Think Outside My Box: Staging Respectability and Responsibility in Ireland’s Repeal the 8th Referendum

Abstract

This article argues that the targeting of certain narratives of womanhood, those deemed ‘respectable’ and ‘responsible’, operated as a key performative and affective strategy during the Irish 2018 Referendum on the 8th Amendment of the Irish Constitution. When the Referendum to ‘repeal the 8th’ amendment was announced, both pro-choice and pro-life campaigns affiliated themselves with idealised imagery, narratives and performative strategies that focused on outdated patriarchal heterosexual constructions of ‘good’ women, i.e., respectable and responsible women, with the intention of convincing middle-ground voters. Pro-life and pro-choice campaigns in Ireland are deeply oppositional; that both sides identify the performativity of respectability and responsibility as the most influential narrative to convince the electorate signals that the conception of embodied womanhood and the traditional heterosexual family remains inextricably linked with idealised nationhood, entrenched with ideological, affective, political, cultural, and personal power. ‘Think Outside My Box’ is a call to cut ties that intersect with the foundational myth of modern Irish nationhood, and, female embodiment and representation in the twenty-first century.

Keywords

• gender performativity
• Irish performance and politics
• postcolonial narratives
• affect and shame
• emigration and mobility