The Gender Politics of Contemporary Performance in Northern Ireland

This book examines theatre and performance produced since the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement in the context of growing discontent with the failure of the peace in Northern Ireland to deliver genuinely transformative forms of social justice. The economic expansion that attended the peace accord propelled the growth of the region’s theatre and performance sector and assisted in increasing the representation of women and LGBTQ+ people across the arts. Despite this, much of the performance work produced since 1998 has illuminated the darker social consequences of Northern Ireland’s embrace of a specifically neoliberal vision of a ‘post-conflict’ society. Existing scholarship has already highlighted the role of theatre and performance in drawing attention to the misogyny and homophobia that has underwritten political antagonism in the North since partition. Instead, this book offers a sustained examination of contemporary performance makers that have engaged specifically with the reconstruction of gender norms amidst the region’s political and economic transformation. The story it tells is of an emerging current in theatre, performance art, and dance consisting of work concerned not only with uncovering the morbid symptoms of the neoliberal peace but also embodying those messy and everyday conditions of co-dependency, vulnerability and solidarity that both patriarchal nationalisms and androcentric individualism seek to deny. Alexander Coupe is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies in the Department of English at the University of Liverpool, UK. His research and teaching encompass contemporary theatre and performance in Britain and Ireland, with an emphasis on gender, conflict transformation and cultural policy. Before working in Liverpool, he was an Associate Lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he also acquired his PhD. His work has been published in a range of academic journals including Research in Drama Education, Cultural Trends, and Études irlandaises.