Projecting a queer republic: mainstreaming queer identities on Irish documentary film

ABSTRACT

Previous work on the Irish documentary has suggested that an innate conservatism in Irish society and broadcasting stifled any political potential on the medium. This article argues that such assertions are not entirely true, especially in light of gay and lesbian documentaries. The focus of this article is on two documentaries produced by Ireland’s public service broadcaster RTÉ: Tuesday Report (1977) and Access Community Television (1984). It argues that mainstreaming approaches were a central representational strategy in these two documentaries that represented Irish gays and lesbians. This mode of representation was crucial as the documentary form in Irish broadcasting attempted to normalise social attitudes towards queer identities. The programmes reveal the cultural specificities of queer Irish documentaries, particularly relating to their mode of address. Both addressed the Irish family – one of the main power bases of Irish society during this period – to speak back and reconfigure conceptualisations of the traditional, normative family.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer documentary
• Irish documentary cinema
• television documentary
• queer media activism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Maria Pramaggiore, Stephanie Rains and Anne O’Brien, who read this article and provided very keens insights and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Páraic Kerrigan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5188-0146

Notes

1 These oppressive laws remained in place until gay rights pioneer David Norris took his Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform to the High Court and Supreme Court to challenge the legislation. On both occasions he failed and was eventually forced to bring the case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in 1988, where the court ruled in his favour. The European ruling was not acted upon until 1993.

2 While the various media texts use primarily gay, lesbian or homosexual to refer to all such identities, queer is used in this article to refer to the documentaries at points. Queer is partly encoded with a history of self-conscious resistance, and in my use of it, I hope to draw attention to the limitations of using ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’, terms which, when used on various occasions in these media texts, are not exactly representative of queer lives more generally. For the most part, gay and lesbian are the terms used in this article, as that is how the participants self-identified during those historical moments.

3 Irish Women United was a feminist organisation formed in 1975 as a campaign group. The organisation campaigned for a range of women’s issues, among which included a commitment to ‘the right of all women to a self-determined sexuality’ (Rose 1977).

4 A detailed discussion of the historical evolution of Irish documentary film is provided in Harvey O’Brien’s seminal work The Real Ireland: The Evolution of Ireland in Documentary Film (2004). Kevin Rockett also has a useful introductory chapter in Cinema and Ireland (1987).

5 Parent’s Enquiry, founded by Rose Robertson in the late 1960s, was Britain’s first helpline to advise and support parents and their lesbian, gay and bisexual children, which she ran from her house in Catford, south-east London, for three decades. Phil Moore later founded an Irish chapter of the organisation in the early 1980s.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Irish Research Council (Government of Ireland Scholarship).

Notes on contributors

Páraic Kerrigan

Páraic Kerrigan is a Teaching Fellow within the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin. He was previously an Irish Research Council Scholar and John and Pat Hume Scholar in the Department of Media Studies at Maynooth University, where he will complete his Ph.D in October 2018. His doctorate is titled Queering in the Years: Gay Visibility in Irish Media, 1974–2014. He has published work in Media History, the Journal of Radio and Popular Media and LGBTQS, Media and Culture in Europe: Situated Case Studies, along with various popular outlets such as the Irish Examiner. He has been a regular contributor in Ireland’s national media on gay culture and politics and has been a researcher on a number of documentaries.