Repealing Mary: A Performance Historiography of Ireland's Campaign for Abortion Rights

Repealing Mary claims that the fight for reproductive justice disturbs the spatial limits of the national imaginary. In the Irish context, public space is haunted by iconography of the Virgin Mary—the Queen of Ireland who is the epitome of motherhood. From roadside shrines to the daily national television broadcast of the Angelus prayer, Marian imagery is woven into topographical and media landscapes, marking the thresholds of womanhood and national belonging. In this postcolonial society, how does one reconcile the persistent performative presence of the Catholic past amid a rapidly changing population that is increasingly progressive, multicultural, and secular? Moreover, how do the discourse and political ephemera of the abortion debate complicate evolving definitions of womanhood and motherhood as the nation’s homogeneity wanes?

Gray scrutinizes how activists and artists utilize intermedial performances—objects and events that depend upon the interconnectedness among bodies, media forms, and technology—to reimage and reimagine the visual and material culture of public space. Using the Repeal the Eighth campaign as a frame, she interrogates the margins of feminist representation at the messy intersection of neoliberal body politics and the durability of the sacred in public spaces.