Abstract
Weaving my way through Bloomsbury on 2 February 2014, I’m glued to a performance at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, streaming from the iPhone in my hand. Drag performer Panti Bliss (Rory O’Neill) is delivering a speech about homophobia on the main stage of Ireland’s national theatre, following a production of James Plunkett’s play The Risen People (1958).1 Surrounded by the cast, Panti has us imagine that we are standing at a pedestrian crossing being judged or threatened, as I curl my way towards Euston Station. While the theatre performance took place on 1 February, I’m watching it a day later as a YouTube clip shared on Twitter. Taking the bus home towards Hackney, I chat online with friends about the performance we have just seen, as if we are leaving the theatre together. Soon I’m communicating with people around the world. As a gay Irish man recently living in London, I feel strangely at home in this eddy of global exchange – proud, moved, encouraged – bobbing somewhere between the Abbey Theatre, the smart-phone in my hand, and a bus journey eastwards. Panti’s performance, and its reception, make me feel a powerful sense of being a part of something important and vitalising – though of what, and just how this has happened, are not immediately clear.
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Notes
José Esteban Muñoz describes queerness in affective terms as ‘that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.’ See José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), p. 1.
For further insight on the influence of Oscar Wilde on Ireland, see Eibhear Walshe’s Oscar’s Shadow: Wilde, Homosexuality and Modern Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2011).
Eibhear Walshe, ‘Queer Oscar: Versions of Wilde on the Irish Stage and Screen,’ in Deviant Acts: Essays on Queer Performance, ed. David Cregan (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2009), pp. 7–24; 7.
See Kieran Rose, Diverse Communities: The Evolution of Lesbian and Gay Politics in Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994), p. 12.
See David Cregan, ‘Irish Theatrical Celebrity and the Critical Subjugation of Difference in the Work of Frank McGuinness’, Modern Drama, 47.04 (2004): 671–85.
Robert W. McChesney, ‘Introduction,’ in Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and the Global Order (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999), pp. 7–18; 8.
See Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003).
Anne Mulhall, ‘Queer in Ireland: Deviant Filiation and the (Un)holy Family,’ in Queer in Europe, eds. Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 99–112; 110. Mulhall’s discussion of homonationalism follows the thinking of Jasbir K. Puar who describes how sexual minorities and gay subcultures are embraced and celebrated by the state, as long as they show allegiance by redefining new enemies. These tend to be religious or ethnic others, deemed to hold the state back, often from economic growth. Puar identifies Israel as an example of a state that cultivates the support of gay people in the service of arguing for the barbarism of parts of the Arab world. See Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
Alexandra Chasin, Selling Out: The Lesbian and Gay Movement Goes to Market (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 21.
For an overview of this bailout programme, especially statistics and figures, see Sean D. Barrett, ‘The EU/IMF Rescue Programme for Ireland 2010–13,’ Economic Affairs, 31.2 (June 2011): 53–57.
Seán Ó Riain, The Rise and Fall of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger: Liberalism, Boom and Bust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 4–5.
Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 21.
José Esteban Muñoz, ‘Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,’ Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 8.2 (1996): 5–16; p. 11.
This model of suffering resembles Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘cruel optimism,’ a term she deploys to describe a relation in which something that someone desires is an obstacle to their flourishing – e.g. property ownership, material accumulation, or other such heteronormative trappings, which are particularly relevant to this study (for example, the discussions of homelessness in chapters 4 and 7). In a critique of what she sees as Adam Phillips’ celebration of uncertainty as the measure of a good life, Berlant claims ‘people come to fear and hate these processes because they exert a constant pressure for negotiating social location. Cruel optimism or not, they feel attached to the soft hierarchies of inequality to provide a sense of their place in the world.’ See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 194.
Alain Badiou, ‘Rhapsody for the Theatre: A Short Philosophical Treatise,’ Theatre Survey, 49.2 (November 2008): 187–238; p. 229.
Elspeth Probyn, Outside Belongings: Disciplines, Nations and the Place of Sex (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 19.
See David Cregan, ed., Deviant Acts: Essays on Queer Performance (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2009),
Brian Singleton, Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and Seán Kennedy, Sarah McKibben, Anne Mulhall and Eibhear Walshe, eds., Irish University Review, ‘Queering the Issue,’ 43.1 (Spring/Summer 2013).
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 9.
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© 2016 Fintan Walsh
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Walsh, F. (2016). Introduction: Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland. In: Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland. Contemporary Performance InterActions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137534507_1
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