Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland ─ Dissent and Disorientation

Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland examines the surge of queer performance produced across Ireland since the first stirrings of Celtic Tiger in the mid-1990s, up to the passing of the Marriage Equality referendum in the Republic in 2015. While unprecedented economic expansion stimulated the growth of certain aspects of LGBTQ culture during this time, 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, this book foregrounds performance that animates interactions among 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 legislation, 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 includeTheatre & 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 ofTheatre Research International.