Book contents
- The New Irish Studies
- Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions
- The New Irish Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part One Legacies
- Part Two Contemporary Conditions
- Chapter 6 The Global Contemporary: The Humanitarian Legacy in Irish Fiction
- Chapter 7 The Queer Contemporary: Time and Temporality in Queer Writing
- Chapter 8 The Feminist Contemporary: The Contradictions of Critique
- Chapter 9 The Maternal Contemporary: Pregnancy, Maternity, and Non-Maternity on the Irish Stage
- Chapter 10 The Aging Contemporary: Aging Families and Generational Connections in Irish Writing
- Part Three Forms and Practices
- Index
Chapter 9 - The Maternal Contemporary: Pregnancy, Maternity, and Non-Maternity on the Irish Stage
from Part Two - Contemporary Conditions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2020
- The New Irish Studies
- Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions
- The New Irish Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part One Legacies
- Part Two Contemporary Conditions
- Chapter 6 The Global Contemporary: The Humanitarian Legacy in Irish Fiction
- Chapter 7 The Queer Contemporary: Time and Temporality in Queer Writing
- Chapter 8 The Feminist Contemporary: The Contradictions of Critique
- Chapter 9 The Maternal Contemporary: Pregnancy, Maternity, and Non-Maternity on the Irish Stage
- Chapter 10 The Aging Contemporary: Aging Families and Generational Connections in Irish Writing
- Part Three Forms and Practices
- Index
Summary
There is a pattern to how pregnancy is theatrically represented in Ireland: It is a taboo, a silence, an open secret. This is symptomatic of the Irish social and cultural stigmatization of women’s bodies and part of a larger discourse in which women’s bodies are carefully policed to be visible but inarticulate and assumed to be usable but unintelligible. This chapter considers new performances of pregnancy, maternity, and non-maternity on the Irish stage as a way of troubling the assumption that women’s bodies are invisible or inappropriate in contemporary theatre, in plays by ANU Productions, Bump & Grind, Stacey Gregg, Elaine Murphy, Frank McGuinness, Christian O’Reilly, and THEATREClub.
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- The New Irish Studies , pp. 161 - 176Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
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