Embodied Histories of Gender and Generation in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland

Abstract

‘Embodied Histories of Gender and Generation in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland’ by Dr Shonagh Hill examines a practice-as-research project that offered participants the opportunity to explore their experiences of gender and generation through a somatic movement workshop. Hill developed the workshop with Nicola Curry, the artistic director of Maiden Voyage Dance NI. Restrictive gender norms and violent conflict in Northern Ireland have cultivated a climate of repression that has impeded corporeal movement and expression in myriad ways. The practice-as-research was underpinned by the fundamental assertion of the value of embodied knowledge as a refusal of the silence and shame imposed on feminized bodies and as a means of engaging with the complexity of identity and lived experience. The workshop had two objectives: firstly, to examine the embodied experiences of different generations of ‘those who travel under the sign women’ (Ahmed 2017: 14), and, secondly, to address their relationship to feminism. The workshop’s attention to generational experience is set against a backdrop of sustained media focus on generational tensions articulated through a conflictual binary. Moreover, within the context of Northern Ireland, conflictual binaries serve to divert and stall progressive forces for change, and perpetuate ongoing crisis and collapse. The workshop findings highlight the need for intergenerational and intersectional models that might generate more complex ways of telling feminist histories of Northern Ireland, as well as a broader understanding of the invasive forces that shape embodied histories and of their legacy.

Notes

1 This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No 889279. See Hill (2023) for the dataset for the research.

2 Following the General Election in May 2022, the NI Executive has been unable to form as the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) refuse to vote for an Assembly Speaker. The election saw Sinn Féin become the largest party for the first time, entitling Michelle O’Neill to serve as the first nationalist First Minister. The DUP cites its issues with the NI Protocol, which, they argue, has created a border in the Irish Sea.

3 See Gina Donnelly’s discussion of the impact of Lyra McKee’s murder on the post-Belfast/Good Friday Agreement generation: ‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget that day. A journalist being murdered in the streets felt so alien to me, it doesn’t feel welcome or like it belongs in our world anymore’ (Hill 2021).