Papers by Lisa Fitzpatrick
Speaking Out on Sexualized Violence Through Artistic Storytelling in Post-conflict Northern Ireland
Violence Against Women
Directly related to The Troubles, sexualized violence has been largely ignored, yet continues to ... more Directly related to The Troubles, sexualized violence has been largely ignored, yet continues to affect significant numbers of individuals in Northern Ireland today. This article analyzes various women's stories concerning sexualized violence shared in testimonial theater projects in Northern Ireland. We argue that (a) artistic storytelling about sexualized violence in theater projects can be a tool to release individuals and the collective from the (normalized) silence surrounding these violent acts and (b) it is an epistemological transformative method of inquiry to address these acts with the aim of eliminating them.
Performance Paradigm, Nov 11, 2015
ABEI Journal, Dec 29, 2023
This essay seeks to weave together an analysis of women's citizenship and its dependency on certa... more This essay seeks to weave together an analysis of women's citizenship and its dependency on certain silences, and the exploration of this tension in two recent productions by Belfast-based Kabosh Theatre Company. Kabosh, and company Artistic Director Paula McFetridge, stage work that examines the realities of the region in the post-conflict era. In constructing the theoretical frame for the analysis, the concept of "silence" and "silencing" draws from Kristie Dotson (2015), and from work on violence such as Gayatri Spivak's concept of "epistemic violence" and a wide range of sources on the performance of violence in theatre. Chantal Mouffe's concept of agonistic democracy shapes the discussion of the Northern Irish state, and Wendy Brown and Joane Butler are the key scholars for the consideration of citizenship and nation.
City Stages: Theatre and Urban Space in a Global City. By Michael McKinnie. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 178. £28/$45 Hb
Theatre Research International, 2008
The book’s currency is remarkable and Glow’s grasp of the politics of the recent past is impressi... more The book’s currency is remarkable and Glow’s grasp of the politics of the recent past is impressive. While her measure of political significance is sometimes beholden to the media myth that opinion columns equate to public debate, her study complements and articulates Australian playwrights’ desires for a theatre of political relevance and personal engagement, and for a dramaturgy of ‘critical nationalism’ and care (p. 15).
Rape on the Naturalistic Stage: The Example of Miss Julie
Fitzpatrick draws on different translations and interpretations of Strindberg’s naturalistic trag... more Fitzpatrick draws on different translations and interpretations of Strindberg’s naturalistic tragedy Miss Julie, including three film versions and two recent adaptions. The play centres around the seduction of a young noble woman by her family’s valet (or possibly her seduction of him). The text never clarifies whether the off-stage sex is consensual, but most interpretations—including contemporary ones—never consider the possibility that the play is about a rape. Yet it can be interpreted in that way, as Ingmar Bergman’s 1981 production makes clear. Fitzpatrick explores the play’s engagement with enduring social and cultural attitudes to women’s sexuality, and the relationship between violence and desire.
Shonagh Hill. Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019, x + 257 pp., £75.00 (hardback)
Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 2021
Irish University Review, 2020
This essay draws upon the work of Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed, and Germaine Greer to consider the #... more This essay draws upon the work of Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed, and Germaine Greer to consider the #MeToo movement and its reflection in the work of the author's students and the scandal at Dublin's Gate Theatre. Taking competing conceptions of freedom as they are materialised in this activism as it starting point, the essay questions intergenerational feminist ideas about the nature of freedom and its relationship to fear and to harassment. The essay returns to the feminist principle that ‘the personal is the political’ to reflect on women's lived experiences of threat and harassment, and young women's resistance to their objectification.
Eroticism and the Politics of Representing the Abused Body
This chapter discusses the photographic and dramatic representation of sexual violence in conflic... more This chapter discusses the photographic and dramatic representation of sexual violence in conflict and the potential for such visual spectacle to be received as erotic or titillating. The chapter begins with a brief consideration of the human fascination with horror, then draws upon the work of Judith Butler on vulnerability, and Susan Sontag and Georges Bataille on suffering to analyze the relationship between pornographic imagery and the images of Abu Ghraib prison. Taking an example of a dramatic representation of wartime rape, Colleen Wagner’s The Monument, the author’s decision not to display the body is explored as one strategy to avoid the exposure of the body to the gaze of the spectator.
The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield: Rape and Conflict
‘The group rape perpetrated by the conquerors is a metonymic celebration of territorial acquisiti... more ‘The group rape perpetrated by the conquerors is a metonymic celebration of territorial acquisition’, Spivak writes in her seminal essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988, 303). Fitzpatrick explores the construction of rape and sexual violence within the dramatic text, and the use of normative conceptions of gender and imperial, postcolonial or nationalist narrative structures to naturalize the representation of sexual violence or to use it as a metaphor for defeat and devastation. From Euripides’ Trojan Women to Lynn Nottage’s Ruined to contemporary verbatim performance in Northern Ireland, Fitzpatrick examines the metonymic ‘body of a woman as a battlefield’ (Visniec), and the strategies used by dramatists to represent the devastation of rape in wartime.
In Extremis: Staging Rape in the 2010s
Fitzpatrick explores representations of rape in recent texts and performances that seek to create... more Fitzpatrick explores representations of rape in recent texts and performances that seek to create an affective engagement with the experience of sexual violence. These challenging and troubling works dramatize the objectification of women, the lure of self-destructive violence, sex trafficking in Europe, and the murder of Jyoti Singh in 2012 in India. The chapter considers the affective power of the work, and the balance between representing women as victims and exploring women’s lived experience ethically and with efficacy.
Aguiar, Robéri o Bôto de A282 Projeto cadastro de fontes de abastecimento por água subterrânea, e... more Aguiar, Robéri o Bôto de A282 Projeto cadastro de fontes de abastecimento por água subterrânea, estado do Piauí: diagnóstico do município de Pimenteiras / Organização do texto [por] Robério Bôto de Aguiar [e] José Roberto de Carvalho Gomes. Fortaleza: CPRM-Serviço Geológico do Brasil, 2004. 1. Hidrogeologia-Piauí-Cadastros. 2. Água subterrânea-Piauí-Cadastros. I. Gomes, José Roberto de Carvalho. II Título.
Modern Drama, 2007
In summer 2005, the Irish theatre company Corcadorca presented The Merchant of Venice as part of ... more In summer 2005, the Irish theatre company Corcadorca presented The Merchant of Venice as part of a multinational project called ‘‘Relocations.’’ The production was a site-specific, promenade performance that travelled through Cork city centre late at night. It had a multinational cast in the speaking roles and a multiethnic community cast drawn from the local population, who marshalled the audience, processed, and heckled the Jewish characters from within the spectatorial space. The performance aimed to challenge the audience to confront their response to Ireland’s recent history of immigration and the country’s increasingly multilingual and multiracial population. This essay explores the concretization in performance of the fictional dramatic world of the play and focuses on specific devices used by the company to realize their interpretation of the work.
Soyinka and Postcolonialism
Rape on the Contemporary Stage
Molding Myths and Making Nations: Celtic Mythology in the Work of Yeats and Synge
... Research Institutes and Groups: Arts and Humanities Research Institute Arts and Humanities Re... more ... Research Institutes and Groups: Arts and Humanities Research Institute Arts and Humanities Research Institute > Creative Arts and Technologies. ID Code: 17117. Deposited By: Dr LisaFitzpatrick. Deposited On: 01 Mar 2011 11:29. Last Modified: 01 Mar 2011 11:29. ...
The Dramatic Representation of the New Ireland on the Contemporary Stage
The re-imagining of Ireland and Irish identity in recent years, linked to both the globalization ... more The re-imagining of Ireland and Irish identity in recent years, linked to both the globalization of the economy and the country's embrace of European integration, is being expressed in theatrical performance and in dramaturgy in a range of ways. The traditional domestic stage spaces tend now to be overtly theatrical rather than naturalistic, are physically invaded by other spaces and times, or exist in a featureless landscape isolated from external society. Key dramatic narratives of the 1960s to 1980s of intergenerational conflict and emigration, which functioned to communicate shared experience and cultural identity, are becoming obsolete or are being re-imagined as narratives of wealth and power and choice. Viewed retrospectively, the changes in Irish dramaturgy have been gradual and have manifested themselves in a number of ways, such as the parodying of genres like the Peasant Play, and a range of experiments with language and dialect. But this paper focuses specifically on...
Fitzpatrick explores the representation of rape and sexual violence in women’s dramatic writing s... more Fitzpatrick explores the representation of rape and sexual violence in women’s dramatic writing since the beginning of the feminist theatre movement. The authors’ and theatre-makers’ strategies for representing violence tends to reflect specific cultural circumstances, both in the nature of the violence and in the techniques used to write and stage it. In general these place the female character’s experience at the centre of the dramatic conflict, while seeking to avoid certain pitfalls of staging rape—such exposing the female body to the scopophilic gaze of the spectators. Fitzpatrick examines these strategies, some of which are explicitly feminist, while others draw upon conventions of naturalistic and realistic dramaturgy and performance.
Characterisation and Systemic Gender Violence: the Example of Laundry and the Figure of the Mother in Irish Culture
Writing the Irish Midlands: Marina Carr's 'Midlands Trilogy' and Patrick Kavanagh's 'Great Hunger
Female Subjectivity in the Work of Teresa Deevy and Marina Carr
... Research Institutes and Groups: Arts and Humanities Research Institute Arts and Humanities Re... more ... Research Institutes and Groups: Arts and Humanities Research Institute Arts and Humanities Research Institute > Creative Arts and Technologies. ID Code: 17115. Deposited By: Dr LisaFitzpatrick. Deposited On: 01 Mar 2011 11:31. Last Modified: 01 Mar 2011 11:31. ...
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Papers by Lisa Fitzpatrick