From Magdalenism to Slut-shaming: A Performance Historiography of Female Containment in Modern Ireland

From Magdalenism to Slut-Shaming: A Performance Historiography of Female Containment in Modern Ireland studies how reproductive rights and women’s sexuality are entangled with the limits of national identity and belonging. Focusing on the campaign to Repeal the Eighth, the constitutional amendment that criminalized abortion until 2018 in the Republic of Ireland, this dissertation investigates feminist protest tactics that use multiple media forms and embodied practices to intervene in contemporary body politics. I situate reproductive politics and feminist activism within a performance historiography of national struggle enacted across and through women’s bodies. As a contemporary protest movement, the fight for bodily autonomy is waged in the streets and town squares, and on social media and the Internet. Thus, in considering the digital as another site in the containment and control of women’s bodies, this project expands the field of feminist performance historiographies. It exposes a transhistorical framework of misogyny that endures on- and offline, continuing to regulate women’s sexuality, visibility, and access to state power. From Magdalenism to Slut-Shaming suggests that the labor of representation for Irish women and other menstruators continues to be burdened by Marian iconography. It considers how Repeal artists and activists engage intermedial performances that expose the material consequences of legal, political, and moral boundaries imposed on abortion-seekers. An intermedial approach accounts for the interactions among the body, media types, and technologies in meaning-making; these performances blend spaces, media, and realities, thereby animating the political potential in disturbing the bounds of the sacred and secular, past and present, visible and invisible. In accounting for the material and visual culture of the Repeal campaign, From Magdalenism to Slut-Shaming simultaneously engages performance, art history, and popular media. It explores the interplay of everyday rituals and performances, of live arts and still arts, that shape public spaces and mobilize bodies. Repeal artists and activists stage challenges to the stigma of shame associated with abortion, the cultural phenomenon of abortion travel, and inequities to abortion access such as class, race, ethnicity, and citizenship status. My primary sites of study include Two Women Travel, a live-tweeted abortion journey that follows two anonymous women as they traverse geographic and media borders; the on- and offline circulation and reproduction of Savita Halappanavar’s mythic image as a symbol of Repeal; the home|work Collective’s pop-up performance action The Renunciation which repurposes the Angelus prayer into a performance of abortion truth-telling at sites of transit; and Tara Flynn’s one-woman show Not a Funny Word, in which she uses comedy, song, and dance to stage her autobiographical experience as an abortion-seeker and target of digital gender harassment