Claiming trauma, glimpsing optimism: women's cultural production and understandings of reality in post-conflict Northern Ireland.

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Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, art and literature by women from Northern Ireland have becomeincreasingly experimental in form. This research project will examine women's cultural production after the 'Troubles' andhow it challenges accepted ideas of truth and reality in the post-conflict society. I will investigate the ways women's art andliterature allow for an honest engagement with Northern Ireland's emotional economies after the 'Troubles', and howresidual trauma plays out in the lives of its citizens when experiences outside the dominant machismo of the conflict arealways already relegated to the past.How does art and literature by Northern Irish women subvert the restrictive social, historical and cultural conditions oftheir post-conflict society? Alternative narratives of the 'Troubles' are gaining increasing recognition, both in academiccircles and in popular culture, particularly those that platform the gaps and absences in available histories. This denotes abroader desire to move away from the dominant machismo of the legacy of the conflict, in order to gain a consciousness ofthe 'Troubles' that has hitherto been denied to a significant number of the population of Northern Ireland. Recognising thelineage of experimentation in contemporary women's writing more broadly, and its employment in tackling themes ofsignificant social importance and the implications of these on the gendered body (Bracken & Harney-Mahajan, 2017), Ipropose that this subversion offers a way to work through the duality of the condition of being 'post'- conflict, and tochallenge the temporality of historical trauma.This project offers a two-pronged approach. Firstly, to examine how the use of experimental methods in women's culturalproduction cultivates the space to question our understandings of truth and reality after the 'Troubles', and how this allowsfor excluded experiences and narratives to be platformed. Secondly, to challenge the temporality of these narratives andthe notion of a 'post-Troubles' society more broadly. This thesis intervenes in current scholarship on the history and cultureof Northern Ireland by challenging the linear timeline of the conflict, questioning the reality of the binary structure ofNorthern Irish society, and introducing an emotional history of the 'Troubles'. As a feminist research project, it contributesto a burgeoning field within Northern Ireland studies and is unique in its interdisciplinary approach. This originalcontribution will demonstrate the space that has been created by women's cultural production to explore excludedexperiences of the conflict and how, by interrogating the way we perceive truth and reality, this has transformed ourunderstandings of the 'Troubles'.This interdisciplinary project will primarily incorporate readings of fiction by Jan Carson, Anna Burns, Lucy Caldwell, WendyErskine and Marilyn McLaughlin. In order to fully engage with an emotional history of the conflict and ideas of contestedspace I will also integrate analyses of the work of visual arts practitioners such as Sandra Johnston, Michaela Cullen, UrsulaBurke and BBeyond, as well as work by contemporary poets such as Sinead Morrissey, Leontia Flynn and Susannah Dickey.The commonality between the fiction, poetry and visual arts I have chosen is a tendency towards experimentation. Byemploying creative methods such as magical realism, surrealism and cartoonish dark humour with a focus on liminalityand emotional experience, these practitioners consistently challenge theories of linear history and the traditional realistmode normally associated with cultural production that engages with the 'Troubles'.