The Grammar of Politics and Performance

What is it about?

My starting point for this piece of research was an immersive, site-specific show called Laundry, performed by Anu Productions in October 2011 as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. The production used a set of staging strategies to examine the systemic and symbolic nature of the violence enacted by the state upon the bodies of women incarcerated in the Magdalene Laundries: an estimated 30,000 women over the course of the twentieth century, before the last Laundry closed in 1996. Many of these women were unmarried mothers; some were victims of rape, incest, or sexual abuse, and some were orphaned or illegitimate girls who had grown up in state care and whose uncertain antecedents rendered them likely to fall into sin or to lead others to sin. The Laundry, on Sean McDermott Street just a few blocks from O’Connell Street in Dublin’s North inner city, was run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge. The Laundry finally closed in 1996; the last woman was admitted there in 1995. The naming seems like a double irony, the first the name of the Order and the second, that these streets were named after the executed leaders of the 1916 Uprising, with its Proclamation of a Republic that ‘guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally’. The staging strategies used by Anu draw attention to the systemic and symbolic nature of the abuse represented by the Laundry, and the complicity of the state and population in the violence. This opens opportunities for a debate about the current, as well as the historical, characterization of women in independent Ireland’s national imaginary.

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Why is it important?

The history of modern Ireland demonstrates the importance of honour (family, community, and national honour) in a European culture, and the connections of honour to female chastity and purity. The stories that have broken over the past twenty or thirty years in Ireland have revealed a systematic abuse of the civil rights of certain kinds of citizens, and I am interested in how this connects to social norms about gender and appropriate gender behaviour.

Perspectives