In Caitriona Lally's debut novel Eggshells (2015), the narrator Vivian Lawlor is an adult wom... more In Caitriona Lally's debut novel Eggshells (2015), the narrator Vivian Lawlor is an adult woman with a quirky personality living in North Dublin, who believes herself to be a changeling. Throughout the novel, Vivian travels various paths in Dublin looking for specific ‘thin places,’ creating ‘an alternative map of Dublin’, as Claire Kilroy's review puts it. Folklore is often used as a code for hiding aspects of Irish life that are unspeakable, and in Eggshells the changeling story is a coded testimony of family violence in which the changeling figure is labelled as nonhuman. Rejected by family, she looks to queer models of kinship as outlined by Judith Butler, through transformative portals and a companion who is a fellow trauma survivor. This essay argues that, while her experience of traumatic family violence is silently coded within the changeling story, Vivian strategically deploys changeling legend to embody a nonconforming gender presentation.
In a restaurant scene during the 2008 film In Bruges, after Ray punches a woman in the face who i... more In a restaurant scene during the 2008 film In Bruges, after Ray punches a woman in the face who is defending her date, whom he has also punched, he deflects: "I would never hit a woman! I'd hit a woman who was trying to hit me with a bottle!" (33). The second statement immediately undercuts the first, retracting Ray's stated values and calling attention to Ray's idea of himself as the kind of man who would never hit a womana fiction that reveals its hypocrisy in the moment of its utterance. Significantly, Ray articulates a chivalric form of masculinity (claiming he would never hit a woman), which is belied by hypermasculinity (by punching the woman). This moment illustrates a key tenet of films written and directed by Martin McDonagh: embattled masculinity represented by an idea presented and then retracted. Thus, repetitive retractions in the films serve as a metaphor signaling the constructed, always-vulnerable nature of contemporary masculinity. Through feminist theories of masculinity as performance and accomplishment, this article addresses how hypermasculinity creates shame, which subsequently drives violence in McDonagh's films In Bruges (2008) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). In close-reading these two films, I argue that McDonagh's technical and thematic use of repetitive retractionplacing an idea on screen only to undermine itoffers a subversive critique of how hypermasculinity propels a cycle of violence. Characters in the films must accomplish masculinity, an effort that becomes humorous when made visible. By conspicuously staging and then removing hypermasculine utterances, McDonagh's films suggest the potential for alternative forms of masculinity that allow men to connect with others and exercise their emotional range, such as fatherhood and friendship. McDonagh built his career as an Anglo-Irish playwright, earning a following for writing black comedies set in Ireland including The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996) and The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001). He then turned to writing and directing films, notably winning an Academy Award in 2006 for
In Caitriona Lally's debut novel Eggshells (2015), the narrator Vivian Lawlor is an adult woman w... more In Caitriona Lally's debut novel Eggshells (2015), the narrator Vivian Lawlor is an adult woman with a quirky personality living in North Dublin, who believes herself to be a changeling. Throughout the novel, Vivian travels various paths in Dublin looking for specific ‘thin places,’ creating ‘an alternative map of Dublin’, as Claire Kilroy's review puts it. Folklore is often used as a code for hiding aspects of Irish life that are unspeakable, and in Eggshells the changeling story is a coded testimony of family violence in which the changeling figure is labelled as nonhuman. Rejected by family, she looks to queer models of kinship as outlined by Judith Butler, through transformative portals and a companion who is a fellow trauma survivor. This essay argues that, while her experience of traumatic family violence is silently coded within the changeling story, Vivian strategically deploys changeling legend to embody a nonconforming gender presentation.
In Hugo Hamilton’s 2010 novel Hand in the Fire, the first Irish novel written from an Eastern Eur... more In Hugo Hamilton’s 2010 novel Hand in the Fire, the first Irish novel written from an Eastern European perspective, Serbian immigrant Vid Cosic is a witness to and conduit of Irish shame amidst revelations of abuses of institutional power during the Celtic Tiger period. As a migrant worker in Dublin, Vid’s position outside of citizenship allows him to register the fundamentally unequal treatment of both migrants and women in Ireland and the reversion to colonial hierarchies that shape his exclusion. The city is figured in the novel as a site of tension between insiders scrambling for power and outsiders desiring integration and access to resources. As he renovates his friend’s family home, seen through his eyes as a set of beams and nails, so too does Dublin emerge as a house with ‘good bones’, so to speak, that urgently needs renovation. Relatedly, Hamilton suggests that, despite Dublin’s increasingly cosmopolitan character, gender inequities continue to structure the capital city. Both of these sociopolitical and gendered forms of exclusion, I argue, produce a sense of shame pervading all relationships in Dublin specifically and the nation more generally. Hamilton’s narrativisation of these distinct but related forms of exclusion and stratification are most effectively viewed through six affective public and private spaces—the home, the pub, the court, the pier, the street, and the church—that structure the city and, ultimately, the Celtic Tiger nation.
This article draws together the work of novelist Salman Rushdie and playwright and screenwriter M... more This article draws together the work of novelist Salman Rushdie and playwright and screenwriter Martin McDonagh, who has embraced the epithet "The Irish Salman Rushdie". When considered in tandem, both writers are revealed as irreverent postcolonial artists using absurd representations to mock the hypermasculine persona and reveal its dangerous ideology as a foundation of terrorist thinking. The article traces the trope of the "Pillowman" assassin, used by both writers to signify emasculated male characters who turn to violence out of shame. The inverted logic these characters espouse is examined and shown to signal the fallacy of accepting violence as an essential facet of masculinity. When viewed in this framework, the work of Rushdie and McDonagh suggests that the drive towards aggressive masculinity in postcolonial settings acts as a vestigial by-product of the colonial power structure.
This article focuses on clown techniques in devised theatre pieces by Charlie O’Neill and Brian F... more This article focuses on clown techniques in devised theatre pieces by Charlie O’Neill and Brian Fleming, claiming those strategies as an emergent category of human rights activism in Irish theatre. Fleming’s Trilogy (2011, 2012, 2014) and O’Neill’s Hurl (2003) and Dodgems (2008a) are influenced by clown as practiced by Barabbas, but they return to a more text-driven, issue-based theatre to advocate for human rights. In close-reading these theatre pieces, I examine the following clown techniques: physical theatre, audience participation, parody and reversals of power, and self-examination. I argue that clowning is a growing undercurrent in Irish theatre, advancing human rights speech that challenges neoliberal and conservative views on immigration, racism, poverty, and homosexual rights.
In the past I have typically used the first five minutes of class to take attendance, make small ... more In the past I have typically used the first five minutes of class to take attendance, make small talk with students, or announce updates to the course schedule. Now, I tweet with my class. Despite the ideal in feminist pedagogy of decentering power in the classroom[i], the opening of a course meeting can often reinforce the hierarchical model of the instructor’s authority. An instructor-focused opening sends a message that the course will be prescriptive, delivered by the professor, and assessed by grades alone. Addressing the class with open-ended questions such as “What did you think of the reading?” puts students on the spot and tends to elicit responses only from those comfortable with oral communication in front of the whole class. When that happens, the voices of minoritized students or students who may have differing ideas about the reading may be silenced. Instead, if the class opens with every student posting a tweet that appears on a classroom screen, the instructor has access to a broader base of engaged responses to guide discussion with. The more consistent this practice is, the more students come to expect it and feel confident posting questions, reactions, and responses in their shared classroom discourse. For feminist and active learning pedagogues, it can be a challenge to create community and guide students to engage deeply with course texts. Susan Alexander and Sonalini Sapra attest to the pervasiveness of millennial students’ engagement with social media, which poses an exciting opportunity for instructors to influence the use of these tools in the classroom.[ii] After reading a 2016 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education by James Lang titled “Small Changes in Teaching: The First Five Minutes,” I was inspired to make the opening of my class more reflective of my pedagogy, which is grounded in my commitments to feminism and active learning. In my 200-level International Women’s Issues course, I ask students to use Twitter as a platform through which to reflect on the readings and respond to each other for the first five minutes of every class. It has been my experience that making a virtual space for student voices at the beginning of class, through public social media like Twitter, influences the environment of the course in ways that create and maintain a feminist classroom. When I began this teaching experiment with Twitter, I was interested in finding out if consistently opening class with students’ voices via a hashtag stream of class tweets would improve learning outcomes and support my efforts to create a feminist classroom. I offer this example of teaching with Twitter in the first five minutes of class as a description of a pedagogical strategy of transformative learning that merits further study for its feminist potential to unsettle roles of instructor and student, to create community, and to stimulate active learning. This teaching experience could translate to other disciplines where instructors are concerned with centralizing student voices and disrupting the top-down delivery of the class opening. While there are some notable articles about social media as a tool of feminism, use of Twitter as both a feminist and a pedagogical tool is an understudied practice.[iii]
's debut novel Eggshells (2015), the narrator Vivian Lawlor is an adult woman with a quirky perso... more 's debut novel Eggshells (2015), the narrator Vivian Lawlor is an adult woman with a quirky personality living in North Dublin, whom her neighbours and relatives perceive as 'touched in the head,' 'a foreigner,' or 'away with the fairies'. 1 Before they died, Vivian's parents told her that she is a changeling who replaced their real daughter, and now Vivian herself claims to be a changeling and uses the legend as a coping mechanism for surviving trauma. Vivian's language and behaviour mark her as deviant, even queer, in line with Diarmuid Ó Giolláin's assessment that 'individuals who occupied ambiguous, "un-ordered" social roles' were likely to be suspected as changelings during the height of changeling belief. 2 Throughout this humorous novel, Vivian travels various paths in Dublin looking for specific 'thin places'-'places in which non-humans might live, potential gateways to the world I came from' and struggling to conform to social norms (p.10). In her travels, she creates 'an alternative map of Dublin', as Claire Kilroy's review in The Guardian puts it, a Dublin that subversively refuses logical journeys in favour of a whimsical sense of experimentation and eccentric play. 3 Folklore is often used as a code for hiding aspects of Irish life that are unspeakable, and in Eggshells the changeling story is a coded testimony of family violence in which the changeling figure is labelled as nonhuman, to save face or explain the abuse in a coded way. Rejected by family, she looks to queer models of kinship, which she creates through an alternative map embedded with transformative portals and a companion who is a fellow trauma survivor. Both homosexuals and changelings are considered threatening to the 'human' under patriarchy, as Judith Butler notes: 'lesbians and gay men, along with other sexual minorities, are not perceived as sufficiently "human" given their estrangement or opposition to the normative kinship configurations by which the "human" becomes recognizable'. 4 I argue that while her experience of traumatic family violence is silently coded within the changeling story, Vivian
Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel The Wonder places a young woman’s refusal to eat at the center of high... more Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel The Wonder places a young woman’s refusal to eat at the center of highly charged narratives about fasting as resistance to oppression and women’s bodies as repositories for shame. Set in 1858 Ireland, the novel tells the story of the English nurse Lib Wright, who is hired to conduct a fortnight-long watch of the so-called “fasting girl” Anna O’Donnell either to determine her a fraud or prove her “a magical girl who lives on air.”1 She uncovers instead how young women’s bodies become canvases for projecting shame experienced by the community, while silencing the woman’s own histories.
Through feminist theories of masculinity, this article addresses how hypermasculinity creates sha... more Through feminist theories of masculinity, this article addresses how hypermasculinity creates shame, which subsequently drives violence in Martin McDonagh’s films In Bruges (2008) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). I argue that McDonagh’s technical and thematic use of repetitive retraction—placing an idea on screen only to undermine it—offers a subversive critique of how hypermasculinity propels a cycle of violence. By conspicuously staging and then removing hypermasculine utterances, McDonagh’s films suggest the potential for alternative forms of masculinity that allow men to connect with others and exercise their emotional range.
Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel The Wonder places a young woman’s refusal to eat at the center of high... more Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel The Wonder places a young woman’s refusal to eat at the center of highly charged narratives about fasting as resistance to oppression and women’s bodies as repositories for shame. Set in 1858 Ireland, the novel tells the story of the English nurse Lib Wright, who is hired to conduct a fortnight-long watch of the so-called “fasting girl” Anna O’Donnell either to determine her a fraud or prove her “a magical girl who lives on air.”1 She uncovers instead how young women’s bodies become canvases for projecting shame experienced by the community, while silencing the woman’s own histories.
This article draws together the work of novelist Salman Rushdie and playwright and screenwriter M... more This article draws together the work of novelist Salman Rushdie and playwright and screenwriter Martin McDonagh, who has embraced the epithet “The Irish Salman Rushdie”. When considered in tandem, both writers are revealed as irreverent postcolonial artists using absurd representations to mock the hypermasculine persona and reveal its dangerous ideology as a foundation of terrorist thinking. The article traces the trope of the “Pillowman” assassin, used by both writers to signify emasculated male characters who turn to violence out of shame. The inverted logic these characters espouse is examined and shown to signal the fallacy of accepting violence as an essential facet of masculinity. When viewed in this framework, the work of Rushdie and McDonagh suggests that the drive towards aggressive masculinity in postcolonial settings acts as a vestigial by-product of the colonial power structure.
In Caitriona Lally's debut novel Eggshells (2015), the narrator Vivian Lawlor is an adult wom... more In Caitriona Lally's debut novel Eggshells (2015), the narrator Vivian Lawlor is an adult woman with a quirky personality living in North Dublin, who believes herself to be a changeling. Throughout the novel, Vivian travels various paths in Dublin looking for specific ‘thin places,’ creating ‘an alternative map of Dublin’, as Claire Kilroy's review puts it. Folklore is often used as a code for hiding aspects of Irish life that are unspeakable, and in Eggshells the changeling story is a coded testimony of family violence in which the changeling figure is labelled as nonhuman. Rejected by family, she looks to queer models of kinship as outlined by Judith Butler, through transformative portals and a companion who is a fellow trauma survivor. This essay argues that, while her experience of traumatic family violence is silently coded within the changeling story, Vivian strategically deploys changeling legend to embody a nonconforming gender presentation.
In a restaurant scene during the 2008 film In Bruges, after Ray punches a woman in the face who i... more In a restaurant scene during the 2008 film In Bruges, after Ray punches a woman in the face who is defending her date, whom he has also punched, he deflects: "I would never hit a woman! I'd hit a woman who was trying to hit me with a bottle!" (33). The second statement immediately undercuts the first, retracting Ray's stated values and calling attention to Ray's idea of himself as the kind of man who would never hit a womana fiction that reveals its hypocrisy in the moment of its utterance. Significantly, Ray articulates a chivalric form of masculinity (claiming he would never hit a woman), which is belied by hypermasculinity (by punching the woman). This moment illustrates a key tenet of films written and directed by Martin McDonagh: embattled masculinity represented by an idea presented and then retracted. Thus, repetitive retractions in the films serve as a metaphor signaling the constructed, always-vulnerable nature of contemporary masculinity. Through feminist theories of masculinity as performance and accomplishment, this article addresses how hypermasculinity creates shame, which subsequently drives violence in McDonagh's films In Bruges (2008) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). In close-reading these two films, I argue that McDonagh's technical and thematic use of repetitive retractionplacing an idea on screen only to undermine itoffers a subversive critique of how hypermasculinity propels a cycle of violence. Characters in the films must accomplish masculinity, an effort that becomes humorous when made visible. By conspicuously staging and then removing hypermasculine utterances, McDonagh's films suggest the potential for alternative forms of masculinity that allow men to connect with others and exercise their emotional range, such as fatherhood and friendship. McDonagh built his career as an Anglo-Irish playwright, earning a following for writing black comedies set in Ireland including The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996) and The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001). He then turned to writing and directing films, notably winning an Academy Award in 2006 for
In Caitriona Lally's debut novel Eggshells (2015), the narrator Vivian Lawlor is an adult woman w... more In Caitriona Lally's debut novel Eggshells (2015), the narrator Vivian Lawlor is an adult woman with a quirky personality living in North Dublin, who believes herself to be a changeling. Throughout the novel, Vivian travels various paths in Dublin looking for specific ‘thin places,’ creating ‘an alternative map of Dublin’, as Claire Kilroy's review puts it. Folklore is often used as a code for hiding aspects of Irish life that are unspeakable, and in Eggshells the changeling story is a coded testimony of family violence in which the changeling figure is labelled as nonhuman. Rejected by family, she looks to queer models of kinship as outlined by Judith Butler, through transformative portals and a companion who is a fellow trauma survivor. This essay argues that, while her experience of traumatic family violence is silently coded within the changeling story, Vivian strategically deploys changeling legend to embody a nonconforming gender presentation.
In Hugo Hamilton’s 2010 novel Hand in the Fire, the first Irish novel written from an Eastern Eur... more In Hugo Hamilton’s 2010 novel Hand in the Fire, the first Irish novel written from an Eastern European perspective, Serbian immigrant Vid Cosic is a witness to and conduit of Irish shame amidst revelations of abuses of institutional power during the Celtic Tiger period. As a migrant worker in Dublin, Vid’s position outside of citizenship allows him to register the fundamentally unequal treatment of both migrants and women in Ireland and the reversion to colonial hierarchies that shape his exclusion. The city is figured in the novel as a site of tension between insiders scrambling for power and outsiders desiring integration and access to resources. As he renovates his friend’s family home, seen through his eyes as a set of beams and nails, so too does Dublin emerge as a house with ‘good bones’, so to speak, that urgently needs renovation. Relatedly, Hamilton suggests that, despite Dublin’s increasingly cosmopolitan character, gender inequities continue to structure the capital city. Both of these sociopolitical and gendered forms of exclusion, I argue, produce a sense of shame pervading all relationships in Dublin specifically and the nation more generally. Hamilton’s narrativisation of these distinct but related forms of exclusion and stratification are most effectively viewed through six affective public and private spaces—the home, the pub, the court, the pier, the street, and the church—that structure the city and, ultimately, the Celtic Tiger nation.
This article draws together the work of novelist Salman Rushdie and playwright and screenwriter M... more This article draws together the work of novelist Salman Rushdie and playwright and screenwriter Martin McDonagh, who has embraced the epithet "The Irish Salman Rushdie". When considered in tandem, both writers are revealed as irreverent postcolonial artists using absurd representations to mock the hypermasculine persona and reveal its dangerous ideology as a foundation of terrorist thinking. The article traces the trope of the "Pillowman" assassin, used by both writers to signify emasculated male characters who turn to violence out of shame. The inverted logic these characters espouse is examined and shown to signal the fallacy of accepting violence as an essential facet of masculinity. When viewed in this framework, the work of Rushdie and McDonagh suggests that the drive towards aggressive masculinity in postcolonial settings acts as a vestigial by-product of the colonial power structure.
This article focuses on clown techniques in devised theatre pieces by Charlie O’Neill and Brian F... more This article focuses on clown techniques in devised theatre pieces by Charlie O’Neill and Brian Fleming, claiming those strategies as an emergent category of human rights activism in Irish theatre. Fleming’s Trilogy (2011, 2012, 2014) and O’Neill’s Hurl (2003) and Dodgems (2008a) are influenced by clown as practiced by Barabbas, but they return to a more text-driven, issue-based theatre to advocate for human rights. In close-reading these theatre pieces, I examine the following clown techniques: physical theatre, audience participation, parody and reversals of power, and self-examination. I argue that clowning is a growing undercurrent in Irish theatre, advancing human rights speech that challenges neoliberal and conservative views on immigration, racism, poverty, and homosexual rights.
In the past I have typically used the first five minutes of class to take attendance, make small ... more In the past I have typically used the first five minutes of class to take attendance, make small talk with students, or announce updates to the course schedule. Now, I tweet with my class. Despite the ideal in feminist pedagogy of decentering power in the classroom[i], the opening of a course meeting can often reinforce the hierarchical model of the instructor’s authority. An instructor-focused opening sends a message that the course will be prescriptive, delivered by the professor, and assessed by grades alone. Addressing the class with open-ended questions such as “What did you think of the reading?” puts students on the spot and tends to elicit responses only from those comfortable with oral communication in front of the whole class. When that happens, the voices of minoritized students or students who may have differing ideas about the reading may be silenced. Instead, if the class opens with every student posting a tweet that appears on a classroom screen, the instructor has access to a broader base of engaged responses to guide discussion with. The more consistent this practice is, the more students come to expect it and feel confident posting questions, reactions, and responses in their shared classroom discourse. For feminist and active learning pedagogues, it can be a challenge to create community and guide students to engage deeply with course texts. Susan Alexander and Sonalini Sapra attest to the pervasiveness of millennial students’ engagement with social media, which poses an exciting opportunity for instructors to influence the use of these tools in the classroom.[ii] After reading a 2016 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education by James Lang titled “Small Changes in Teaching: The First Five Minutes,” I was inspired to make the opening of my class more reflective of my pedagogy, which is grounded in my commitments to feminism and active learning. In my 200-level International Women’s Issues course, I ask students to use Twitter as a platform through which to reflect on the readings and respond to each other for the first five minutes of every class. It has been my experience that making a virtual space for student voices at the beginning of class, through public social media like Twitter, influences the environment of the course in ways that create and maintain a feminist classroom. When I began this teaching experiment with Twitter, I was interested in finding out if consistently opening class with students’ voices via a hashtag stream of class tweets would improve learning outcomes and support my efforts to create a feminist classroom. I offer this example of teaching with Twitter in the first five minutes of class as a description of a pedagogical strategy of transformative learning that merits further study for its feminist potential to unsettle roles of instructor and student, to create community, and to stimulate active learning. This teaching experience could translate to other disciplines where instructors are concerned with centralizing student voices and disrupting the top-down delivery of the class opening. While there are some notable articles about social media as a tool of feminism, use of Twitter as both a feminist and a pedagogical tool is an understudied practice.[iii]
's debut novel Eggshells (2015), the narrator Vivian Lawlor is an adult woman with a quirky perso... more 's debut novel Eggshells (2015), the narrator Vivian Lawlor is an adult woman with a quirky personality living in North Dublin, whom her neighbours and relatives perceive as 'touched in the head,' 'a foreigner,' or 'away with the fairies'. 1 Before they died, Vivian's parents told her that she is a changeling who replaced their real daughter, and now Vivian herself claims to be a changeling and uses the legend as a coping mechanism for surviving trauma. Vivian's language and behaviour mark her as deviant, even queer, in line with Diarmuid Ó Giolláin's assessment that 'individuals who occupied ambiguous, "un-ordered" social roles' were likely to be suspected as changelings during the height of changeling belief. 2 Throughout this humorous novel, Vivian travels various paths in Dublin looking for specific 'thin places'-'places in which non-humans might live, potential gateways to the world I came from' and struggling to conform to social norms (p.10). In her travels, she creates 'an alternative map of Dublin', as Claire Kilroy's review in The Guardian puts it, a Dublin that subversively refuses logical journeys in favour of a whimsical sense of experimentation and eccentric play. 3 Folklore is often used as a code for hiding aspects of Irish life that are unspeakable, and in Eggshells the changeling story is a coded testimony of family violence in which the changeling figure is labelled as nonhuman, to save face or explain the abuse in a coded way. Rejected by family, she looks to queer models of kinship, which she creates through an alternative map embedded with transformative portals and a companion who is a fellow trauma survivor. Both homosexuals and changelings are considered threatening to the 'human' under patriarchy, as Judith Butler notes: 'lesbians and gay men, along with other sexual minorities, are not perceived as sufficiently "human" given their estrangement or opposition to the normative kinship configurations by which the "human" becomes recognizable'. 4 I argue that while her experience of traumatic family violence is silently coded within the changeling story, Vivian
Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel The Wonder places a young woman’s refusal to eat at the center of high... more Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel The Wonder places a young woman’s refusal to eat at the center of highly charged narratives about fasting as resistance to oppression and women’s bodies as repositories for shame. Set in 1858 Ireland, the novel tells the story of the English nurse Lib Wright, who is hired to conduct a fortnight-long watch of the so-called “fasting girl” Anna O’Donnell either to determine her a fraud or prove her “a magical girl who lives on air.”1 She uncovers instead how young women’s bodies become canvases for projecting shame experienced by the community, while silencing the woman’s own histories.
Through feminist theories of masculinity, this article addresses how hypermasculinity creates sha... more Through feminist theories of masculinity, this article addresses how hypermasculinity creates shame, which subsequently drives violence in Martin McDonagh’s films In Bruges (2008) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). I argue that McDonagh’s technical and thematic use of repetitive retraction—placing an idea on screen only to undermine it—offers a subversive critique of how hypermasculinity propels a cycle of violence. By conspicuously staging and then removing hypermasculine utterances, McDonagh’s films suggest the potential for alternative forms of masculinity that allow men to connect with others and exercise their emotional range.
Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel The Wonder places a young woman’s refusal to eat at the center of high... more Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel The Wonder places a young woman’s refusal to eat at the center of highly charged narratives about fasting as resistance to oppression and women’s bodies as repositories for shame. Set in 1858 Ireland, the novel tells the story of the English nurse Lib Wright, who is hired to conduct a fortnight-long watch of the so-called “fasting girl” Anna O’Donnell either to determine her a fraud or prove her “a magical girl who lives on air.”1 She uncovers instead how young women’s bodies become canvases for projecting shame experienced by the community, while silencing the woman’s own histories.
This article draws together the work of novelist Salman Rushdie and playwright and screenwriter M... more This article draws together the work of novelist Salman Rushdie and playwright and screenwriter Martin McDonagh, who has embraced the epithet “The Irish Salman Rushdie”. When considered in tandem, both writers are revealed as irreverent postcolonial artists using absurd representations to mock the hypermasculine persona and reveal its dangerous ideology as a foundation of terrorist thinking. The article traces the trope of the “Pillowman” assassin, used by both writers to signify emasculated male characters who turn to violence out of shame. The inverted logic these characters espouse is examined and shown to signal the fallacy of accepting violence as an essential facet of masculinity. When viewed in this framework, the work of Rushdie and McDonagh suggests that the drive towards aggressive masculinity in postcolonial settings acts as a vestigial by-product of the colonial power structure.
This article focuses on clown techniques in devised theatre pieces by Charlie O'Neill and Brian F... more This article focuses on clown techniques in devised theatre pieces by Charlie O'Neill and Brian Fleming, claiming those strategies as an emergent category of human rights activism in Irish theatre. Fleming's Trilogy (2011, 2012, 2014) and O'Neill's Hurl (2003) and Dodgems (2008a) are influenced by clown as practiced by Barabbas, but they return to a more text-driven, issue-based theatre to advocate for human rights. In close-reading these theatre pieces, I examine the following clown techniques: physical theatre, audience participation , parody and reversals of power, and self-examination. I argue that clowning is a growing undercurrent in Irish theatre, advancing human rights speech that challenges neoliberal and conservative views on immigration, racism, poverty, and homosexual rights.
Guest Editor of "Studi irlandesi. A journal of Irish Studies", issue VII on "Resistance in Modern... more Guest Editor of "Studi irlandesi. A journal of Irish Studies", issue VII on "Resistance in Modern Ireland" (Florence University Press) in June 2017.
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For feminist and active learning pedagogues, it can be a challenge to create community and guide students to engage deeply with course texts. Susan Alexander and Sonalini Sapra attest to the pervasiveness of millennial students’ engagement with social media, which poses an exciting opportunity for instructors to influence the use of these tools in the classroom.[ii] After reading a 2016 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education by James Lang titled “Small Changes in Teaching: The First Five Minutes,” I was inspired to make the opening of my class more reflective of my pedagogy, which is grounded in my commitments to feminism and active learning. In my 200-level International Women’s Issues course, I ask students to use Twitter as a platform through which to reflect on the readings and respond to each other for the first five minutes of every class. It has been my experience that making a virtual space for student voices at the beginning of class, through public social media like Twitter, influences the environment of the course in ways that create and maintain a feminist classroom.
When I began this teaching experiment with Twitter, I was interested in finding out if consistently opening class with students’ voices via a hashtag stream of class tweets would improve learning outcomes and support my efforts to create a feminist classroom. I offer this example of teaching with Twitter in the first five minutes of class as a description of a pedagogical strategy of transformative learning that merits further study for its feminist potential to unsettle roles of instructor and student, to create community, and to stimulate active learning. This teaching experience could translate to other disciplines where instructors are concerned with centralizing student voices and disrupting the top-down delivery of the class opening. While there are some notable articles about social media as a tool of feminism, use of Twitter as both a feminist and a pedagogical tool is an understudied practice.[iii]
For feminist and active learning pedagogues, it can be a challenge to create community and guide students to engage deeply with course texts. Susan Alexander and Sonalini Sapra attest to the pervasiveness of millennial students’ engagement with social media, which poses an exciting opportunity for instructors to influence the use of these tools in the classroom.[ii] After reading a 2016 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education by James Lang titled “Small Changes in Teaching: The First Five Minutes,” I was inspired to make the opening of my class more reflective of my pedagogy, which is grounded in my commitments to feminism and active learning. In my 200-level International Women’s Issues course, I ask students to use Twitter as a platform through which to reflect on the readings and respond to each other for the first five minutes of every class. It has been my experience that making a virtual space for student voices at the beginning of class, through public social media like Twitter, influences the environment of the course in ways that create and maintain a feminist classroom.
When I began this teaching experiment with Twitter, I was interested in finding out if consistently opening class with students’ voices via a hashtag stream of class tweets would improve learning outcomes and support my efforts to create a feminist classroom. I offer this example of teaching with Twitter in the first five minutes of class as a description of a pedagogical strategy of transformative learning that merits further study for its feminist potential to unsettle roles of instructor and student, to create community, and to stimulate active learning. This teaching experience could translate to other disciplines where instructors are concerned with centralizing student voices and disrupting the top-down delivery of the class opening. While there are some notable articles about social media as a tool of feminism, use of Twitter as both a feminist and a pedagogical tool is an understudied practice.[iii]