Embodied Histories of Gender and Generation in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland

Abstract

‘Embodied Histories of Gender and Generation in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland’ by Dr Shonagh Hill examines a practice-as-research project that offered participants the opportunity to explore their experiences of gender and generation through a somatic movement workshop. Hill developed the workshop with Nicola Curry, the artistic director of Maiden Voyage Dance NI. Restrictive gender norms and violent conflict in Northern Ireland have cultivated a climate of repression that has impeded corporeal movement and expression in myriad ways. The practice-as-research was underpinned by the fundamental assertion of the value of embodied knowledge as a refusal of the silence and shame imposed on feminized bodies and as a means of engaging with the complexity of identity and lived experience. The workshop had two objectives: firstly, to examine the embodied experiences of different generations of ‘those who travel under the sign women’ (Ahmed 2017: 14), and, secondly, to address their relationship to feminism. The workshop’s attention to generational experience is set against a backdrop of sustained media focus on generational tensions articulated through a conflictual binary. Moreover, within the context of Northern Ireland, conflictual binaries serve to divert and stall progressive forces for change, and perpetuate ongoing crisis and collapse. The workshop findings highlight the need for intergenerational and intersectional models that might generate more complex ways of telling feminist histories of Northern Ireland, as well as a broader understanding of the invasive forces that shape embodied histories and of their legacy.

Restrictive gender norms and violent conflict in Northern Ireland have cultivated a climate of repression that has impeded corporeal movement and expression in myriad ways. In her personal essay ‘No dancing’, Northern Irish writer Jan Carson asserts the hold of ‘Catholic guilt … Protestant shame’ (2018: 75), which is felt through the body as a ‘kind of tightness’ (70). The history of invasion is writ large on women’s bodies: from the poetry of Seamus Heaney, for example ‘Act of Union’, to the sexual violence staged in Bill Morrison’s A Love Song for Ulster, we see the deployment of the well-worn trope of woman as land, subjected to violent, sexual possession as a metaphor for colonial oppression (Fitzpatrick 2018: 157–63). However, what histories might unfold when we refuse these invasive and limiting narratives and instead create a space and offer the means through which to express silenced bodies and experiences. In 2021, I embarked on a practice-as-research project underpinned by the fundamental assertion of the value of embodied knowledge as a refusal of the silence and shame imposed on feminized bodies and as a means of engaging with the complexity of identity and lived experience.¹ I developed a somatic movement workshop with Nicola Curry, the artistic director of Maiden Voyage Dance NI, whose expertise lies in somatic dance and movement practice, Hanna Somatics, Feldenkrais, and Authentic Movement. The workshop had two objectives: first, to examine the embodied experiences of different generations of ‘those who travel under the sign women’ (Ahmed 2017: 14), and, second, to address their relationship to feminism.

Eilish Rooney asserts, ‘[r]epresentative democracy, politics and gender in the north of Ireland are enmeshed within the hierarchies of power and inequality, which are differently experienced and differently understood by differently positioned women’ (2000: 166). The value that feminism places on lived experience was fundamental to the workshop’s objective to facilitate exploration of embodied histories. The workshop was structured to primarily focus on generation as a means of addressing how women are ‘positioned’ differently. This attention to generational experience is set against a backdrop of sustained media focus on generational tensions articulated through a conflictual binary: the supposed feud between Baby Boomers and ‘snowflake’ Millennials, which we saw harnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic when younger and older generations were pitted against one another. Moreover, within the context of Northern Ireland, murdered journalist Lyra McKee has described the ‘mocking tone’ with which the generational label ‘Ceasefire Babies’ is used to describe those born after the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (1998). In her last article, McKee highlights how her generation have grown up in an era of austerity politics and connects the economic and post-Agreement landscape:

The story of how my generation got fucked over was a different one … Peace, we were assured, would bring a thriving new economy. It never appeared. It didn’t matter what qualifications you had, the most plentiful work was to be found in call centres, answering or making calls for a minimum wage. (McKee 2020)

McKee highlights a generational model defined by conflict and betrayal, and refutes a simple developmental narrative that results in ‘thriving’ peace time.

The tendency to focus on the sectarian divide in politics and culture in Northern Ireland has side-lined exploration of more complex identities. Northern Ireland’s ethno-sectarian divisions are the legacy of a history of invasion reaching back centuries. The Plantation of Ulster in the seventeenth century saw the arrival of settlers from Scotland and the north of England, and the confiscation of lands from Gaelic chiefs. The creation of a wealthy, land-owning Protestant community with ties to Great Britain generated a division that was cemented by the creation of Northern Ireland in 1921, partitioned from the newly independent Irish Free State. The non-violent civil rights campaign of the 1960s sought an end to discrimination against the Catholic and nationalist population. The subsequent outbreak of sectarian violence, accompanied by the arrival of British troops, resulted in a period of conflict euphemistically known as the Troubles (1968–98). Peace followed the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement but political instability persists in the region: the Agreement’s power-sharing mechanisms are rooted in ethno-national division. There have been repeated suspensions of the NI Assembly, including at the time of writing.² The region’s history of invasion has clearly had a seismic impact but the need to engage with community and identity beyond a simple binary is pressing. Moreover, a gendered lens is vital to a broader understanding of the invasive forces that shape embodied histories and of their legacy.

Scholarly studies of Northern Ireland, including its theatre and performance, have been dominated by the Troubles. Recent scholarship has explicitly endeavoured to counter these hegemonic accounts: a notable example is Caroline Magennis’ (2021) work on fiction after the Troubles, which turns to the realms of affect and intimacy to refigure the political. As Northern Ireland emerges into a post-conflict period, scholars need to engage, as Mark Phelan argues, with ‘the rich plenitude and complex flux of new forces, forms and themes shaping contemporary theatre practice in Northern Ireland’ (2016: 373). The workshop facilitated the participants’ exploration of these forces, including feminism, as well as consideration of their differing experiences as influenced by gender and generation. Participants were empowered to refuse the constraints of the corporeal invasions that have shaped their lives as they authored their own embodied histories.

The workshop took place twice – on 3 and 5 August 2021 – with seven participants on each occasion. These numbers were in line with COVID-19 regulations at the time, which included social distancing requirements. The workshop was designed to be accessible to people of all abilities and without any prior experience of somatics or other movement practices. An open call was shared through networks, including Queen’s University Belfast, and Theatre and Dance NI. In addition, Maiden Voyage Dance shared the call with participants from their Belfast Movement Choir, which is open to all ages and has a broader demographic than academic and professional dance networks. The fourteen participants who took part in the workshop spanned five generations, with one participant respectively from the youngest and oldest cohorts: the Pre-War Generation (born before 1945) and Generation Z (born from 1996 to 2000; definitions vary but in the context of Northern Ireland the midpoint coincides with the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement). As these generations are either more than 76 years of age or less than 21 to 25 years, one would expect them to make up a smaller proportion of respondents to the call. The other participants were fairly evenly spread across the other larger cohorts with four Baby Boomers (1945–65), three Generation X (1966–79) and five Millennials (1980–97).

At the start of the workshop, participants were asked to complete a demographic survey that comprised questions drawn from the 2021 Northern Ireland Census. The lack of diversity in Northern Ireland’s population was reflected in the group: twelve out of fourteen participants described their national identity as British/Irish/Northern Irish/Scottish. In the 2021 census (Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency 2022), 96.55 per cent of the resident population identified as ‘white’: the workshop demographic constituted twelve participants identifying their ethnic group as ‘white’ and two participants as Latinx. In terms of sexual identity, ten of the participants identified as straight. Nine of the participants self-identified as middle-class. So, while participants were drawn from across generational groups, the predominant experience was that of white, straight, middle-class women. Although there are limitations to the breadth of experience conveyed, the workshop offered participants a valuable opportunity to draw creatively on corporeal sources to explore their experiences of gender and generation.

SOMATIC MOVEMENT AS EMBODIED HISTORY

Feminist phenomenologists, including Elizabeth Grosz (1994) and Iris Marion Young (2005), have explored the implication that the lived body is fundamental to both experience and the production of knowledge. Somatic movement practice can bring this knowledge to our attention through mindful movement. Martha Eddy describes how, ‘[i]n somatic studies, the body is perceived as the source of human intelligence – one learns through the living body’ (2017: 7). This approach offered workshop participants the opportunity to explore their embodied knowledge: to discover the histories in and of their bodies, and thereby investigate the embodied experiences of different generations of women in Northern Ireland. Enabling women to discover and value these corporeal sources, counter to experiencing their bodies as silenced and objectified by patriarchal society, was fundamental to the workshop.

The two-hour workshop was led by myself with Nicola Curry present in an advisory capacity. We started the workshop with a body scan, which heightened participants’ body–mind awareness and prepared them to move. Following this experiential anatomy, they engaged in a somatic enquiry centred on the pelvis, as I explained to the participants: it is ‘an energy centre for many disciplines and where your power emanates from. It is also the seat of your reproductive system and is often associated with passion, creative energy and pleasure.’ This was offered as an empowering invitation to further connection, or indeed reconnection, with the body as a source of knowledge, and in particular, the pelvic area as a crucible of strength. It cannot be overstated how important this framing was within a society where people of all genders have been socialized to experience feminized bodies as shameful, rather than as sources of pleasure and expression. The workshop was then comprised of three explorations: first, a movement response to biographical questions followed by written reflection on these questions; second, a written reflection on an image, which participants were asked to bring to the workshop; third, an exploration through Authentic Movement of their relationship to feminism followed by written reflection.

Somatic practices have a long tradition of incorporating written exercises so that movement and writing continually inform each other. The interplay between body and text is developed in Janet Adler’s work in the discipline of Authentic Movement. Adler reflects on the ‘embodied text’:

As people explore writing the embodied experience rather than writing about it, they can discover new ways of knowing the distance between experience and word, as well as the absence of such distance. The writing process brings a heightened awareness of words that emanate directly from the body. (Adler 2002: 154)

The intention of the activities in the workshop was to afford participants the opportunity to discover new ways of examining how gender is scripted on and through their bodies. The ongoing nature of the dialogue between movement and text underpins engagement with the process of gender as something that can be pinned down and exposed but that also escapes definition – of writing gender on and through our bodies but also exceeding these invasive scripts. The structure of the workshop endeavoured to emphasize the creative agency of the participants, and the written reflections were threaded throughout the movement workshop to enable them to ‘write’ their embodied histories. Their ‘embodied text’ was created through both movement and written reflections, thereby facilitating Susan Leigh Foster’s proposal of the ‘possibility of a scholarship that addresses a writing body as a well as a body written upon’ (1995: 12).

BIOGRAPHICAL EXPLORATION

The workshops took place amid a mixture of nerves and excitement as, following the easing of pandemic restrictions, we were finally able to gather in-person. Our varying experiences of the preceding eighteen months undoubtedly heightened the sense of importance in coming together to move in a shared space. The participants were invited to join the workshop as co-creators, working through somatic movement to communicate their embodied text. The first movement enquiry invited participants to move in response to biographical prompts, which led them through the stages of their life to explore how gendered roles have shaped their emotional expression, bodily comportment and assertion of their self. These somatic responses were therefore deeply personal in nature and so I made the decision that my analysis would not be based on my interpretation of their movement, rather, that I would approach their movement through their written reflections, which were threaded throughout the workshop in response to the movement enquiries. The analysis that follows is drawn from these ‘embodied texts’, which were authored by the participants.

In these ‘embodied texts’ there were just two references to the history of violence in the region: a Baby Boomer participant made reference to feeling ‘sad Troubles started, bomb scares in school, bomb in my street’. She went on to describe how in her teens there was ‘ongoing uncertainty in NI’. A Generation X participant mentioned how ‘growing up in the 70s there was no room in the world for sensitivity’. The youngest participants did not mention the conflict, although its legacy has been a feature of their lives.³ The overall lack of reference may be explained by the focus of the workshop on gender, as well as a reticence to share potentially traumatic experiences. It is also important to note that experiences of the conflict are shaped by an uneven spatial distribution: urban working-class communities (particularly in the North and West of Belfast) were most severely impacted by violence and continue to be the most segregated and deprived areas (Fay et al.1999).

What was most striking about the participants’ responses to the series of biographical prompts was that there were no discernible generational distinctions among contemporaries. Rather, what was broadly evident were experiences of anger, frustration and exhaustion: a shared affective history in response to expectations to fulfil traditional feminine roles throughout life stages. To take one example, one participant’s written reflection described how she ‘played this feminine role in the house’ and it ‘made me feel both a bit special and a bit resentful – that I was somehow expected to do more/help more at home purely because I was a girl’. The impact of this resentment of, and confinement to, a restrictive notion of the feminine was strikingly captured by another participant’s ‘embodied text’, which described her experience as: ‘confining, tiring, difficult, painful, silent, narrow, reducing, endless’. The movement communicated here encapsulates a diminishing affective experience. Clare Hemmings (2012) argues that feeling, and being moved by, onto-epistemological gaps (between one’s sense of self and the social possibilities afforded) can potentially form the basis of feminist politics. Several of the participants evidenced awareness of the affective impact of this gap: ‘By my teens I started to feel this internal conflict of my sense of self with the external expectations of what it was to be female.’ This is echoed by another participant’s dawning awareness as a child that ‘not being rude to adults (very important to my parents) might mean not being truthful to me’.

References to constriction and the need to find a means of ‘survival’ permeate the responses. Interestingly, one participant noted the price of women’s visibility and how, ‘In my 40s I began to feel at home in my own body and to relax into the invisibility of older women which has been a lovely relief.’ Participants indicated a variety of strategies for navigating the conflict between self-expression and patriarchy, including a return to education, creative outlets such as dance, and feminism. An affective desire for expansion was harnessed by one participant who noted the importance of ‘finding spaces in feminist and queer communities to allow breath’. One participant described how she became ‘aware that women were pushed into roles they may not have wanted’ and that, ‘I seemed to lose my strength for several years. I feel each time I move I get my strength back.’ The sense of possibility and freedom in movement was one of the underlying motivations of the workshop and several participants commented afterwards how they felt empowered and invigorated by this. The workshop aimed to facilitate the participants’ embodied, creative expression through movement in order to push at the patriarchal limits of what we are told is possible.

WHO DO YOU CONSIDER TO BE A FEMINIST?

For the purposes of the second exploration, participants were asked to bring an image of someone they consider to be feminist and who they admire. The intention was to explore different generations’ understanding of feminism but it was also important for the flow of the workshop as it signalled a shift in focus from personal life experiences to a consideration of what is feminism and who is feminist. It therefore paved the way for the third exploration, which turned to how feminism moves us. Participants were invited to engage in a period of reflection, or ‘slow looking’, on their chosen image. A series of questions guided them through this reflection, which concluded with an invitation to consider: What in this picture resonates with my understanding of my relationship to feminism?

In terms of the images selected, all participants chose women who are in politics and activism, and/or the cultural and artistic sphere. Some trends emerged in that Generation X participants focused on cultural figures while the Pre-War and Baby Boomer participants focused on politics, activism and law. For the most part, white, Western women were picked, which was reflective of the predominantly white group. Two Latinx participants chose Colombian and Chilean activists, while two Millennial participants added to the diversity of the choices with their selection of bell hooks and Frida Kahlo. The choices evidenced both period and life cycle effects as loosely the ages of the feminists in the images got younger in tandem with the participants’ ages. That said, what was most striking was that the feminists chosen were all in their late 40s and older, with most more than 60. There was one outlier with Lady Gaga, age 36, who was selected by the youngest Generation Z participant: however, although Lady Gaga is much younger than all the other feminists in the images, she is still from an older generation than the person who chose her. All participants selected feminists who are about their age/within their generation, or that are older or historical figures. While this arguably evidences how women look up to their feminist mothers and value the wisdom that has been gained through life experience, it might also reveal attitudes towards younger women. In the context of Northern Ireland, Alison Garden (2018, 2022) has written about how both the TV series Derry Girls and the fiction of Lucy Caldwell centre the experiences of girlhood in defiance of society’s failure to take them seriously. Within patriarchal societies, young women are treated with suspicion and dismissed as sources of wisdom, authority and knowledge.

WHAT DOES YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FEMINISM FEEL LIKE?

The final movement exploration was a short improvisation where participants had the opportunity to develop the act of co-creation by working in pairs. This task enabled exploration of the question: what does your relationship with feminism feel like and how does it encourage you to move? The discipline of Authentic Movement structured the exploration as participants paired up and took turns to be a mover and a witness. Janet Adler describes the relationship between the two roles:

For each, work is centred in the development of the inner witness, which is one way of understanding the development of consciousness. In this discipline the inner witness is externalised, embodied by a person who is called the outer witness. Another person, called the mover, embodies the moving self. This relationship evolves within the study of three interdependent realms of experience: the individual body, the collective body, and the conscious body. (Adler 2002: xvi)

The process of moving and witnessing works to heighten conscious embodiment and offer new ways of knowing the self. Adler acknowledges the challenges of Authentic Movement work: ‘The choice to risk being seen by a witness inevitably includes a willingness to endure the possibility of not feeling seen’ (2002: 6). There is a vulnerability both in being seen and not feeling seen so it was important to invite participants to give the mover their fullest attention and to remind them to hold non-judgemental and compassionate awareness to the self and others while moving and witnessing. Following their improvisations, they were invited to write about their experience as both mover and witness.

Overall, the improvisations were positive in terms of participants’ relationship to feminism, as evidenced through capacious movements and expansion of their bodies in space, as well as the recurrence of embracing gestures connoting support. Several of the participants also acknowledged that feminism is ‘not easy’. The one outlier to these responses was that of the Pre-War generation participant whose resistance and dissatisfaction were evident in the frustrated actions communicated through her movement response. This was echoed by her written reflection, which described her ‘difficulty … with the extremists such as Germaine Greer’. In Generations: Does when you’re born shape who you are, Bobby Duffy suggests that the generational divide is stronger than the gender divide with respect to the Pre-War generation and highlights their belief that ‘a woman’s place is in the home’ (2021: 143). However, lest we assume that feminist histories are simple narratives of linear progress, we might look to how Germaine Greer’s ‘extremism’ has been cast in a different light in more recent years with her transphobic commentary and dismissal of the #MeToo movement. Moreover, in her written reflection the Pre-War participant acknowledged working through her resistance during the workshop to explore the ‘power and strength’ of feminism. Attention to this participant’s ‘difficulty’ underlines the key finding of the workshop: generational differences and tensions are exaggerated, and they are not insurmountable.

CONCLUSION

Consideration of feminist histories from a personal perspective is a valuable approach, for ‘if we start with our experiences of becoming feminists not only might we have another way of generating feminist ideas, but we might generate new ideas about feminism’ (Ahmed 2017: 12). Feminism in Northern Ireland has a complex history, which has been overshadowed by the politics of the Troubles; a more nuanced approach to identity serves as a starting point from which to disentangle these feminisms. Through attention both to how we frame these histories and to supressed, embodied knowledge, we might generate new ideas about feminism in the region. The workshop revealed the gendered limitations experienced by participants and that feminism has been a force for change in these women’s lives. The workshop findings also support Shelley Budgeon’s submission that generational experiences are overstated: ‘suggesting levels of similarity that do not exist, while obscuring continuities between different positions’ (2011: 169). Budgeon’s assertion is made in the context of discussion of the generational logic of the wave model of feminist history, which serves to erase ‘the ongoing contestations that have constituted the complex genealogy of feminist thought and practice’ (171). Crucially, the combination of the overstatement of generations with an invasive model of conflictual binaries (including mother/daughter, during/after the Troubles) perpetuates the loss of rich and complex histories. Moreover, within the context of Northern Ireland, we can see how conflictual binaries serve to divert and stall progressive forces for change, and perpetuate ongoing crisis and collapse. Deadlock and division have hampered grassroots activist work, as Deiana, Hagen and Roberts point out:

The adversarial nature of post-Agreement politics continues to hinder the realization of feminist and LGBTQ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning] rights. For example, this is visible in the mobilization of the ethno-national divide or the misuse of certain power-sharing mechanisms to postpone or avoid political change. (Deiana et al. 2022: 6)

The temporal design of the workshop drew on a generational logic that reinforced normative scripts. The first exploration of the workshop endeavoured to examine generational experiences through life stages and the biographical prompts unfolded in a linear narrative arc. However, this enforces ‘a normative set of temporal constructs, including biological or social reproduction, and monetary or cultural inheritance’ (Freeman 2007: 165). In their discussion of queer time, Halberstam rejects a timeline structured by the narrative coherence of life stages and critiques ‘the careful social scripts that usher even the most queer among us through major markers of individual development and into normativity’ (2007: 182). Generational models that harness continuity as a self-perpetuating legacy install stasis; however, alternative temporal models have the potential to initiate change. Through the refusal of both conflictual binaries and linearity, intergenerational and intersectional models might generate more complex ways of telling feminist histories of Northern Ireland. These findings provide the basis for the next stage of the research project, which will explore how we move in an intergenerational feminist solidarity and what it feels like.

Notes

1 This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No 889279. See Hill (2023) for the dataset for the research.

2 Following the General Election in May 2022, the NI Executive has been unable to form as the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) refuse to vote for an Assembly Speaker. The election saw Sinn Féin become the largest party for the first time, entitling Michelle O’Neill to serve as the first nationalist First Minister. The DUP cites its issues with the NI Protocol, which, they argue, has created a border in the Irish Sea.

3 See Gina Donnelly’s discussion of the impact of Lyra McKee’s murder on the post-Belfast/Good Friday Agreement generation: ‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget that day. A journalist being murdered in the streets felt so alien to me, it doesn’t feel welcome or like it belongs in our world anymore’ (Hill 2021).