must be signalled from without. Bryan McFadden, previously one of the eroticized circle of the band, is now Brian McFadden, son of Westlife, grandson of Boyzone, and part and purveyor of the familiar narrative of melancholia that shores up such a national ideal. Just as the Irish nation-state became a nation fearful and punitive of alterity, especially the alterities that had been harnessed in its service, the man(ager) spawned from boy bands also defends against the alterities that it had exercised in its promotion of itself. In becoming authentic/Irish/man, he sheds the signifiers of alterity. McFadden’s opening lines to ‘Irish Son’, originally ‘I was born in the heart of Dublin / Back when being gay wasn’t cool’, became in a later version: ‘I was born in the heart of Dublin / To a holy book full of rules’.23 The earlier flirtation with homoerotic imagery with which the band had become successful is replaced with a formulaic fist shaken at the disabling environment of

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Ireland represented by the Church, the authority of which would have been only nominal during the years in which McFadden was educated. A boy band’s average lifespan is two years and it rarely survives a member’s defection, yet when McFadden left Westlife, it went from strength to strength, and the band has now been together for seven years. Given the fate of other boy bands, that Westlife have survived and thrived means that the band functions on a much broader cultural register than the pop market alone, a berth wide enough on which to convert from boy band to man band. Over the last three years, the lead feature article in the pre-Christmas RTÉ Guide, Ireland’s ‘premier family magazine’, has facilitated this nativity. In the wake of Mark Feehilly coming out as gay mid-way through 2005, the band gave a judiciously placed interview called ‘Westlife’s Incredible Journey’, in December 2005. In it Nicky Byrne is compared to James Dean and described as always looking ‘unflappable in a Larry Mullen kind-of-way’,24 which is far removed from his description in 2003: ‘he looks too good to be true, his skin shines, his teeth glisten, and his golden hair sits perfectly on his head’.25 In small sleights of hand such as this, their ‘incredible’ journey from boy-mother to fatherman is facilitated, as the interview repositions the band not as a ‘family’ but as a ‘gang or a football team’, and focuses on the recent and possible fatherhood of Shane Filan and Nicky Byrne.26 When the heteronormative lives of the other members have been discussed at length ‘finally, Mark Feehily makes an entrance, apologising for the make-up that makes his eyes look absolutely hu-u-u-ge. “We’re doing a mad photo-shoot,” he laughs’.27 Mark has no real place in the reproduction-focused article (in which he only makes a fleeting appearance at the end, and in which his relationship status is not, unlike the others, discussed), except as a cipher for fixed stereotypes of feminized gay men, and as the trace of the boyish giddiness that defined the band’s former life, for which he apologizes. Mark’s personal realities as a gay man in Ireland are not simply written into the margins of the article (as he’s also placed at the back in photographs), but out from the centrality of family to national life; a point poignantly underscored by the differences between Kian and Mark’s responses when asked about Christmas plans. Kian answers, ‘There’s no Christmas without your family, really in my opinion. I wouldn’t like to be away for Christmas’, while Mark answers, ‘I’ll be up in Sligo with my family and friends for the main days of the Christmas holidays. Apart from that I don’t know what I’ll do. Maybe go away for a few days.’28 The marginalizing of the queer in and of the boy band is connected to their participation in the political conservatism of Irish national life. Following Nicky Byrne’s marriage to Bertie Ahern’s daughter,

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Nicky and his fellow boy band members sat in the front row of the 2003 Fianna Fáil Ard Fheis, commanding more camera time than Ahern during national television news coverage. In this vignette, the powerful visual of the country’s most adored boy band listening attentively and piously whilst being voiced over by exhortative Fianna Fail rhetoric, tells its own story; a story in which the name of the father-in-law is strengthened by the propagating sons, and where realpolitik and popular culture converge in propagating Adorno’s ‘consensus of blind opaque authority’. Such consensus was evident in the results of the citizenship referendum of 2004, in which four out of five people voted overwhelmingly to restrict grounds for eligibility for Irish citizenship. The referendum raised a number of questions about race and racism, which were unsatisfactorily addressed in the proposed amendment, and which remain pressing in terms of social and political practice in contemporary Ireland. Indeed the proliferation of cover-bands and boy heart-throbs in Ireland, at a time when the country saw unprecedented numbers of people from other cultures arrive to live and work on the island may not be a simple coincidence. For the cover-version and the boy heart-throb are intimately related to the history of racism in the United States, whose cultural operations we have assimilated. Ireland’s culture industry functions, like that of America, on the ‘star system’, which Adorno argues ‘propagates supposedly great personalities and operates with heart-throbs’.29 In twentieth-century American culture, the cult of the white boy heart-throb operated very powerfully as a way of defending white middleclass American family values against the phantom threats of miscegenation and licentiousness promised by rock and roll. In ‘The Domestication of Rock and Roll: From Insurrection to Myth’, Larry Bennett observes how Blues and Rock and Roll hits were ‘covered’ by wholesome white singers, thus containing the fear voiced by Asa Carter of the White Citizen’s Council that ‘rock and roll contributed to racial mixing’: Major record companies recruited film and television personalities such as Tab Hunter and Rick Nelson to make sanitised recordings for the teenage audience and there was little chance that wilder performances could cross over from the ‘race’ or ‘rhythm and blues’ markets to the larger white teenage audiences. As soon as race records became hits in regional markets or among black teenagers, more controlled ‘cover versions’ would be recorded by white performers.30 Bennett details how the career of the most famous white boy heartthrob, Elvis Presley, was managed in order to contain any potentially

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undermining aspects of his act, namely visual and performative citations of blackness.31 Likewise, Simon Frith notes in his famous study of pop culture, Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop, that Elvis’s widespread success was in large part due to the visual appeal that his act made to Hollywood’s version of ‘fervid adolescence’.32 Elvis sang black, but not too black, and looked white. The fetishization of display, of ‘femininity’ in mass culture, meant that the increasing use of TV and film was central to the marketing of the heart-throb, and to the assimilation of blackness into the representative and iconic white star, evidenced as much as anything else by a widely-held (yet hotly-disputed) belief in MTV’s initial ban on playing videos by black artists. Padel keenly observes that the assimilation of blackness into representative white bodies is the popular cultural equivalent of the assimilation of black and so-called ‘primitive art’ into high modernism and on into postmodernism. The racist primitivism that reified blackness still functions as an unconscious index of depth in white music today, where soul (marketed almost exclusively as black music) gives repressed whiteness a heart, just as a blues riff is shorthand for edginess and sexuality. Blackness is incorporated into the explicitly white Irish boy bands when they harmonize as if a cappella groups, croon and evoke blues and soul, and of course have a repertoire almost entirely made up of cover versions. Moreover, a visual play on black and white features prominently in Westlife’s and Boyzone’s promotional material. Many of the photographs feature the boys dressed all in white against a black background, or in black against white, with stark chiaroscuro the most commonly recurring lighting motif. The success of boy bands in the last decade contrasts with Ireland’s first ‘cover band’ of the nineties, The Commitments, which did not succeed because it was in fact, all too explicitly ‘black’. In the film of the same name, the manager, Jimmy Rabbitte, identifies the Irish as the ‘blacks of Europe’, in a bid to help the band identify with, and perform like, the soul greats.33 Indeed, Jimmy goes further and uncovers Elvis as the great white black pretender, when he asserts: ‘Elvis is not soul’, to which his father, who worships Elvis, replies ‘Elvis is God’. Jimmy’s inability to follow a righteous path (‘I never pictured God with a fat gut and corset singing “My Way” at Caesar’s Palace’34) combined with the band’s wearing of its blackness on its sleeve (covers), means its eventual failure in a film visually distinguished by a dangerously miscegenating grey somewhere between black and white. Jimmy senior has no problem imagining a form of godliness with a ‘fat gut’, for in the film of The Commitments, pictures of Elvis Presley replace the traditional icon of the Holy Mother in the Rabbitte kitchen.

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Elvis’s later Vegas act was, as Garber points out, effectively a drag act, and was heavily marked by gender transgression, by what she calls an ‘unconscious of transvestism’.35 This was not simply in terms of decoration, but was also the condition of his body shape, which resembled that of a pregnant woman. Elvis impersonators overwhelmingly choose, as Garber points out, not to impersonate boy-Elvis, but the Vegas version. Jimmy senior in The Snapper, second in the Barrytown trilogy, becomes intimately involved with his daughter’s pregnancy to the extent that he, like the later Elvis, becomes mother-like himself,36 an act that performs the great cover version of Western Christianity, when, in the ritual of the taking of mass (culture), the father’s word converts the mother’s body and blood into his. The desire to impersonate Elvis is most profoundly the desire, in this case, to become mummy. In the context of Irish culture, the Barrytown trilogy can be seen as a sequence that starts when Ireland was, as Jimmy asserts ‘a Third World country’, and which showed, however unwittingly, not only what skin to wear with your cover version, but also how to deliver it for the ‘First World’. Boy-band mummy’s appropriation of the cultural valency of the archaic in the name of the father is inseparable from the political and social policing of women’s reproduction. Their display of maternal virility in the context of contemporary Ireland is precariously placed at the legislative and constitutional borders of Ireland in terms of the thousands of women who travel to Britain every year to have an abortion, the lack of proper state-support for mothering, and the non-national pregnant women who appeared to threaten the economic integrity of Ireland. That the recent referendum on Irish citizenship took as its iconographic and anecdotal bogey woman the spectre of a pregnant black woman, who threatened to swallow up the economy if allowed to claim Irish citizenship by way of her child, is no surprise given the building blocks used to construct recent Irish model citizens. Boy mummy on the other hand is no threat, for he gives birth to the authenticating history needed by a culture in search of ‘that which must have been given’. Celtic Tiger Ireland, in its journey from boy to postcolonial man, has created a society of sameness, in which boy makes man, and the cultural dominant is in Luce Irigaray’s terms, ‘hommo-sexual’, in which only one sex symbolically exists, and which reproduces itself through incorporation and partial display of the differences, the dissidents, the (m)others which its symbolically represses.37 Or, as Adorno puts it, ‘what parades as progress in the culture industry, as the incessantly new which it offers up, remains the disguise for an eternal sameness’.38 The Irish postcolonial nation finds itself not in the figure of the archaic, as Bhabha asserts, but in the

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figure impersonating the archaic flesh of the mother. At stake in this history, as in popular culture, is an event of national authenticity that propagates the fiction that this display, this history, is all about men and boys. Not so: papa, it seems, was no rolling stone, no siree, papa is quite other, indeed, quite mother.

Notes 1. See Andy Bennett, ‘“Sitting in an English Garden”: Comparing representations of “Britishness” in the Songs of the Beatles and 1990’s Britpop Groups’, in The Beatles, Popular Music and Society: a Thousand Voices, ed. Ian Inglis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 189–206. 2. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘A Question of Survival: Nations and Psychics States’, in Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory: Thresholds, ed. James Donald (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1991), p. 95. 3. See Irish Times, 28 January (2006), p. 6. 4. See http://www.west.loife.com/article%20g.html for a list of and access to Westlife interviews (accessed 15 March 2006). 5. Colin Graham, ‘“Blame it on Maureen O’Hara”: Ireland and the Trope of Authenticity’, Cultural Studies, 15:1 (January 2001): 58–75, 62. 6. See website as above. 7. Graham, ‘Blame Maureen’, 63. 8. Graham, ‘Blame Maureen’, 64. 9. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, dir. Steven Spielberg (Sony Pictures, 1977). 10. Now Magazine (December 2004). The Observer Magazine ran a similar article about U2’s fathers, called ‘The Son also Rises’. The cover photograph featured each of their father’s heads superimposed on their corresponding son’s body, in an iconic U2 pose, with the headline, ‘ “In the Name of the Fathers”: Bono Talks about Life and Death and why their Dads are the Real U2’, Observer Magazine, 6 February (2005), http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/ 0,,1406648,00.html (accessed 02 April 2006). 11. Brian McFadden, ‘Irish Son’, Irish Son (Sony 2004). Cat. No. 5190022. 12. Ruth Padel, I’m a Man: Sex, Gods and Rock ’n’ Roll (London: Faber and Faber, 2000) p. 184. 13. Padel, I’m a Man, p. 198. 14. See Gayle Wald, ‘“I Want It That Way” Teenybopper Music and the Girling of Boy Bands’, http://www.genders.org/g35/g35_wald.html (accessed 23 March 2006). My thanks to Diane Negra, who drew my attention to this. I was not aware of Wald’s points when I first wrote this chapter, so the many similarities between our analyses and conclusions are all the more interesting in the context of the globalized gendering of commodity culture. 15. The popularity of the Showbands in Ireland (arguably partial precursors of boy bands), especially those fronted by Dickie Rock, during the 1960s and 1970s is often illustrated by tales of the fans screaming ‘spit on me (Dickie)’ at the bands. 16. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990) playfully reassigns Lacan’s theories of the centrality of the phallus. See also Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Middlesex: Penguin, 1977).

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17. Marjorie Garber, ‘Cross-dressing, Gender and Representation; Elvis Presley’, in The Feminist Reader, 2nd edn, eds Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 164–81, 166–7. 18. Theodor Adorno, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) p. 237. 19. Adorno, ‘Culture Reconsidered’, p. 237. 20. Brian McFadden, Irish Son (Sony 2004), Cat. No. 5190022. 21. Bhabha, ‘Nation States’, p. 101. 22. McFadden, ‘Irish Son’. 23. McFadden, ‘Irish Son’. 24. John Byrne, ‘Westlife’s Incredible Journey’, RTÉ Guide, December 3–9 (2005): 12–15, 14–15. 25. See http://www.west.loife.com/article%20g.html (accessed 1 April 2006). 26. Byrne, ‘Journey’, p. 15 27. Byrne, ‘Journey’, p. 15. 28. John Byrne, ‘Journey’, p. 15. 29. Adorno, ‘Culture Revisited’, p. 233. 30. Larry Bennett, ‘The Domestication of Rock and Roll: From Insurrection to Myth’, in Popular Culture and Political Change in Modern America, eds Ronald Edsforth and Larry Bennett (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 143. 31. Bennett writes: ‘the threat to public morals embodied by Presley and his comrades was linked to another cultural taboo in the south, where many of the early rock and roll performers were based. In late March 1956, the New York Times reported that the executive secretary of the North Alabama white citizen’s council had claimed that the “national association for the advancement of colored people had infiltrated southern white teenagers with Rock and Roll music” ’ (p. 142). 32. Simon Frith, Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop (Oxford: Polity Press, 1988), p. 218. 33. The Commitments, dir. Alan Parker (Twentieth Century Fox, 1991). 34. The Commitments. 35. Garber, ‘Cross-dressing’, p. 165. 36. The Snapper, dir. Stephen Frears (Miramax, 1993). 37. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985). 38. Adorno, ‘Culture Reconsidered’, p. 233.

15 Quare Theory Noreen Giffney

. . . we rarely see a glimpse of what queer theory means to those producing and employing it.1

Quare(ly) lack(ing) The lack of research into the history of Irish sexuality is puzzling, although it corresponds to a general lack of interest in sexuality in Irish academia.2 If Tom Inglis is puzzled, then so am I; what we find puzzling differs substantially however. He is puzzled by what he terms ‘the lack of research into the history of Irish sexuality’, which for him ‘corresponds to a general lack of interest in sexuality in Irish academia’. I, on the other hand, am puzzled by his ignorance of the reputation that his own university, more specifically Women’s Studies at University College Dublin, has attained internationally as an academic site of excellence for the study of sexuality, Irish and otherwise. These statements leave me wondering what Inglis means by the terms ‘sexuality’ and ‘academics’, what constitutes ‘an interest in sexuality’ for him or indeed what might count as ‘research’. I am curious about his use of these words and phrases because the study of sexuality has been ongoing in Ireland for some time. If I confine myself to the twenty-first century, I can think of a host of conferences, symposia, panel discussions, seminars, publications and specialized courses which deal with sexuality, predominantly from feminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer perspectives.3 These interdisciplinary events have attracted the foremost experts in the field of sexuality to Ireland to discuss their work without ‘shame 197

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or embarrassment’.4 They have also contributed towards the formation of an international community of scholars and activists who have travelled to Ireland to share their research findings on sexuality. Inglis’s silence about this work raises questions relating to visibility, value and respectability. What academic work is considered worthy enough to mention, or unimportant enough to ignore? What scholarly activities are legitimated by the academic establishment, and what research is trivialized, dismissed or silenced? Who, more pointedly, is deemed to be respectable enough to speak on such matters and expert enough to be listened to? These questions are especially pertinent in light of the theme of this chapter: the development of queer theory in Ireland and its relationship with lesbian studies and feminism. This chapter is a genealogical meditation on queer theory in Ireland, what I am terming ‘quare theory’.5 I employ the term ‘quare’ to articulate the specificities, nuances and methodological tensions between expressions of queer theory in an Irish context and theoretical formulations of queer theory originating in Anglo-North American contexts. Employing ‘quare’ also helps to differentiate the pursuit of queer theory as an epistemology, ontology, methodology and pedagogy in Ireland from Irish Queer Studies,6 which is a loose umbrella term to describe scholarly efforts which concern themselves more specifically with the connections between Irish studies and queer studies or LGBT7 studies more generally – in other words, work which has a firm commitment to or engagement with postcolonial theory and makes a concerted effort to think about questions relating to Irish national identity. While queer theory might have a tentative home in Women’s Studies, Irish Queer Studies remains an amorphous shape haunting the contours of Irish studies and queer studies. I argue here that quare theory happens at the points of entanglement between queer theory, feminism and lesbian studies in Ireland. Thus, quare theory is useful as a qualifying term to describe a moment in time – a temporal anomaly – and to point to the cultural context within which this particular genealogy of queer theory has gestated. I have no investment in seeing quare theory develop as an area of study in its own right (hence it is not quare studies), but instead cite the term to make visible the ways in which queer/feminist/lesbian work intersects in Ireland, and as a way to facilitate the interrogation of our collective investments in such fields of knowledge production. To suggest that there is no tension between queer theory and feminism and lesbian studies in Ireland would be inaccurate. What I am suggesting instead is a concentration on points of

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connection in spite of the methodological and ideological tensions between the three fields; an attendance to the contradictory impulses inherent in such interminglings and a commitment to recognizing that these three fields are not mutually exclusive but have shifting boundaries. In this, quare theory also happens at points of conflict and in the very sites where differences between the three fields get expressed. And so, I insist that quare theory operates as a methodology rather than as an identity category or object to be scrutinized, a culturally-situated and historically-contingent analytical tool for interrogating the potentialities and limits of areas of study founded on the internalization, deconstruction or repudiation of identity categories. I draw on collaborative queer/feminist/lesbian events I have been involved in (co)organizing in Ireland, in an effort to show where and how quare theory comes into being. I focus specifically on the annual Lesbian Lives conference, the formation and development of the Dublin Queer Studies Group, the Certificate in Lesbian Studies and Queer Culture and the rationale for The(e)ories: Advanced Seminars for Queer Research, all convened at University College Dublin. Originally set up as a community event in 1993, Lesbian Lives has grown in recent years into an international, interdisciplinary conference which attracts hundreds of delegates from Ireland and around the world. The Dublin Queer Studies Group was established in 2001 to facilitate informal discussion about topics relating to queer interest. Convened fortnightly, the group uses a single chapter or article, film or other cultural product to act as a springboard from which to launch thematic debates. The Certificate in Lesbian Studies and Queer Culture was launched as an outreach certificate programme in 2000, delivering modules on subjects such as history, film, psychology, politics and literature to interested members of the LGBTQ community in Dublin and Cork. The(e)ories, which originated as a monthly, interdisciplinary, formal seminar series in 2003, also features occasional roundtable discussions, symposia and conferences under its rubric, in addition to hosting some of the world’s leading thinkers in LGBTQ studies as plenary speakers. As well as exhibiting a commitment to the formation of an interdisciplinary and multi-theoretical environment for discussions, all four events operate an inclusive, trans-academic policy, which means that they are attended by academics, activists and nonacademics. This also signifies that they often incorporate what are traditionally considered to be non-academic elements; for example, The(e)ories has featured a performance by a local drag-king troupe, the Shamcocks, in advance of a plenary lecture by Professor Judith Halberstam.

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Quare The(e)ories A queer pedagogy must also try to break with the oedipal deadlock that creates and sustains intergenerational conflict.8 This section begins by introducing some of the key tenets of queer theory, before moving on to analyse what marks out its trajectory in Ireland as different, while thinking about the ways in which quare theory comes into being in the gaps between the three discourses and in their enfoldings. Genealogies of queer theory can be traced through sexology, psychoanalysis, the lesbian and gay liberation movement, the black civil rights movement, (lesbian) feminism, HIV/AIDS activism as well as postmodernism and poststructuralism.9 Broadly defined, the term ‘queer theory’ denotes a collection of methods all devoted to examining desire and its relationship to identity. Queer theorists interrogate the categorization of desiring subjects (that is, the creation of identities based on desire), while making visible the ways in which some desires (and thus identities) are made to pass as normal, at the same time that others are rendered wrong or evil. Queer theorists depathologize abjected desires (and thus identities), not by attacking or refuting untrue statements but by exercising a post-structuralist approach advocated by Michel Foucault to elucidate the processes through which norms are created.10 Queer theorists refuse to ‘play the game’ of the dominant culture, and instead of asking what is wrong with queers, turn an interrogative gaze towards societal norms and the assumptions which underpin those norms. Using deconstructive logic, queer theorists expose norms for the constructions that they are, and show how norms define, solidify and defend their shaky self-identities by excluding those (dissident others) who fail or refuse to conform. Queer theorists show that norms need their abjected others, because they would not exist if they did not have one or more others to define (and protect) themselves against. Queer theorists also reclaim terms of insult; while brandishing them with pride and not as words of degradation, theorists (try to) relieve those same terms of their power to hurt or offend. The term ‘queer’ itself is seen to have a performative power; a power to challenge (if not always successfully subvert) all norms relating to (desirous) identity. While many queer theorists forward a fluid definition for the term ‘queer’ and boast a capacious understanding of its epistemological and methodological potential, all too often the term is collapsed in its praxis into a synonym for lesbian and gay studies. In addition, a growing body of criticism has developed around the misrepresentation or silencing of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender

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issues and viewpoints by certain queer theorists. Many point to queer theorists’ failure to deal adequately with how sexuality and gender intersect with other facets of our identities: race, ethnicity, nationality, (dis)ability, age, class and religious affiliation. This has had the positive effect of spurring on intersectional analyses, which attempt to answer E. Patrick Johnson’s call for ‘an epistemology of the body’.11 A variety of people within the university, in addition to activists and members of the LGBTQ community, have levelled charges of elitism at some queer theorists who bear the hallmarks of post-structuralism by employing jargon-laden prose in their explication of ideas. Despite the proliferation of queer theoretical work in places as diverse as Poland and India, an unvoiced assumption circulates within LGBTQ studies that queer theory is produced in North America and to a lesser extent Britain, and then exported as a form of neo-imperialist rhetoric to other parts of the world. A ‘star system’ continues to underpin many queer writings, with the result that certain individuals, locations and disciplines have become conflated with producing theory while others are seen as simply applying it – colonized by its ideological effects.12 Quare theory is produced relationally both in the spaces between queer theory, lesbian studies and feminism, and at their loci of connection. Functioning as a concept like Gloria Anzaldúa’s La Mestiza, quare theory exhibits ‘a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity’.13 Certainly queer theory holds within its expansive rubric the potential to embrace contradictory thoughts and positions and ‘combine methods that are often cast as being at odds with each other’.14 Having said that, certain works informed by queer theory follow a linear, developmental trajectory and posit themselves against heteronormative impulses on the one hand and a so-called normative feminist and/or lesbian discourse on the other.15 This becomes unhelpful when all feminist and/or lesbian scholarship is ridiculed, misrepresented or ignored, or else employed as a catchall category for thinking that is reputedly outmoded, conservative or essentialist.16 This is not to say that work sporting ‘lesbian’ and/or ‘feminist’ tags does not distort, resist or discard ‘queer’ insights.17 As Elizabeth Weed puts it, ‘To say that feminism and queer theory share commonalities and affiliations is not to say they are easy commensurable.’18 This is not to imply that either queer theory or feminism are monolithic entities; indeed, as Donald E. Hall comments, ‘there is no “queer” theory in the singular, only many different voices and sometimes overlapping, sometimes divergent perspectives that can loosely be called “queer theories” ’.19 In my queer/lesbian/feminist collaborations in Ireland, I have not experienced what appears to be a queer rite of passage if critical commentaries are to

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be believed: that is, queer theory’s apparent ritualistic Oedipal resistance to feminism and/or lesbian studies or its practitioners’ metaphorical cannibalistic sacrificing of its (m)others for not being transgressive, subversive, radical or theoretical enough. This ‘collision model’, as it is referred to by Laura Doan,20 exists within a long series of unhelpful dichotomous stand-offs prevalent at one time or another in queer theory, lesbian studies and feminism over the past fifteen years: essentialism/social constructionism, academia/activism and theory/materiality. I sometimes find it difficult to distinguish between queer theory, lesbian studies and feminism in Ireland for three reasons: firstly, my formal introduction to feminism was through the Certificate in Lesbian Studies and Queer Culture. In fact, the practice of queer theory has been facilitated, made possible even, by the earlier gains of feminism and lesbian studies. Secondly, I work in a Women’s Studies department with a firm commitment to lesbian studies – hosting an annual Lesbian Lives conference, for example – and exhibiting an active involvement in a variety of LGBTQ organizations and coalitions, such as the Irish Queer Archive, the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network, the National Lesbian and Gay Federation and the Queer(y)ing Psychology Collective. Thirdly, many of the events I have organized or participated in have resulted in a fusion of the three fields, in that they are generally put together by self-identified female, male or transgender feminists with an investment in creating an inclusive environment. This means that explicitly ‘feminist’ conferences, such as ‘Feminism Contesting Globalisation’ (2004), have included a number of presentations on lesbian and queer issues, just as the ‘Queer Keywords’ conference (2005) featured a panel on ‘Lesbo Words’. Similarly, the Lesbian Lives conferences have always had queer sessions on their programme, everything from panels on ‘Queering the (Non-) Human’ (2003) to roundtable discussions on topics such as ‘(Heterosexually) Married and Queer: an Oxymoron?’ (2004). Thus, my schooling in queer theory/lesbian studies/feminism has never been ‘pure’ or disciplined; rather, I have always been offered a multidisciplinary conglomerate of theories and perspectives – academic and activist – for the study of sex, gender and sexuality. This has encouraged an appreciation in me of the ways in which each of the three fields is implicated in and enriched by the others. It is this methodological eclecticism, this expressed refusal towards disciplinary coherence, this hybridization of feminist/lesbian/queer theory which gives rise to quare theory. Quare is indispensable here to pinpoint this specific instance of an alignment between feminist, lesbian and queer perspectives because not all Women’s Studies departments are pro-lesbian or supportive of explicitly queer

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work. This also means that quare theory does not recognize queer theory, lesbian studies and feminism as existing in a competitive or evolutionary relationship with one another. It is the emphasis on fluidity and indeterminacy – where does one discourse end and another begin? – which encapsulates the sense that quare theory constitutes a collection of moments, a rhizomatic temporal symbiosis without a centre or locus of definition. My concentration on what might appear to be the painless and seamless interconnections between queer theory, lesbian studies and feminism should not be taken as a call for an all-encompassing eclecticism which inhibits, according to Joan Wallach Scott, ‘rigorous interrogation’ and results in ‘the coexistence of conflicting doctrines as if there were no conflict . . . to ignore or overlook differences, to create balance and harmony, to close down the opening to unknown futures’.21 Quare theory points to the creative energy which results from confrontational encounters between queer theory, lesbian studies and feminism. It is through a discursive process that quare theory comes into being. This process incorporates the points of disagreement arising when ideological borders between the three fields are drawn and redrawn; when belief systems are reconsidered and new ideas are formed. Thus, quare theory describes the compromises entered into in order to facilitate such productive encounters as well as naming the encounters themselves. The title of the annual lesbian conference at University College Dublin has been a subject of continued contention among delegates. Retaining the title ‘Lesbian Lives’ in spite of criticism and calls for a more capacious moniker – ‘Queer Lives’ and/or ‘Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Lives’ – the organizers operate an inclusive policy when it comes to deciding who can attend and the topics that can be presented. In this, the title ‘Lesbian Lives’ operates as ‘an anachronism’,22 which is offered up yearly as something to be debated and is never clearly defined so that it is always open for resignification. This refusal to relinquish the term ‘lesbian’ while at the same time not feeling the need to own its meaning(s) is reminiscent of Judith Halberstam’s idea of a queer lesbian studies: ‘“Lesbian” is a term that modifies and qualifies “queer”, and “queer” is a term capable of challenging the stability of identities subsumed by the label “lesbian”.’23 When choosing a name for the Dublin Queer Studies Group, Michael O’Rourke and I decided on the word ‘queer’ for its use as an umbrella term for people as well as theories and subjects which could be discussed under that banner. While acting as facilitators of the group’s discussions during 2001–02, O’Rourke and I were privy to a number of heated debates as members argued over what ‘queer’ might mean, who or what it included and excluded, what its practical uses and material effects were, its

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relationship to feminism and lesbian and gay studies, in addition to race, class, (dis)ability, age and religion more widely. The group counted among its members academics and students from a number of academic disciplines and social backgrounds with a range of political affiliations, as well as including activists and non-academics and people who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and straight. Conversations were often tense with people staking out particular positions and they often arrived frustrated that the articles under discussion were inaccessibly written. While some members were comfortable with divulging personal details, others pushed for more abstractly theoretical discussions at the same time that a section of the group insisted that everything be brought back to the material realities of queers and other disadvantaged groups. This caused a lot of consternation in the group at first, as everyone endeavoured to ‘convert’ other members to one another’s viewpoints. Those fiery arguments also encouraged dialogue, however, between a diverse range of people, who sometimes held fundamentally opposing opinions and forced all of us to try to find a common ground where we could tolerate if not always understand radically different viewpoints. It was at the Dublin Queer Studies Group that the borders between particular forms of (lesbian) feminism and queer theory became visible, as discussants sometimes put forward opposing thoughts on topics such as transgender, bisexuality, heterosexuality, power and identification. Many of those debates remained unresolved with participants reaching out across a chasm of assumptions, misunderstandings and oppositional political persuasions. It is in this chasm, in the borderlands between identities and identifications that quare theory sparks and takes flight. For E. Patrick Johnson ‘quare studies’, as he formulates it, ‘is “bi”-directional: it theorizes from bottom to top and top to bottom’.24 This raises the question of the relationship between ‘queer’ and ‘theory’, especially as it relates to the Dublin Queer Studies Group, many of whom took issue with what they saw as the exclusionary language and elitist posturing of queer theorists. That is why I use the word ‘quare’ in connection with ‘theory’ because it points to the discussions we were furiously having early in the new millennium.25 It is at the point of those unresolved – sometimes irreconcilable – tensions that quare theory can be identified, as well as in the perverse pleasure that we took in challenging one another’s conceptions of self, desire and identification.

Critically quare ‘Queer’ is such a simple, unassuming little word. Who ever could have guessed that we would come to saddle it with so much pretentious

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baggage – so many grandiose theories, political agendas, philosophical projects, apocalyptic meanings?26 If the term ‘queer’ is to be a site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings, it will have to remain that which it is, in the present, never fully owned.27 This section commences with a consideration of the usefulness of employing the term quare to refer to an analytical process, after which I briefly offer a few suggestions as to how quare theory might function as a critical process for examining the affective investment, embodied practices and performative machinations involved in doing queer theory in Ireland. William Haver remarks that ‘it would be more useful to ask what queer research does, to ask what happens in queer research, than to ask what it is’.28 This is a common strategy put into practice by queer theorists who refuse to be defined or categorized as passive objects of knowledge by the dominant culture and by extension will not define what queer theory ‘is’, by fixing its identity, but concentrate more on writing about its actions, in the process allowing it to speak on its own behalf. Quare theory doesn’t exist independently of the interrelationship between queer theory, lesbian studies and feminism, or indeed as something in its own right. This chapter is not trying to perform a conjuring act or birth a new field. To clarify: I am not suggesting that ‘quare theory’ should be used as a so-called advanced replacement for ‘queer theory’, in the reductive way that the latter has often been operationalized following (but against the wishes of) Teresa de Lauretis in relation to ‘lesbian and gay studies’.29 Quare is useful as a descriptor for a methodological apparatus in this instance because it does not harbour, like the word ‘queer’ does, as much ideological baggage as an identity category. Certainly quare is sometimes used in Irish contexts as a colloquial epithet for gay, just as it can also be employed to point to something or someone ‘odd’ or ‘strange’; however, the term does not have the same currency in Ireland as an identity marker in activist and academic circles. Quare theory signifies the self-reflexive interrogation of queer theory through a feminist and lesbian studies lens and vice versa. It is at the moment that one field interrupts another that quare becomes manifest.30 Quare theory enumerates the importance of each field in ensuring the continued relevance of the others and defines, through critique, compromise and re-evaluation, ‘the adaptability of queer studies to meet the challenges suggested by contexts that are never simply reducible to our sexual desires’.31 This is in contrast to some individuals who see the words ‘lesbian’, ‘queer’ or at times even ‘feminist’ as

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an opportunity to reduce an event and its participants to the sexual acts they think ‘lesbians’, ‘queers’ and/or ‘feminists’ perform. It is a way of dismissing an event and rendering its participants silent. Judith Butler has discussed what it might mean to ‘come out’ as a ‘lesbian’, professionally (in an academic sense) and otherwise. According to Butler, it is at the moment of coming out, of rendering oneself intelligible in language, of taking on a term to identify oneself with, that a person becomes complicit with the technologies of a regulatory regime.32 By extension, what might it mean to ‘out’ oneself as someone who does queer theory in the university in Ireland? The utterance, ‘My research interests include queer theory’, is a double coming out of sorts: one is identifying oneself as an academic, a participant in the institutionalization of knowledge, while also professing one’s relation to a subject which many mark out for ridicule or abjection, when not choosing to ignore it entirely. This pronouncement results in a double bind: while one is now visible in academic discourse, a subject of one’s own creation, it is at this very moment that one also becomes an object and is thus subjected to the scrutiny of potentially hostile onlookers. This also has the potential effect of facilitating the (re-)institutionalization of queer(s) in an alienating academic discourse; a professional pathologizing of those who have always been subjected to pathologization in medical, legal and religious discourses. E. Patrick Johnson summons ‘quare studies as an interventional disciplinary project. Quare studies addresses the concerns and needs of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people across issues of race, gender, class, and other subject positions.’33 For him, quare studies ‘is committed to theorizing everyday life’,34 and offers a critique of identity while recognizing, like Butler does, that terms like ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’ and ‘transgender’ can function as politically efficacious phantasms.35 Johnson is especially insistent that queer theorists concentrate on the specific contexts within which sexualities are produced, discussing matters pertaining especially to race and class.36 Following on from Johnson, quare theory is especially cognizant of the pleasures and dangers involved in positioning oneself as a practitioner of queer, lesbian or feminist work, whatever one’s sexual identity might be. To conclude, I would like to return to the two quotations – the first by David Halperin, the second by Judith Butler – that preface this section. While Halperin ponders how queer, ‘such a simple, unassuming little word’, has been saddled with ‘so much pretentious baggage’,37 Butler insists that the term must remain forever open to reinterpretation. Certainly Halperin’s point suggests that it has, in its definitional proliferations, inflated to sometimes grandiose proportions. Let me focus in closer on Butler’s words

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for a moment, in which she says that if queer is to be useful, it must ‘remain that which it is, in the present, never fully owned’.38 In diverging from Butler, I would make the point that it is not that queer must not be owned, so much as that it should not be allowed to own us – those who invest it with meaning, practise it, live it – it must not become another category for us to ‘come out’ into, castigate ourselves with, disidentify from or fiercely protect from encroachments by hostile forces. Queer is, of course, all of these things because it has developed simultaneously as an identity category and a methodology as well as having a host of other meanings. This is why the term ‘quare theory’ has proved so useful to me: I neither wish to own it nor contemplate a time when I will become owned by it. It is useful not in itself, but because it has facilitated the discursive coming into being (through this chapter and others like it) of the presence of queer theory in Ireland and the specific context within which queer theory has developed here, out of and alongside lesbian studies and feminism.

Notes I am grateful to Nicole Murray, Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke for their astute suggestions on earlier drafts. 1. John P. Elia, Karen E. Lovaas and Gust A. Yep, ‘Reflections on Queer Theory: Disparate Points of View’, Journal of Homosexuality, XLV: 2/3/4 (2003): 335. 2. Tom Inglis, ‘Origins and Legacies of Irish Prudery: Sexuality and Social Control in Modern Ireland’, Éire-Ireland, XL: 3/4 (2005): 10. 3. For the purposes of this chapter I will mention just a small sample of the activities I have been involved in either as an organizer or a participant: ‘Queer Men: Historicising Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800’ (2001), organized by Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke; ‘Lesbian Lives, Studies and Activism since The Lesbian Postmodern’ (2004), organized by Noreen Giffney and Katherine O’Donnell; ‘The Closet in Lesbian Lives, Studies and Activism’ (2005), organized by Linda Greene, Mary McAuliffe and Sonja Tiernan; ‘Gender, Sexuality and Irish Studies’ (2002), ‘Queer Keywords’ (2005), ‘Queering History’ (2006), organized by Michael O’Rourke; ‘Historicising the Lesbian’ (2006), organized by Mary McAuliffe; ‘Queer Studies: Where Have We Been? Where Are We Going?’ (2002), ‘Queer Studies: Pros, Cons and “Futural Imaginings”’ (2003), ‘Reading Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: a Retrospective, 1980–2005’ (2005), ‘Queer-Straight: an Oxymoron?’ (2006), organized by Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke; ‘Freaks of Nature? Queering the (Non-) Human’ (2003), ‘Are We Post-Queer Yet?’ (2005), ‘Gender, Sexuality and Horror Cinema’ (2006), organized by Noreen Giffney; ‘Lesbian Studies and Medieval Studies: at the Intersections’ (2006), organized by Noreen Giffney and Diane Watt. 4. For example, Judith Butler, Clare Hemmings, Laura Doan, Antke Engel, Garrett P.J. Epp, Lillian Faderman, Judith Halberstam, Myra J. Hird, Morgan Holmes, Sally R. Munt, Joan Nestle (by video-link), Luciana Parisi, Sasha Roseneil, Eve

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5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture Kosofsky Sedgwick, Nikki Sullivan, Calvin Thomas, Valerie Traub, Del LaGrace Volcano, Jeffrey Weeks and Bonnie Zimmerman, to name but a few. Noreen Giffney, ‘Quare Éire’, Journal of Lesbian Studies, XI: 3/4 (2007): 291–305. This is but one genealogy among many. Quare Joyce, ed. Joseph Valente (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998). LGBTIQQA is an acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, questioning, affiliated. Judith Halberstam, ‘Queer Studies’, in A Companion to Gender Studies, eds Philomena Essed, David Theo Goldberg and Audrey Kobayashi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 69. Noreen Giffney, Queer Theory: Key Concepts (Oxford: Berg, forthcoming). Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1978). E. Patrick Johnson, ‘“Quare Studies”, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother’, Text and Performance, XXI: 1 (2001): 9. Noreen Giffney and Katherine O’Donnell, ‘Twenty-First Century Lesbian Studies’, in Twenty-First Century Lesbian Studies, eds Giffney and O’Donnell (Binghampton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 2007), pp. 1–18. Gloria Anzaldúa, ‘La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness’, in Borderlands/La Frontera: the New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1991), p. 79. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), p. 13. Ellis Hanson, ‘Lesbians Who Bite’, in Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, ed. Ellis Hanson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 183–222. Susan Fraiman, ‘Queer Theory and the Second Sex’, in Cool Men and the Second Sex (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 122–55. Sheila Jeffreys, Unpacking Queer Politics: a Lesbian Feminist Perspective (London: Polity Press, 2003). Elizabeth Weed, ‘Introduction’, in Feminism Meets Queer Theory, eds Elizabeth Weed and Naomi Schor (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. vii. Donald E. Hall, Queer Theories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 5. Laura Doan, ‘Lesbian Studies after The Lesbian Postmodern: Toward a New Genealogy’, in Twenty-first Century Lesbian Studies, pp. 19–35. Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Against Eclecticism’, differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, XVI: 3 (2005): 116. Katherine O’Donnell, closing address, ‘Historicising the Lesbian’ (2006). Judith Halberstam, ‘Queering Lesbian Studies’, in The New Lesbian Studies: Into the Twenty-first Century, eds Bonnie Zimmerman and Toni A.H. McNaron (New York: The Feminist Press, 1996), p. 259. Johnson, ‘Quare’, p. 19. Kath Weston, ‘Theory, Theory, Who’s Got the Theory? Or, Why I’m Tired of that Tired Debate’, GLQ: a Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, II (1995): 347–9. David M. Halperin, ‘The Normalization of Queer Theory’, Journal of Homosexuality, XLV: 2/3/4 (2003): 339. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: on the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 228.

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28. William Haver, ‘Queer Research; Or, How to Practise Invention to the Brink of Intelligibility’, in Eight Technologies of Otherness, ed. Sue Golding (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 284. 29. Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Introduction’, differences: a Journal of Feminist and Cultural Studies, III: 2 (1991): iii–xviii. 30. Haver, ‘Queer Research’, p. 284. 31. Clare Hemmings and Felicity Grace, ‘Stretching Queer Boundaries: an Introduction’, Sexualities, II: 4 (1999): 394. 32. Judith Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, in inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 13–14. 33. Johnson, ‘Quare’, p. 20. 34. Johnson, ‘Quare’ p. 20. 35. Butler, ‘Imitation’, p. 13. 36. Johnson, ‘Quare’, p. 13. 37. Halperin, ‘Normalization’, p. 339. 38. Butler, Bodies, p. 228.

16 Camping up the Emerald Aisle: ‘Queerness’ in Irish Popular Culture Anne Mulhall

Scavenging the aesthetic undergrowth in search of recuperable tools for critical analysis and cultural practice seems to be something of a trend in some recent Irish cultural criticism. The critical utility of kitsch and camp has been particularly in evidence in the recent work of David Lloyd, Colin Graham and Richard Kirkland, where the introduction of kitsch and, in Kirkland’s case, camp brings all three studies to their climactic moments.1 Important and mutually contestatory, what these works share in spite of their disagreements is an elision of what many would reflexively associate with both kitsch and camp: queer. The interlocked genealogies of kitsch and camp reveal the fraught and contradictory interstitial spaces of colonial and postcolonial cultural constitution and practice. One space in which such contradictions come into view is in the Olympia Theatre in Dublin, where the Alternative Miss Ireland (AMI) is held annually, aptly enough during the rebranded ‘St Patrick’s Festival’. The event, fondly nicknamed ‘Gay Christmas’, is what Fredric Jameson would doubtless condemn as ‘postmodern pastiche’.2 It is a good example, in its motley parody of other popular culture events, of the way in which camp derives from the turning of normative gendered standards against themselves, referencing both indigenous and international public competitive displays of the pantheon of feminine virtue, combining the adopted structures of the conventional beauty pageant, queer appropriations and parodies of these, and the uniquely Irish kitsch of the Rose of Tralee and ‘Homemaker of the Year’.3 These kitsch events are rendered as camp within the overarching structure of the AMI, whose inspiration is the Alternative Miss World (AMW), organized by the artist Andrew Logan and held irregularly in London. The form is imported from an Anglo-American tradition of drag performance and queer subcultural production, although the notion of importation, with its connotations 210

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of the foreign, cloaks the historical and affective implication of Irish queerness in what is called the Anglo-American model. Neither, however, is the form of the AMW unaltered in the transposition from London to Dublin. The performance art and high fashion values of the AMW are themselves transformed in the comparatively déclassé AMI, which gives stage space to performers of widely varying professionalism and talent, all held together with a lick and a promise. Taken all together, the contestants vying for the title of Queen-Cailín are ‘queer’ in the broad sense of encompassing the spectrum of gender and sexual identifications, both Western and nonWestern, thereby implicitly and explicitly calling into question any belief in a fixed and universal codification of gender and sexuality. The effect of the AMI’s camp queerness, the enthusiastic display of the comic and tragic effects of disjunctions between real bodies and affective lives and the gendered norms so assiduously instituted in the forms it parodically mimics, is captured in Jonathan Dollimore’s description of camp as an invasive technique that ‘undermines the categories that exclude it’ by hollowing out ‘the depth model of identity from the inside [. . .] making depth recede into its surfaces’.4 This effect is amplified by the space in which the AMI takes place: one of its previous lives was as Dan Lowrey’s ‘The Star of Erin’, a music-hall theatre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The interior of the Olympia retains the traces of its kitsch past; its gilt edges chipped and tarnished, the formerly plush velveteen seating camply fraying at the edges – bourgeois colonial kitsch, invaded by those queer bodies formerly abjected by and within that same space, mutates from kitsch to camp. The Olympia’s music-hall history resonates with the AMI: popular cultural entertainments that bear some structural resemblances, as popular culture practices imported to varying degrees from foreign cultural contexts, both the music-hall and the AMI are hybrid forms, problematically situated in relation to the colonial and the transnational and, for some readings, both complicit in the operations of cultural imperialism. Music-hall was a species of burlesque variety entertainment, where the stage was shared by dancers, singers, cross-dressing ‘travesties’, minstrels in blackface, comics, stage Irishmen (and women), acrobats, jugglers, magicians. As Cheryl Herr has described, the form attests to the ‘porousness’ of colonial culture, and to its structural disjunctions; productions originally intended for a mainly working-class English audience were imported for a less clearly-defined urban Irish audience. A crucial aspect of the musichall was the repetitiousness of its acts; as Herr notes, gender and racial drag was a key element in the entertainments, and entertainers crossdressing as women, as Irish and as black in the minstrel shows had the

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effect of parodying not the norms by which gender and race were constituted within imperialism, but rather of parodying infractions against those norms.5 The travesty, the stage Irishman, and the blackface minstrel show (analysed in Chapter 3 of this volume by Suzanna Chan) were misogynistic and racist performances, and their effect was to police the invented categories and hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality in popular representation. As both Herr and Marjorie Garber argue, such crossdressing signals a sharpening cultural anxiety about the containment of gender, sexuality and race within increasingly policed precincts.6 The nineteenth century was, after all, the century that saw the imperialist development of the biological sciences and the concomitant fixing of biological and physiological signs of racial and gendered deviance and difference. It was the era of the pathologization of non-reproductive and extra-familial sexuality, and the construction of the ‘invert’ as a specific category whose sexuality constituted the ‘truth’ of his/her identity; the historical moment in the shared colonial history of Britain and Ireland when the ‘sodomite’ transformed into the medicalized ‘homosexual’, and, significantly, the historical juncture that saw the prosecution of Oscar Wilde, whose body became the ground through which the contradictory meanings of the effeminate in the colonial context – on the one hand, a mark of an aesthetic, aristocratic effeteness, and on the other a sign of the racial inferiority of the colonized, as feminized, immature and unfit for self-government – came to converge, transforming the gendered terms of the effeminate to a scientific classification of specifically sexual deviance, a pathological and criminal symptom of the homosexual.7 This complex history is embodied and recycled, then, in the ‘Gay Christmas’ that is the AMI. That is, the camp recycling and emptying out onto the surface of the kitsch bourgeois, colonial past is not merely a metaphor for something else; it is a return of the histories and abjections played out in past popular cultural forms, but with their oppressive, normative content evacuated to the surface of the event in the parodic mimicry that the AMI performs. Surface becomes the display of depth, the playing out of the logic of claims to authentic identity. Neither does this display solely cite the forms and norms of a past colonized culture; it also, more obviously, empties out the cultural logic of the recent Irish postcolonial past, and intersects problematically with the neoliberal Irish present, while affirming a queer history and collectivity that does not map cleanly onto the lineaments of the nation. The markings of the stillrecent, pre-Celtic Tiger past are clear in the structures of the event – the Rose of Tralee, the Homemaker of the Year, talismans of an eclipsed era peopled by nice, wholesome girls and devoted wives and mothers, the

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one self-effacing, anodynely pleasant, willing to expose their dubious talents to the evaluation of the wider community for the greater good of the crack, the other shaming less homemaking women into acute awareness of their lack of the feminine skills of baking, sewing and breeding. But such traditional versions of aspirational femininity have, it seems, been elbowed out of the picture by the colonization of Irish woman by postmodern notions of progress and cosmopolitanism, dubiously liberated from enforced niceness, compulsory nurturance, and the performance of jigs and reels at the behest of an audience of proxy aunts and uncles (‘Go on Mary, do a dance for your Uncle Gaybo. Go on now!’). The parody of such gender proscriptions in the queer camp of the AMI shows in one of its aspects the ways in which the oppressions endured by women and by queers (and, for queer women, the doubled effect of these oppressions) are interconnected. The interconnections of the two in the cultural logic of Ireland, past and present, are also clear in the ways in which feminism and queer activism and scholarship and the unquestionably improved lot of most Irish women and Irish queers since the days of De Valera can be read in the light of much recent Irish cultural criticism, as in fact politically, socially and culturally dubious, as both draw on the tainted Western Enlightenment discourse of rights, which has at its core the fundamental contradiction of rights asserted for some at the expense of the rights of others. The discourse of rights, and the modernization theory that is involved with this model of emancipation, imagines global history along a homogenizing axis of progressive, teleological movement from atavistic tradition to enlightened modernity, from cultural barbarism to cosmopolitan sophistication, from no rights to full rights. In investing in such a model, in adopting and adapting movements from the imperializing West, particularly AngloAmerican models of the Women’s Movement and Gay Liberation, and, in the academic occupational subculture, in making use of the non-national languages of psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, feminist and queer theory, Irish feminist and queer scholarship and activism can seem to be implicated in the critique of imperializing, modernizing discourses in some Irish critical texts, although the direct imputation is often averted in favour of the unspecified category of ‘Theory’.8 These issues connect to debates within feminist and queer scholarship and activism, in which the hegemony of a standpoint that is white and Western, and in the case of queer, male, has been called into question for its racial and geopolitical biases in particular. In recent work on queer diaspora and queer identity formations in non-Western cultures, the Western liberatory model has been called to account; for instance, Martin

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Manalansan has critiqued this ‘post-Stonewall’ model for its tendency to inscribe the relationship between the Western and the non-Western queer subject as one of adult to child, maturity to immaturity, developed to developing. Full queer maturity is, for the liberatory model, achieved by adopting Anglo-American, post-Stonewall understandings of sexual identity.9 Manalansan’s work on queer Filipino diaspora in the USA is salutary for queer collectivities in Ireland, particularly in Dublin, which has a considerable queer Filipino and South East Asian diaspora community. The AMI is one space where these queer diaspora make themselves spectacularly visible. The AMI is also a space that accommodates conflicting Western and non-Western models of gender, sexual and identification, potentially creating, to borrow Manalansan’s words, ‘a vital liminal site in which the conjunctions of identities, cultures, histories and geographies are played out and performed’.10 That the ‘Medusa Crown of Shamrocks’ has never gone to an Alternative Miss Philippines might suggest, in light of Manalansan’s analysis, the valorization of the post-Stonewall Anglo-American model of parodic drag performance; however, it is at the same time important to emphasize that queer culture in Ireland has great potential as a space of cross-class, crossethnic contact in a broader social atmosphere of acute anxiety about such intersections. This potential is particularly important in the context of the current political hijacking of queer emancipation to bolster and rationalize the inequities of the neo-liberal racist state. As Michael G. Cronin observes, lesbians and, in particular, gay men, have become the totems of a New Ireland that is anxious to present itself as modern, tolerant, cosmopolitan. Decriminalization and the positive political noises being made about civil partnership are the legislative signifiers of a prosperous nation liberated from its past.11 The current focus of queer activism on domestic partnership and adoption rights is conveniently assimilable to the needs of neo-liberal Ireland; at a time when the future of the white heterosexual Irish family is in jeopardy, the future may yet be saved by the queer white Irish family. The ironies of this development are clear; the queer, the abjected product of the surveillance cell of the family and until recently criminalized or invisibilized in law, becomes the means to declare a newfound liberal state-sanctioned tolerance, and simultaneously reinscribes the family as the central unit of society. This can be understood within broader imagined threats to white Western futurity.12 White women, we are reminded with numbing frequency by the media, particularly middleclass career women, are not reproducing like they used to. The circumstances are either tragic – the woman, wrong-headedly pursuing her ambitions, ‘left it too late’ – or, much worse, selfish and narcissistic – some

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women, it seems, are ambivalent about the changes in lifestyle that motherhood, still entirely lacking any meaningful state support, entails. The intention is to shame such women into a recollection of their rightful, natural role – to reproduce the future of the nation and of the white Western world. This shaming, aimed specifically at middle-class white women, has racist, as well as class, implications; at the same time as we are told that ‘we’ are facing a crisis in the near future as ‘we’ will lack sufficient bodies to create the revenue for ‘our’ pensions, non-national, non-white, pregnant women have been constitutionally barred from citizenship. The bodies that could ameliorate fears of future fiscal collapse (to adopt this brutal utilitarian rhetoric) are thus clearly white, indigenous bodies; the fear for the future is not fiscally rooted at all, but is rather the fear of cultural engulfment by a racial other. Debates in Italy and Australia, for instance, about paying women citizens to have more children are further evidence of the anxiety to cordon off a white Western future.13 In this context, the Irish queer family is a potential site of cultural salvation. The Irish queer in this political usage is tradition and modernity rolled into one; totem of a tolerant and modernized state, and domesticated unit ensuring the continuity of white Irishness and the containment of irresponsible rogue elements. The imbrication of queer liberation with fears of migrant bodies is made inescapably visible in, for instance, the Dutch immigration exam, where immigrants are shown pictures of queer couples kissing in order to test their suitability for entrance into the West.14 The ‘new homonormativity’ as Lisa Duggan describes it is a powerful weapon in the armament of the neo-liberal state.15 The new homonormativity reinforces the old heteronormativity, and is made a means of rationalizing and papering over the logic of the racist state. Assimilated into the charmed circle16 of state-sanctioned respectability, the new homonormativity affirms the abjection of non-normative bodies and lives, particularly those that fall outside of traditional gendered roles and the structures of the white family cell. I am certainly not suggesting that queers are somehow unentitled to agitate for the rights that heterosexual citizens take for granted as their ‘natural’ dues. What I am suggesting, rather, is the possibility that a neoliberal agenda is not, ultimately, so much concerned with the livability of queer lives as with the maintenance, in line with other Western European states, of a white Irish futurity. There is a faultline between political appropriations of the queer in the service of normativity and cultural continuity on the one hand, and the position of the queer in Irish cultural criticism. Made the bearer of modernity, the queer is ambivalently positioned in a discourse that seeks above

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all to recuperate the local, something like authenticity if not quite tradition, the non-modern, the past in the present, as a counter to imperializing modernity. Women and queers, the most obvious beneficiaries of a rightsbased discourse in the Irish context, are by dint of this association verging on complicity with modernity and its progressivist model of development in neo-Marxist and postcolonial analyses of the contemporary Irish condition. Having internalized the contagion of the foreign, they become its vectors, abetting its going global. Stereotypes of the postmodern queer as the ideal consumer-citizen intersect with more traditional perceptions of the foreignness of the gay man in particular, his associations with an abjected effeminacy and with colonial processes of identity formation, and it is perhaps these associations that prove to be a sticking point in the elision of the queer from most mainstream Irish cultural criticism. As Kathryn Conrad compellingly notes, a common strategy of Irish commentators when faced with the misogyny and homophobia that are demonstrably an aspect of nationalism is to explain gender and sexual oppression as colonial residues. The gay man, and the cultural and political associations he is made to bear, prove particularly problematic in this psychosocial arrangement. Effeminacy is invoked, via Ashis Nandy’s psychosocial model of postcolonial ‘hypermasculinity’, as the emasculating effect of colonial subjection on the colonial male in particular. Robbed of agency, made the passive object of colonial surveillance and dehumanization, categorized as ‘feminine’, irrational, barbaric and unfit for selfgovernment, the male subject and the nation-state after colonialism repeat the cycle of abuse. Disavowing his current or former abject state, the postcolonized man must assert his masculinity with increased force, and hence the punitive legal and social sanctions against homosexuality and the rigid curtailment of women’s freedoms in the postcolonial nation-state.17 However, if the violent abjection of the homosexual from the clean and proper body of the nation is an effect of colonial oppression, the imposed patterns of Victorian gender ideology and legally enforced heterosexuality, then it is also true to say that the homosexual is likewise a product of colonial ideologies of gender and sexuality. As Diane Fuss remarks this may be the implication of Frantz Fanon’s claim in Black Skins, White Masks that homosexuality is a Western malaise; as the Oedipal structure is specifically Western, so homosexuality is a Western psychological aberration of the white colonizer that does not occur, he maintains, in ‘precolonial’ nonWestern cultures.18 In any case, the implications of the ascription of the inequities of heteronormative regimes to colonialism clearly puts the homosexual, the embodied product of such colonial regimes, in a problematic position in the Irish context. This position is further problematized

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by our scant knowledge of male – or female – same-sex relations in an Irish historical context, and the inextricability of that scant knowledge from colonization and its effects, so that the early modern ‘sodomite’ or the modern ‘homosexual’ becomes either the racialized representative of an inherent Irish moral disorder and barbarity (as in the Earl of Castlehaven’s trial for rape and sodomy in 1631), the carrier of a colonizing English corruption and degeneracy (as in the case of George Stone and George Sackville in 1754, or the Dublin Castle Scandal in 1884), or, in the cases of Oscar Wilde or Roger Casement, recuperable for Irishness through fudging or disavowing the foreign taint of the homosexual.19 The ambivalent positioning of the queer continues into our neo-liberal, late capitalist present. Cronin argues that in this cultural economy, the ‘dominant structure is not compulsory heterosexuality but compulsory consumerism’; in this restructuring, queers in general, but gay men in particular are represented as exemplars of the New Ireland, the ideal consumer-citizens. The gay man becomes the sign that we have been delivered into full, prosperous, tolerant modernity. Cronin elaborates the double-bind: gay men, ‘[a]s a “minority” bearing an “identity” . . . can simultaneously be deployed as signifiers of Irish pluralism and diversity – as guarantors of equality in the face of the gross inequality which the dynamics of globalisation, of which they are signifiers, is actually producing’.20 Implicated as an exemplary first-world Western subject in the global effects of Western ideas of progress and enlightenment and the immiseration of non-Western peoples, the Irish queer moves from colonial residue to mobile, privileged queer consumer. Absent from ‘tradition’, and bearer of ‘modernity’, the Irish queer embodies both the colonial residue and the new positioning of Ireland as an engine of global imperialist capitalism. While recognizing the importance of Cronin’s analysis, it might be useful to see what kind of ‘archive of the surface’ unfolds if we recognize that there has never, in ‘modernity’, been a clean break between, to tamper with the phrase, ‘compulsory heteronormativity’ (or perhaps, to risk a new coinage, ‘compulsory enfamulation’) and ‘compulsory consumption’.21 The two quite literally feed each other, elements of the same system that perpetuates itself through the circuits of production, reproduction and consumption. A genealogy of sorts can be traced between contemporary representations of the gay man as narcissistic consumer-citizen and the historical associations between gender, class, effeminacy and the sodomite in the English and colonial context. Clothing is one site for the articulation of the intersections of gender, social and racial hierarchy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. English sumptuary laws sought to legislate

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for a semiotic of rank by setting out in great detail what type, quantity and colour of fabric could be worn by what rank of person. In ‘The Semiotics of Masculinity’, David Kuchta describes how, by dint of law, the courtier was duty-bound to display conspicuous consumption; the wearing of sumptuous clothing was the mark of his rank, a means of making visible and thus maintaining the structure of the social order. To dress ‘out of place’, on the other hand, was to draw the charge of ‘effeminacy’; the crossrank dresser risks becoming like a woman. The invocation of effeminacy had the purpose of policing both the hierarchies of social rank and the gender hierarchy; the two are interconnected. The social utility of this usage of effeminacy does not, then, have the policing of sexual behaviours as its aim, although the charge does carry imputations of moral and sexual disorder: but these are aimed, in this particular deployment of effeminacy, at transgressions against a social order that was constitutionally misogynistic and anxiously on guard against the socio-economic changes being wrought by incipient capitalism.22 By the eighteenth century, the meanings of ‘effeminacy’ have changed; the ‘effeminate man’ in the later period becomes the sign of a degenerate aristocracy rather than a social arriviste: the effete fop, an aristocratic figure, signals in his emasculation the death of the order of things. In his charting of the changing historical meanings of effeminacy, Alan Sinfield defers to Eve Sedgwick’s analysis of ‘ “the feminization of the aristocracy as a whole”, whereby “the abstract image of the entire class, came to be seen as ethereal, decorative, and otiose in relation to the vigorous and productive values of the middle class” ’.23 Historians of sexuality have remarked on the early eighteenth century as simultaneously a time when a change in the constitution of male samesex desire becomes apparent in the English context. This change is evident in the emergence of a distinct subculture, defined urban spaces where ‘mollies’ would meet to socialize, drink, and for sex. Court records and popular accounts give a phobic description of a subculture located in the London ‘underworld’, where men, ‘mollies’, devolve their own subcultural semiotic system, adopting and adapting the codes of ‘effeminacy’ to their own distinctive subculture, taking on feminine dress, voice, gestures, clothing and calling each other by female nicknames.24 These reports describe some of the ‘rituals’ performed in the molly houses. The ritual that has most baffled scholars is the mock-birth that the mollies are reported as having enacted. One man would go through his ‘groaning’, finally giving birth, aided by the ‘midwife’, to a wooden doll.25 We might be tempted to read such a scene in terms of a desire for access to or as a parody of the heterosexual family; Steven Shapiro has, however, read the scene otherwise, in terms of class conflict. For Shapiro, the mock-birth is a plebeian

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protest aimed at middle-class undercover observers from the Society for the Reformation of Manners in their midst and is a kind of parody of the representation, exemplified in the writings of the London Spy, Ned Ward, in particular, of the stereotype of the ‘effeminate’ molly. It is also possible that adaptations of ‘effeminacy’ by these men largely from the lower orders may be an appropriation of an aristocratic semiotic, a form of class protest enacted on the surface. Two different but interlocking ‘cultural modes’ of effeminacy can then be traced through the eighteenth century: the effeminacy of an effete and waning aristocracy, and the effeminate semiotics of the mollies, parallel ‘types’ that work to crystallize the associations between ‘effeminacy’ and the ‘sodomite’.26 Both of these modes are recalled in a queer camp performance, ‘The Dinner Party’, staged in 2002 at the now-defunct Club Outrageous that ran in Galway from 2001–04. The unhistoricist leap, from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, from London to Galway, is not intended to assert any transhistorical queer or gay male subject, but rather to suggest again some ways in which contemporary queer camp performance might encode or deploy a history that is other to, perhaps running against the grain of, and most certainly occluded in much Irish cultural criticism. Visually, particularly in terms of the costumes and powdered wigs worn by the performers, ‘The Dinner Party’ intentionally recalls the Georgian era. The scene opens with a servant setting out the table for his masters, retrieving their dinner from the camp, white fur, pink-heart bedecked commode he has just been using. Abjection is, then, the point of origin for the performance (although the retrieved waste is, in reality, cold spaghetti). The guests arrive, and take their positions at the table; the scene becomes increasingly degenerate as the guests feed each other and, indeed, the audience. The performance reaches a climax when one of the female guests, apparently heavily pregnant, begins to feel birth pangs; the others help her onto the table and gather around as she delivers not a wooden but a plastic doll, ably abetted by the servant-turned-midwife, who proudly presents the newborn to a by turns delighted, amused and alarmed audience. At the same time as asserting distance, the performance reinscribes the ‘originary scene’ of the eighteenth-century association between the aristocrat and effeminacy, and the adaptation of the semiotics of aristocratic effeminacy in the molly house subculture, ‘archiving’ on the surface one historical genealogy for the Irish queer – a genealogy that sits uncomfortably with the colonial history of which it is an aspect, given the geographical location of the performance, in Galway, gateway to the Romantic West. The ‘mock-birth’ is here performed by a woman, who takes the place of the ‘molly’, and rather than reinserting the woman as the

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grounds of the circuits of socio-economic and symbolic production and reproduction, instead asserts, in this queer space, an alignment with the camp reinvestment of the stigma of ‘non-utility’ and ‘nonreproduction’ stereotypically associated with the gay man. Contrary to Sinfield’s observation that it is difficult to imagine ‘ “childbearing” scenes in twentieth-century queer or gay culture’, the motif of child-bearing recurs in the club’s stage shows.27 ‘The Nativity’, staged at Christmas 2003, suggests that this queering of the scene of childbirth is, perhaps, a ‘disidentification’ that carries a particular valence in an Irish context, where constitutional control over reproductive rights have been central to an Irish cultural economy.28 In this scene, the Blessed Virgin Mary is played by a gay man in BVM drag, and the scene is the stable in Bethlehem. The Three Wise Women come bearing gifts, culminating in the gift of a pair of thigh-high boots, which Mary puts on, and, legs akimbo over her shoulders, ‘gives birth’ to Christ, who arises, fully grown but clad in a nappy, from a trapdoor centre-stage. ‘The Nativity’ reinvests the ‘originary scene’ of the birth of the first Christian family with some of its decidedly non-normative connotations: a teenage mother, her partner uninvolved in her impregnation, abjected from human company to give birth among a menagerie in an outhouse. In that proferring of the thighhigh boots and exposure of the site of queer male abjection – the ‘abject arse’ – the performance reinscribes the faultline between the gay man valorized or castigated as model citizen-consumer, and the gay man stigmatized as nonreproductive, lacking in utility-value. Here, in this specifically Irish, postcolonial, postmodern context, the commodity – the gifted boots – reveal, for me, not so much camp as an aesthetic complicit with imperialist postmodernity, but rather an ‘archive of the surface’, a genealogy of the conjunctions between the ‘effeminate’, the commodity, and a stigmatized identity that are problematically returned as a cipher of a history still untold in the Irish context, and as a semiotic marker of personal and collective disidentification from ‘the logic of reproductive futurism’ enshrined in the precincts of the ‘normative’ family cell.29

Notes Much love, and gratitude for the inspiration and friendship of all who were involved in Club Outrageous, and in particular to Gary Guyatt, Gary Laz, Vicki, Lara, Mícheál, Becci, Ludo, Jaime, Oli, Karen and Crystal. Many thanks to Tonie Walsh, Jude Cosgrove, Sheila Normanly, Emma Weafer, and Matt for generously discussing their work and especially to Tonie Walsh for sharing his personal archives and broad knowledge of Dublin queer subcultural production. This generosity has been invaluable for the larger project that this chapter is a part of.

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‘Emerald Aisle’ is taken from Dancing at the Crossroads/Glamour Rooted in Despair: Alternative Miss Ireland 1987–2004, comp. AMI, Niall Sweeney, Trish Brennan, Rory O’Neill, Nigel Truswell and Tom Gleeson (Dublin: Pony Limited, 2004), p. 5. 1. See David Lloyd, Ireland after History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), pp. 89–101; Colin Graham, Deconstructing Ireland: Identity, Theory, Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), pp. 165–72; Richard Kirkland, ‘Three Forms of Camp’, Identity Parades: Northern Irish Culture and Dissident Subjects (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), pp. 125–66. 2. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 1–54. 3. Thanks to Tonie Walsh for his insights into these cultural references. Personal interview, March 2004. 4. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 310. Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity informs Dollimore’s thinking here, as it does this chapter. See in particular Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990). 5. See Cheryl Herr, Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 201–2. 6. Herr, Joyce’s Anatomy, pp. 136–7, 142; Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Crossdressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). 7. See Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: the History of Sexuality, Volume One, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 42–56 and passim. See also Kathryn Conrad, Locked in the Family Cell: Gender, Sexuality and Political Agency in Irish National Discourse (Winconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), pp. 3–26; Steve Garner, Racism in the Irish Experience (London: Pluto Press, 2004), pp. 114–39. On Wilde, effeminacy, and the homosexual, see Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment (London: Cassell, 1994), pp. 118–26. 8. See, for example, Peader Kirby, Luke Gibbons, and Michael Cronin, ‘Introduction: the Reinvention of Ireland: a Critical Perspective’, in Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy, eds Kirby, Gibbons and Cronin (London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2002), pp.14–17; John Paul Waters (ed.), South Atlantic Quarterly, special issue, ‘Ireland and Cultural Studies’, 95:1 (Winter 1996): 3. 9. See Martin Manalansan IV, ‘In the Shadows of Stonewall: Examining Gay Transnational Politics and the Diasporic Dilemma’, in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, eds David Lloyd and Lisa Lowe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 485–505. 10. Martin Manalansan IV, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 133. 11. See Michael G. Cronin, ‘He’s My Country: Liberalism, Nationalism, and Sexuality in Contemporary Irish Gay Fiction’, Éire-Ireland, 39: 3&4 (Autumn/ Winter 2004): 250–67. 12. On ‘the logic of reproductive futurism’, see Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 1–31.

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13. See Gaby Hinsliff and Lorna Martin, ‘How the Baby Shortage Threatens Our Future’, Observer (19 February 2006), http://guardian.co.uk/gender/story/ 0,,1713186,00.html (accessed 31 March 2006). 14. See Gregory Crouch, ‘A Candid Dutch Film May Be Too Scary for Immigrants’, Nijmegen Journal (16 March 2006), http://www.nytimes.com (accessed 31 March 06). 15. See Lisa Duggan, ‘The New Homonormativity: the Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism’, in Materializing Democracy, eds Dana Nelson and Russ Castronova (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 175–94. 16. See Gayle Rubin, ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’ (1984), reprinted in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, eds Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale and David M. Halperin (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 13. 17. See Kathryn Conrad, Locked, pp. 23–5. 18. See Diane Fuss, Identification Papers (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 149–60. 19. See Chris Mounsley, ‘Searching in the Dark: Towards a Historiography of Queer Early Modern and Enlightenment (Anglo) Ireland’, in Queer Masculinities: Siting Same-sex Desire in the Early Modern World, eds Michael O’Rourke and Katherine O’Donnell (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 4–6, 12; Conrad, Locked, pp. 21–33; Éibhear Walshe, ‘The First Gay Irishman? Ireland and the Wilde Trials’, Éire-Ireland 40:3&4 (Fall/Winter 2005): 38–57. 20. Cronin, ‘He’s My Country’: pp. 254–5. 21. The phrase ‘archive of the surface’ is informed in part by Ann Cvetkovich’s elaboration of an ‘archive of trauma’ in respect of lesbian/queer ‘public cultures’. See An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 22. See David Kuchta, ‘The Semiotics of Masculinity in Renaissance England’, in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 233–46. 23. See Alan Sinfield, Wilde, p. 40, quoting Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 93. 24. The literature on the molly houses is extensive. See, for example, Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982), pp. 81–104; Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: the Gay Subculture in England 1700–1830 (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1992), pp. 54–69, 92–105; Stephen Shapiro, ‘Of Mollies: Class and Same-sex Sexualities in the Eighteenth Century’, in In a Queer Place: Sexuality and Belonging in British and European Contexts, eds Kate Chedgzoy, Emma Francis and Murray Pratt (London: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 155–76. Mounsley speculates on the possibility that Stone and Sackville were involved in a similar molly house culture in Dublin, although as he says no evidence of such a subculture in eighteenth-century Dublin has yet come to light. See ‘Searching in the Dark’, p. 13. 25. See Norton, Mother Clap, pp. 97–100. 26. Sinfield, Wilde, p. 41. 27. Sinfield, Wilde, p. 39. 28. On ‘disidentification’ as a performative queer strategy, see José Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

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29. This reading is informed by two queer re-readings of Jameson’s (phobic) reading of Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes, in Postmodernism, pp. 6–11. See Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York and London: New York University Press, 2005), pp. 99–103; and, discussed in Halberstam, Mandy Merck, ‘Figuring Out Andy Warhol’, in Pop Out: Queer Warhol, eds Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley and José Esteban Muñoz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 224–37.

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Index Adair, Johnny, 31–2 Adorno, Theodor, 104, 179, 189–90, 192, 194 advertising, 39–49 Ahern, Bertie, 191–2 aliens, 177–8, 182 see also the other; otherness Allen, Theodore W., 129–30 alterity, 185, 190–1 see also otherness Alternative Miss Ireland, 210–14 amateurism, 39–49 passim America and Ireland Irish-American diaspora, 129–31 Irish-American identity, 128–39 Irish-Americans and modern Ireland, 137–9 in the US media, 3–14 Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), 128, 131, 133, 134–7 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 201 authenticity, 149, 152–4, 186–90 authorship, 74, 76–7 Bank of Ireland, see under corporate sponsorship Barthes, Roland, 74 beauty pageants, 210–14 Bell, Desmond, 32 Bennett, Larry, 192 Between War and Peace (Bew, Patterson and Teague), 175 Bew, Paul, 174, 175 Bhabha, Homi K., 185, 187, 190, 194–5 blackface, 29–31 see also minstrelsy blackness and Irish identity, xviii, 24–5, 32 and masculinity, 26–36, 192–3 and pop music, 192–3 stereotypes of, 33–5 see also minstrelsy body anxiety, 5–9

Bono, xviii, 16 borders, see boundaries boundaries, xiv–xv, 5–9, 10, 111–12, 158–9 see also cyberspace; framing; immigration; liminality Bowen, Elizabeth, 102, 105–6 boy bands, 184–95 boyhood, 186 Boyzone, 184–95 passim brotherhood, 186 Bryan, Dominic, 29 Burke Brogan, Patricia, 55, 68 Butler, Judith, 163, 206–7 Byrne, Nicky, 191 Cameron, James, 115, 117–21 camp, 210–13, 219–20 Casey, Natasha, 149 castration anxiety, 6–9 Catholic Church, 42, 55–70, 131–4 Catholicism and sexuality, 61–2, 66–8, 69 in the USA, 129, 131–4 celebrity tourism, 141–4 celibacy, 67, 68 Celtic Tiger Ireland, 137–9, 141–2, 157, 158–9, 166, 184, 194 Certau, Michel de, 109 circulation, 107–9 citizenship, 17 in fandom, 76, 81 legislation, 35, 47–8, 192, 194 city, the, 100–2, 108–12 Civil Rights Movement, 132, 134, 135 class, 117–20 Clear, Catriona, 56, 57 clothing cross-dressing, 189, 210–12 and effeminacy, 217–18 fancy dress, 27–30 colonialism, xvii–xviii, 69–70 and effeminacy, 216–18 225

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colonialism – continued postcolonialism, 56, 194–5, 198 and sexuality, 211–13, 216–18 and surveillance, 89 comedy, stand-up, 162–6 Commitments, The (Doyle), 32, 193–4 commodification of masculinity, 157–8 of the Northern Ireland conflict, 85, 91, 97 community and Irishness, 45–7 and tradition, 173–4 and traditional music, 116, 117–21, 122–3 Connolly, Claire, xiii–xiv Conrad, Kathryn, 216 convents, 55–70 corporate sponsorship, 39–41, 43–9 Bank of Ireland, 39, 44, 45–6, 48 Guinness, 39, 44, 46–7, 48 Vodafone, 39, 41, 44, 48 cross-dressing, see under clothing cultural identity (in Northern Ireland), 171–82 cyberspace, 75–81, 111 cyborg culture, 77–8 dance music, 180–1 Dandelions (Looney), 165 Darke, Colin, 28 de Lauretis, Teresa, 205 Derrida, Jacques, 110, 176, 177, 181–2 Dery, Frank, 78 Desmond, Jane, 141 destination weddings, 146–54 Devil’s Own, 121, 123, 124, 180 Diderot, Denis, 60–1, 67, 69 Dinkins, David (former Mayor of New York), 133, 134, 135 ‘The Dinner Party’, 219–20 Doan, Laura, 202 Dollimore, Jonathan, 211 Downing Street Declaration, 173–4 Doyle, Roddy, 15–25, 32, 193–4 drag, 194, 210–12 Duggan, Lisa, 215 Durbinsky, Karen, 151

Eclipsed (Burke Brogan), 68 effeminacy, 212, 216–20 and colonialism, 216–18 history of, 218–20 eroticism in cyberspace, 78–80, and Gothic, 60–2 and boy bands, 185–6 ethnicity Irish-American, 9–14, 128–39 and masculinity, 3–14, 26–36 and music, 115–26 and race, 32–3 and weddings, 144–54 see also race family values and boy bands, 185–6, 188, 191 and homosexuality, 214–15 and Irishness, 141, 143–4, 146, 150 see also motherhood fan fiction (fanfic), 74–81 fancy dress, 27–30 fans, 74–81, 188–9 Fanon, Frantz, 31, 216 Farrell, Colin, 157, 158–61, 166 father, the, 159–61, 165–6 Feehilly, Mark, 191 Feldman, Allen, 86, 88 femininity, 40–1, 157–9, 161–6, 212–13 feminism and convent life, 55–6, 63–4, 68, 69–70 and queerness, 197–204 passim, 213 feminization of mass culture, 188–9 fiction fanfic, 74–81 novels, 60–6, 193–4 science fiction, 76–9, 177–8, 187 short stories, 15–25, film Hollywood, 115–26, 144–6 Irish film, 58–9, 62, 66–9, 108 and Irishness, 121–6, 144–6, 157–62, 163, 166 music in, 115–126 and religious institutions, 58–9, 62, 66–9

Index Fiske, John, 74 football and national identity, 21, 29 Foucault, Michel, 200 Foy, Marie, 92–3 framing, 85–97, 162, 164, 165 see also boundaries; stereotypes Freud, Sigmund, 104, 110 Frith, Simon, 193 Gaelic Athletic Association, 39–49 see also corporate sponsorship Gangs of New York, 129 Garber, Marjorie, 189,194, 212 Garner, Steve, xviii, 20 gayness, 128–9, 132–9, 190–1, 197–207 passim, 210–20 see also homosexuality; queerness gender, 78–80, 210–20 see also gayness; homosexuality; femininity; lesbianism; masculinity; queerness; sexuality ghost stories, 178–80 Gibbons, Luke, 59 global capitalism, xiii, 10–11, 39, 40, 180–1, 217 Good Friday Agreement, 171, 174 Gothic, 59–63, 66–70, 178 graffiti, 92–5 Graham, Brian, 32 Graham, Colin, 186–7, 210 Greavu, Sara, 26, 28–9, 35 Gubar, Susan, 34 Guinness, see under corporate sponsorship Halberstam, Judith, 203 Hall, Donald E., 201 Halperin, David, 206 Haraway, Donna, 77–8 Haver, William, 205 heart-throb, the, 192–3 Herr, Cheryl, 211–12 Hollywood, 115–26, 157–66 Holmes, David, 160–1 homophobia, 128–39, 216 homosexuality and colonialism, 216–18

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in eighteenth-century England, 218–20 and Irishness, 128–9, 132, 133–9 and modern Ireland, 214–17, 219–20 see also gender; queerness Howe, Stephen, 31 identity and culture, 171–82 Irish-American, 128–39 and sexuality, 199–200, 205–7 and work, 11–12 Ilouz, Eva, 148–9 immigration in fiction, 18–25 in the Irish media, 15–18 and queerness, 215 to the USA, 10–14, 129, 131 industrial schools, 55–8 Inglis, Tom, 197–8 inhuman, the, 100–12 Intermission, 161, 163 internet, 74–81 Invention of the White Race, The (Allen), 129–30 Ireland fantasies of, 141–54 and heritage, 142, 152, 153 as a refuge, 142, 143–44 and tourism, 141–54 and the USA, see America and Ireland as a wedding destination, 141–2, 146–54 Irigaray, Luce, 194 Irish cultural revival, 41, 64, 186 Irish fanfic writers, 76, 78, 79–81 Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization (ILGO), 128–9, 132–9 Irishness accessorization of, 146–50 and American identity, 3–4, 142, 150–4 and ancestry, 47–9 and authenticity, 149, 152–4, 186 and blackness, xviii, 24–5, 32 and Catholicism, 59 and the Celtic Tiger, 158–9, 160–1, 166

228

Index

Irishness – continued and community, 45–7 in cyberspace, 76, 78–81 and death, 9, 13 and drunkenness, 12, 137 and family values, 141, 143–4, 146, 150 and femininity, 157–8, 161–6 and the GAA, 39–49 and Hollywood, 144–6, 157–66 and homophobia, 128–39 and homosexuality, 128–9, 132, 133–9 and liminality, 9 and masculinity, 13, 39–49 measures of, 21–2 and music, 115–26, 184–95 and self-destruction, 12–13 and sexuality, 57 and slavery, 129–30 and the USA, xv–xvi, 4–14, 128–39 Jameson, Fredric, xiii, xviii, 210 Jarman, Neil, 29, 85–6, 88–9 jazz, 34–5 Jenkins, Henry, 74, 79 Johnson, E. Patrick, 201, 204, 206 Joint Declaration of Peace, see Downing Street Declaration Joyce, James, 102, 106, 173 Keating, Ronan, 187, 189 Kelly, Aaron, 91–2, 95–6 Kiberd, Declan, 102 Kirkland, Richard, 175, 210 kitsch, 210–12 Kuchta, David, 218 Land of Spices, The (O’Brien), 55, 62–6, 68 landscape, aesthetics of, 100–12 Larkin, Jim, 107, 109 Laws of Attraction, 144–6 Lentin, Ronit, 17 see also homosexuality; queerness Lesbian Lives, 199, 202, 203 lesbian studies, 197–207 passim lesbianism, 60–1, 63–4, 128–9, 132–9 Lewis, Matthew, 60, 61

LGBTQ, 198–202 passim Lijphart, Arend, 174 liminality, 9, 151, 166, 185, 214 see also boundaries Lloyd, David, 56, 210 localism, in Irish sport, 45–8 Loftus, Belinda, 87 Longley, Edna, 175 Looney, Fiona, 165 Lott, Eric, 30 loyalism, 26–36 Luas, 100–12 see also speed Lyotard, Jean-François, xiii, 104–5 MacNeice, Louis, 102–5 Magdalene laundries, 55, 56–7, 58–9, 62, 66–9 Magdalene Sisters, The, 55, 58, 62, 66–9 Magray, Mary, 56–8 Maguire, Anne, 132, 133, 134 Manalansan, Martin, 213–14 marching bands, 27–8, 30–1, 32–3 Martin, James H., 44–5 masculinity and authenticity, 187–8 and blackness, 26–36, 192–3 and the body, 5–9, 31–2, 40–1, 194 crisis of, 4–14, 39–41 and ethnicity, 3–14, 26–36 and fanfic, 79–80 and femininity, 40–1 and the GAA, 39–49 and global capitalism, 10–11 and Hollywood, 157–61, 165–6 Irish-American, 3–14 and loyalism, 26–36 and marching bands, 27–31 and militarism, 5–6, 30–1 in music, 187–9 and self-sacrifice, 9, 40 and women, 8–9 McAleese, Mary, 185 McCurtain, Margaret, 56 McDonald, Mary G., 142, 151 McFadden, Brian, 187, 189, 190–1 McGonagle, Declan, 87 McKibben, Bill, 101

Index McTeague, Tommy, 26 McTigue, Eoghan, 91 McVeigh, Robbie, 26 Metro Eireann, 15–25 metrosexuality, 157, 166, 167n Mighall, Robert, 59, 67 militarism, 3–4, 5–6, 30–1 minstrelsy, 26–8, 33–5, 211–12 mobility, 110–12 modernism, 102, 103, 105–6 mollies, 218–19 see also homosexuality; queerness Monk, The (Lewis), 60, 61 Monk, Maria, 61–2 mother, the and boy bands, 185, 187, 189–90, 194–5 in the Oedipal moment, 158–9 as stereotype of Irish woman, 157–8, 159, 161, 164–5 see also Oedipal archetype motherhood, 158–9, 164–5 Mullan, Peter, 55, 58, 59, 66–9 multiculturalism, 16–17, 138, 161 mural paintings, 85–97 Murphy, Brenda, 46–7 Murphy, Kieran, 138 music dance, 180–1 jazz, 34–5 pop, 184–95 traditional Irish, 115–26 music hall, 211–12 Nairn, Tom, 176 Nandy, Ashis, 216 nationalism and boy bands, 186–7 and the Catholic Church, 66 and the GAA, 39–49 and religious institutions, 64–6 nature, 100–6 negotiation, consociational model of, 174, 177 Negra, Diane, 157–8 9/11 attacks, 3, 4–9 Northern Ireland, 26–36, 85–97, 171–82 Nun, The (Diderot), 60–1

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nuns, 55–70 Nussbaum, Martha, 18 O’Brien, Kate, 55, 62–6 O’Connell, Daniel, 129 O’Connor, John Cardinal, 132, 134 O’Donnell, Daniel, 188–9 O’Kane, Deirdre, 158, 161–6 O’Loughlin, Peadar, 123 O’Rourke, Michael, 203 O’Toole, Fintan, 16, 17 Oedipal archetype, 158–61, 164–6, 184–95 Onyejelem, Chinedu, 15, 16–17 Orange Order marches, 26, 27, 29–31 other, the, 177–8, 200–1 see also otherness; outsider otherness and jazz, 34–5 and technology, 103–6 see also alterity; other Otnes, Cele, 149 outsider, the, 161, 178–80 see also aliens; the other Padel, Ruth, 188, 193 paranormal, 178–80 Patterson, Henry, 175 peace and violence, 176–7, 178 Peace Process in Northern Ireland, 171–82 Pearse, Padraig, 186 penis envy, 189 photography, 26, 28–9, 85–90, 102, 171 and power, 87–90 and violence, 87, 89–90 Pitt, Brad, 180 Pleck, Elizabeth H., 149 Poole, Michael, 32 pop music, 184–95 postcolonialism, see under colonialism postmodernism and modernism, 102, 105–6, 110 and plurality, 111–12 and queerness, 215–16 postmodernity, definition of, xiii Presley, Elvis, 192 public transport, 100–12

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quare theory, 197–207 queer theory, 197–207 queerness, 197–207, 210–20 and child bearing, 218–20 in the convent, 60–1, 63–4 definition of, 203–4 and fanfic, 78, 80 and global capitalism, 217 Irish queerness, 210–20 and modernity, 215–16 Quiet Man, The, 116, 122 race, xiv, 3–51 and ethnicity, 32–3 in fiction, 18–25 in Northern Ireland, 26–36 see also ethnicity; racism racism and boy bands, 192 and homophobia, 128–9, 135–7 in Ireland, 15–25 and Irish-Americans, 129–31, 135–7 and sectarianism, 35–6 Raftery, Mary, 69 rail travel, 102–6 reader as writer, 74, 77 Recruit, The, 159, 160 religious orders, 55–70 Rescue Me, 4–9, 13–14 Reynolds, Paddy, 121 Riach, Douglas C., 33 Riverdance, 116 Rolston, Bill, 36, 94 RTÉ, 41–2, 43 science fiction, 76–9, 177–8, 187 Scott, Joan Wallach, 203 Sex in a Cold Climate, 58–9 sexuality, xvii–xviii and Catholicism, 61–2, 66–8, 69 and colonialism, 211–13, 216–18 and Gothic, 60–1 and Irishness, 57 and monastic life, 57, 60–1, 63–4, 66–8 research into, 197–8 repression of, 57–8, 60–2, 66–8, 69 Shapiro, Steven, 218–20 Shoukri, Andre, 31

Siegel, Norman, 135 Sinfield, Alan, 218, 220 Sisters of Mercy, 56, 57, 58, 64, 68 slavery, 129–30 Sloan, Darryl, 177–8, 180 Smith, Jim, 57, 59 ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, 162–3 Sontag, Susan, 89–91 speed, 105–6, 107–12 sport, 39–49 St Clair, Sheila, 178–80 St Patrick’s Day Parades, 3–4, 128–39 stand-up comedy, 162–6 stereotypes of class, 117–21 and fancy dress, 28 of Irish women, 157–9, 161–6, 212–13 of Irishness, 3, 128, 137 racial, 27–31, 33–5 street, the, 107–12 surface and depth, 211–12 surveillance, 87–9 Szarkowski, John, 86 Tagg, John, 92 Teague, Paul, 175 technology, 103–6 television, 3–14, 76, 78, 150–1, 165 theatre, 68, 165 Thompson, Spurgeon, 89 Titanic, 115, 117–21, 123 tourism, 141–54 trade unionism, 107 tradition and community, 173–4 traditional music, 115–26 and community, 116, 117–21, 122–3 definition of, 115–16 and the exotic, 119–21, 123 and vitality, 117 tram, see Luas transgender, 79–80, 163, 211, 218–20 transnationalism, 75–7, 110–12 Ugba, Abel, 15, 17, 20 University College Dublin, 197, 199, 203 urban landscape, see city

Index violence and peace, 176–7, 178 Virilio, Paul, 109 Vodafone, see under corporate sponsorship voyager as voyeur, 111–12 voyeurism and film, 122 and the Luas, 111–12 Waking Ned Devine, 121–6 weddings, 142, 144–54 Weed, Elizabeth, 201 Westlife, 191, 184–95 passim whiteness and ethnicity, 32–3 and Irish-Americans, 129–31

and minstrelsy, 34 and national identity, 24 in Northern Ireland, 26–7, 30–3, 34–5, 36 Wilde, Oscar, 212, 217 wild Irish girl, 157–8, 161–4 Wire, The, 4, 9–14 women and masculinity, 8–9 see also femininity; gender; motherhood Women’s Studies, 197, 198, 202 Woods, Oona, 90 work and identity, 11–12 Zizek, Slavoj, 7

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