Abstract
Woods places contemporary drag performance in Ireland within the historical context of dissident, subversive elements of Irish popular culture. The chapter examines drag performance within the Irish LGBT movement as a performative practice that queers dominant and intersecting discourses on gender, sexuality and national identity while also reinflecting Bakhtin’s conception of the carnivalesque. In exploring traditional wake games, Woods highlights resonances between critical drag performance and aspects of traditional Irish popular culture. The chapter illustrates that—in their re-imagination of social, sexual and gender identities—the traditional Irish wake and contemporary drag practice constitute parallel aspects of Irish popular culture, serving as performative expressions issuing from the margins that destabilise dominant understandings of dominant social, gender and sexual subjectivities.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
From the AMI website http://www.alternativemissireland.com/. This website is no longer live, but archival material relating to the pageant, including promotional material, is held in the Irish Queer Archive located in the National Library of Ireland: http://www.nli.ie/pdfs/mss%20lists/151_IQA.pdf.
- 3.
Briquettes are compacted bricks of shredded peat used as a solid fuel. The semi-state company Bord na Móna was established under de Valera’s government in 1946 to commercially harvest peat from Ireland’s bogs as part of de Valera’s mission to develop Ireland as a self-sufficient economy.
- 4.
See Nancy Fraser (1995).
- 5.
- 6.
The video of “AMI goes Diddly Sci-Fi” is available on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm3a5Vz7xMQ, accessed 17 October 2015.
- 7.
- 8.
See http://www.abbeytheatre.ie/behind-the-scenes/backstage-blogs/the-risen-people-blog/the-noble-call/, accessed 12 November 2015.
- 9.
- 10.
For a critical analysis of discourses on marriage equality as bound up with normalisation and assimilationist imperatives, see Neary (2016).
- 11.
See http://www.peopleoftheyear.com/Inspirational-People/2014-People-of-the-Year.aspx, accessed 17 November 2015. For media coverage of the award, see Zhuang (2014).
- 12.
See Somerville’s “Queer” (2007).
- 13.
See Binchy (1958).
- 14.
See Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977).
- 15.
Focused on legitimating its claims to independent nationhood within the terms of empire, nationalism retained, while sometimes inverting, the binarisms of colonial ideology in relation to gender, culture and civility. As David Lloyd points out, ‘nationalist monologism is a dialogic inversion of imperial ideology, caught willy-nilly in the position of a parody, antagonistic but dependent’ (1993, p. 112).
- 16.
The Queen of Ireland (dir. Conor Horgan 2015).
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Woods, J. (2018). Dragging up the Past: Subversive Performance of Gender and Sexual Identities in Traditional and Contemporary Irish Culture. In: Villar-Argáiz, P. (eds) Irishness on the Margins. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74567-1_2
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