Speaking of silence, speaking of art, abortion and Ireland

ABSTRACT

Sounding the Depths a collaborative installation by Pauline Cummins and Louise Walsh, 1992 reclaimed the female body appropriated by the Eight Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland and symbolically opened it up to speak and even laugh in defiance of patriarchal and heteronormative definitions of “woman”. First exhibited in 1992, the artwork was addressed to the silencing of women about abortion and other denigrated bodily experiences in a deeply repressive social and political climate. More recent artworks which challenge how women’s reproductive bodies are controlled by the state evidence the continued relevance of these themes as related to the Irish contexts, North and South. This essay considers how art and contemporary pro-choice arts activism explores ways of “saying the unsayable” when abortion is criminalised, stigmatised and largely experienced secretly and silently, to transform its symbols and discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Art
• abortion
• Ireland
• Repeal campaign
• feminism
• silence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Eighth Amendment, passed in a referendum in 1983 by 66.9% to 33.1% of voters, declares, “The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.” See O’Reilly, Masterminds of the Right, 79, and for an account of how the Eighth Amendment resulted from a powerful right-wing Catholic campaign, unsuccessfully opposed by amongst others, the Anti-Amendment Campaign.

2. De Londras, “Politicians Left,” http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/politicians-left-with-nowhere-to-hide-on-abortion-1.3061938.

3. Smyth, “Foreword,” xi.

4. Flynn,“How Women Like Me Told,”

5. Founded by artists Cecily Brennan, Rachel Fallon, Alice Maher, and others. In 2017 they hosted A Day of Testimonies, featuring film, visual art and performances about abortion, in Dublin’s Project Arts Centre. This essay seeks to address the theme of abortion silence in art, in particular in the early 1990s, rather than exhaustively account for art about abortion in Irish contexts. Other artworks have been made about, or have been interpreted as potentially about abortion, for example Kate Antosik Parsons suggests Amanda Coogan’s performance How to Explain the Sea to an Uneaten Potato (2008) could refer to women’s abortion journeys. See Barber, Art in Ireland, 262. Made in the year the Eighth Amendment was enshrined, Kathy Prendergast’s powerful Body Maps series (1983), depicts the female body as a site for regulation through cartographic imagery. Many women artists have worked in very diverse ways with the body to challenge patriarchal ideals of nation, religion and gender in Irish contexts, North and South, including Frances Hegarty, Mary Duffy, Dorothy Cross, Alice Maher, Sandra Johnston, Áine Phillips, Cecily Brennan and Rita Duffy.

6. Cornell, The Imaginary Domain; Cornell, Beyond Accommodation; and Irigaray, “How to Define.”

7. Krauss, I Love Dick.

8. Minge, “Painting a Landscape of Abortion.”

9. Lentin, “After Savita,” 182, 185.

10. Zetterman, “Frida Kahlo’s Abortions,” 230. Zetterman demonstrates how successive authors have described what are recorded as the termination of Kahlo’s pregnancies, as miscarriages.

11. As well as the withdrawal of the “Irish Protocol,” in 1992 the Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment demanded legislation to provide services in accordance with the “X-Case” Supreme Court Judgement; and ultimately the repeal of the Eighth Amendment. See Smyth’s “A Sadistic Farce,” 18,19.

12. Holland urged Irish feminists to add their names to a list of women who declared that they had had abortions, headed by herself, but no one responded. See Rossiter, Ireland’s Hidden Diaspora, 142.

13. Oaks, “Abortion is Part of the Irish Experience,”181. Fintan O’Toole reminds us of how extremely anti-abortion Ireland was before the 1983 referendum. A 1981 survey found that over 50% of respondents considered it acceptable for a woman whose life was at risk during pregnancy to die, rather than have an abortion. By 1990 however, 65% agreed that abortion was justified to save the woman’s life. O’Toole argues that the Eighth Amendment did nothing to stop a growing liberalisation in public opinion and paradoxically created a previously non-existent public debate about abortion. However, as Oaks argues, the terms of that debate were set by the anti-choice position. O’Toole,“The Eight Amendment,” .

14. Irigaray, “How to Define,” 208.

15. McInerney, The Glorious Heresies, 172.

16. Ibid, 172.

17. Ibid, 189. The Magdalene Laundries date to the eighteenth century and from 1922 were operated by Religious Orders in the North and South of Ireland.

18. Ibid, 190.

19. Ibid, 292.

20. Wright, “The Silencing of Women,” 67, 69.

21. Bloomer and O’Dowd, “Restricted Access to Abortion,” 370.

22. Jessica Elgot and Henry McDonald “Northern Irish Women.” Left without a majority following the June 2017 General Election, Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May struck a deal with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to back her minority government. As the DUP oppose extension of the 1967 Act to Northern Ireland, ministers led by Labour politician Stella Creasy were galvanised by concerns that their influence might prevent future change.

23. See Department of Health, “General Scheme.” In summary, the Irish Government proposes abortion provision within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy subject to a doctor’s certification and a 72 hour waiting period; where there is a threat to the health or life of a pregnant woman; where such threat is in an emergency necessitating urgent action; and in cases of fatal foetal abnormality.

24. Bloomer and O’Dowd, “Restricted Access to Abortion,” 367, 371.

25. Aiken, Gomperts and Trussell, “Experiences and characteristics of women.” Between 2010 and 2015, 5,650 women form the North and South of Ireland requested telemedicine from Women on Web alone.

26. Aiken, Gomperts and Trussel, “Experiences and Characteristics,” 7.

27. See Aiken, Gomperts and Trussell, “Experiences and characteristics of women,” 2.

28. Seu, “Shameful Silences,” 257, 259.

29. Parpart, “Choosing silence. Rethinking Voice,” 17.

30. Lorde in Carrillo Rowe and Malhotra, “Still the Silence,” 2.

31. Fisher, Vampire in the Text, 168.

32. Trinh, When the Moon Waxes, 150–151.

33. Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence,” 40, 41. 42.

34. Cornell, Beyond Accommodation, 60.

35. Ibid, 60.

36. Peteschy, “Fetal Images,” 264, 287.

37. Shrage, “From Reproductive Rights,” 61.

38. Lambert-Beatty, “Twelve Miles.”

39. For Smyth, who campaigned since 1983 against the Eighth Amendment, 2016 was the “tipping point” in pro-choice support in Ireland, which became a mass movement as young people identified with the issue and built on the Yes Equality campaign in the same-sex marriage victory in 2015. Mullally, “Ireland’s Tipping Point.”

40. “Anna Cosgrove Explains Her ‘Repeal’ Project”, District Magazine, 28 July, 2016. http://districtmagazine.ie/anna-cosgrave-explains-her-repeal-project-2/.

41. Fletcher, “Contesting the Cruel Treatment,” 17.

42. Side, “A Geopolitics of Migrant Women,” 1794.

43. Fletcher, ibid, 17.

44. Holland, “Asylum Seeker Sues HSE.”

45. Ludlow, “Love and Goodness,” 481.

46. O’Brien, “Speaking of I.M.E.L.D.A.”

47. A video of the intervention, “Speaking of I.M.E.L.D.A. 8 March 2014 Action” can be viewed on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr1z_aCKoOQ [Accessed Dec. 2015].

48. Rossiter, Ann, Making a Holy Show of Myself. A Sketch on Abortion (or the lack of it) on the Island of Ireland, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edBYSZvqKjI [accessed Dec. 2015].

49. Cummins in Roth, “Two Women,” 6. Walsh considers the artwork a shift from a reactive stance towards exploring ideas about the body beyond a repressive regime. See Deepwell, Dialogues, 189.

50. Walsh in Roth, “Two Women,”13.

51. Walsh in Roth, “Two Women,” 5.

52. Sounding the Depths is included the Museum’s Permanent Collection.

53. Walsh in Roth, “Two Women,” 6.

54. Pollock, “Beyond Words,” 267.

55. Cummins in Roth, “Two Women,” 6.

56. Cornell, Imaginary, 46–47. See O’Reilly ibid, for wording of the Eighth Amendment.

57. Cornell, Imaginary, 50. Irigaray, “How to Define,” 208. For “sexuate rights” to emerge, Irigaray demands, “An end to the exploitation of a functional part of their selves by the civil and religious powers: motherhood.”

58. Irigaray, “How to Define,” 206. Irigaray refuses notions of equality between the sexes because men and women are not equal in a contemporary social and cultural order dominated by male modes of production, labour and representation.

59. Cummins and Walsh quoted in Irvine, “Sounding the Depths,” 66.

60. Irvine Sounding the Depths, 66.

61. See Robinson, “Dancing on the Margins,” 26. Cummins and Walsh, she argues, produced “a site where cultural memory, female genealogy and horizons of latent possibility coexist.” See Robinson, Reading Art, 192.

62. The tension between the political need for feminists to establish what power relations impact on our lives, and the instability of “woman” and “truth” as social formations, means that feminists must identify uses of knowledge and any validity claimed for it, according to Ramazanoglu and Holland. They argue that to deconstruct the subject means to question and open it to redeployment, not to abandon it. Ramazanoglu and Holland, “Still Telling It,” 208.

63. See Smyth, Foreword, xii.

64. Tipton“‘Are We going to Let Them Burn Us,”.See also, Birch, “Venice Biennale 2017,”

65. Tipton, “Are We going to Let Them Burn Us.”.

66. Jesse Jones, Interview Tremble, Tremble, Pavilion of Ireland, Venice 2017, Studio International, https://vimeo.com/225677676 [accessed October 30 2017].

67. Haraway, Primate Visions, 193.

68. For a history of the helplines, see Rossiter, Ireland’s Hidden Diaspora. O’Reilly, Masterminds, 110, 120. In 1982 the High Courts illegalised and ended Ireland’s Open Line and the Well Woman Clinic’s abortion counselling service. British magazine publishers deleted advertisements for abortion clinics from their Irish editions, and the pro-life campaign took three Irish Students’ Unions to court to stop them providing information.

69. Mc Namara, “Quadrant,” 62.

70. Rothman in Peteschy, “Fetal Images,” 270.

71. Peteschy, “Fetal Images,” 268.

72. Irigarary, Sexual Difference, 167.

73. Campbell in Allen, “When They Put Their Hands,” up.Allen, Sarah “When They Put Their Hands Out Like Scales–Interview with Emma Campbell,” Prism. Editorial Collective Dedicated to Photography and Visual Communication, http://prismphotomagazine.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/when-they-put-their-hands-out-like.html [Accessed August 7 2017].

74. Azoulay, The Civil Contract, 27.

75. “Abortion – In The Northern Ireland Assembly at 2 00pm on 20 June 2000,” “They work for you. Hansard and Official Reports,” They Work For You website, run by mySociety. https://www.theyworkforyou.com/ni/?id=2000-06-20.2.0 [Accessed January 2017].

76. “Abortion – In the Northern Ireland Assembly,” ibid.

77. See Alliance for Choice, http://www.alliance4choice.com/news/2017/2/mla-candidates-stance-on-abortion-ae17 [Accessed June 2 2017].

78. Smyth, “Foreword,” xi.

79. MERJ in, Ursula Barry. “The Appeal of Repeal.”

80. Ibid.