Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland Dissent and Disorientation

The surge of queer performance produced across Ireland since the first stirrings of the Celtic Tiger in the mid-1990s, up to the passing of the Marriage Equality referendum in the Republic in 2015, forms the focus of this book. While unprecedented economic expansion stimulated the growth of certain aspects of LGBTQ culture during this time, as the case studies examined here reveal, a great deal of queer performance illuminated the darker social consequences of frenzied capitalism, systemic state failings and pernicious cultural crises.

Tracking scenes of dissent and disorientation across diverse sites and contexts, the book foregrounds performance that animates interactions between gender and sexuality, and issues relating to migration, religion, place, age, economics and class, ethnicity and national identity. It considers how performance engaged with same-sex partnership and marriage debates, but perhaps queerer still, offered some remarkably nuanced perspectives on interpersonal intimacy, social support, public participation and cultural belonging, with the capacity to inspire and provoke beyond an Irish or LGBTQ context.

Fintan Walsh is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, UK, where he is Co-Director of the Centre for Contemporary Theatre. Recent publications include Theatre & Therapy (2013), Male Trouble: Masculinity and the Performance of Crisis (2010), and the edited collection 'That Was Us': Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance (2013). He is Associate Editor of Theatre Research International.

1.Introduction: Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland
2.Activism, Drag and Solo Performance
3.Reparative Therapies and Political Performers
4.Transforming Shame and Testimonial Performance
5.Intergenerational Moves and Documentary Theatre
6.Sex, Class and the City: Site-Specific Roots and Routes
7.Vertiginous Loss, Love and Belonging on the National Stage
Afterword: Reeling-Feeling
Bibliography
Index