Suppressed Voices: The Suffering and Silencing of Irish Institutional Abuse Survivors in Áine Phillips’s Redress Performances

This essay examines Redress (2010-2012), a recent series of performances by Irish artist Áine Phillips that interrogate the legacy of abuse perpetrated in Irish residential institutions in the 20th century and the official efforts to compensate abuse survivors. These powerful performances are imbued with simple, yet compelling bodily gestures informed by spectatorship, memory and representation. Redress embodies the marginalised memories of abuse survivors, revealing the deliberate gaps and silences in Irish hegemonic narratives.Cette étude concerne Redress (2010-2012), une récente série de performances de l’artiste irlandaise Áine Phillips. Ces performances analysent l’histoire des sévices et des maltraitances perpétrées dans les instituts et foyers publics dirigés par des religieux au xxe siècle ainsi que les démarches officielles entreprises envers les victimes qui ont survécu à ces abus. Très intenses, ces performances sont caractérisées par un langage corporel simple mais fascinant qui fusionne public, mémoire et représentation. Redress défend la mémoire de ces victimes, en montrant les lacunes et les silences de leur histoire au sein d’un dicours hégémonique irlandais.

Women’s Troubles: Abject Femininity in Willie Doherty’s Same Difference and Closure

Abstract: The work of internationally acclaimed lens-based artist Willie Doherty proposes rich and nuanced understandings of the agency and participation of women in the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In a large number of visual and cultural representations of the ethno-nationalist violence of the Troubles, the conflict is often gendered as masculine, with women featuring primarily as victims and innocent bystanders. This essay examines Doherty’s Same Difference (1990) and Closure (2005), two key works that incorporate a female subject. It considers these works in relation to the concept of “abject femininity”, a non-normative femininity that is at odds with dominant representations of women as passive, nurturing care-givers or victims of conflict. This essay argues that the non-normative femininities in Same Difference and Closure offer opportunities to complicate understandings of women’s public and private roles in Northern Ireland.Résumé : Le travail de Willie Doherty, artiste vidéaste et photographe de renommée internationale, évoque de manière riche et nuancée la participation des femmes dans les Troubles en Irlande du Nord. Dans un grand nombre de représentations visuelles et culturelles de la violence ethno-nationaliste des Troubles, les femmes représentent principalement des victimes et des passants innocents. Cet essai examine deux vidéos de Doherty, Same Difference (1990) et Closure (2005), deux œuvres fondamentales qui intègrent un sujet féminin. L’analyse convoque le concept de « féminité abjecte », une féminité non normative en contradiction avec les représentations dominantes des femmes en tant que passives, soignantes ou victimes de conflits. Cet essai soutient que les féminités non normatives présentées dans Same Difference et Closure permettent une compréhension plus nuancée et complexe des rôles publics et privés des femmes en Irlande du Nord

Leading Change: Reproductive Rights, Empowerment and Feminist Solidarity in the Dublin Bay North Repeal the 8th Campaign

This article examines how the Dublin Bay North (DBN) Repeal the 8th activist group, an independent women-led, grassroots movement in the largest constituency in Ireland, practiced a collectivist approach to forms of ‘power-with’ and ‘power-to’ (Allen, 2018) that enabled the group to create an activist community based upon a feminist ethics of ‘caring-with’ (Tronto, 1993). In 2018 in Dublin, what had been a narrow majority in 1983 against abortion rights became a decisive 3:1 margin in favour. While this remarkable change can be attributed to the efforts of numerous feminist and reproductive rights activists working for many years, including those tied to the national Together for Yes campaign, less attention has been paid to new activist leaders participating at the grassroots level. This article focuses on the leadership roles adopted by first-time grassroots activists who became ‘team leaders’ and ran decentralised campaigns in their neighbourhoods. Using qualitative analyses of a survey of 125 members (June 2018), 16 semi-structured interviews with DBN team leaders and other key people within the campaign (October 2018 and March 2019), and the authors’ own experiences, we consider how new activists recruited and empowered others to tell their stories, canvass, and lead their own actions

Campaigning for Choice: Canvassing as Feminist Pedagogy in Dublin Bay North

The dramatic and resounding vote for abortion rights in Ireland was won by committed women sharing their personal stories. While some of these stories were circulated in the mass media, many more were shared with family and friends in the privacy of kitchen or living room. Still more were retailed on doorsteps to complete strangers face-to-face when activists canvassed. This aspect of the Repeal campaign was prepared for and supported by groups who organised locally in their constituencies. This chapter comes from our membership and activism in Dublin Bay North Together For Yes (DBN Repeal) group, a grassroots, women-led group set up to remove the Eighth Amendment (8th) from the Irish constitution. In this chapter, we draw upon a survey of June 2018 conducted by and of 125 activists from DBN Repeal to describe how this vote was won and the particular place of the canvass in the campaign.2 After providing an overview of our constituency, group, and campaign, we argue that our approach to canvassing may properly be understood as a form of feminist activist pedagogy

Campaigning for Choice: Canvassing as Feminist Pedagogy in Dublin Bay North

The dramatic and resounding vote for abortion rights in Ireland was won by committed women sharing their personal stories. While some of these stories were circulated in the mass media, many more were shared with family and friends in the privacy of kitchen or living room. Still more were retailed on doorsteps to complete strangers face-to-face when activists canvassed. This aspect of the Repeal campaign was prepared for and supported by groups who organised locally in their constituencies. This chapter comes from our membership and activism in Dublin Bay North Together For Yes (DBN Repeal) group, a grassroots, women-led group set up to remove the Eighth Amendment (8th) from the Irish constitution. In this chapter, we draw upon a survey of June 2018 conducted by and of 125 activists from DBN Repeal to describe how this vote was won and the particular place of the canvass in the campaign.2 After providing an overview of our constituency, group, and campaign, we argue that our approach to canvassing may properly be understood as a form of feminist activist pedagogy