Photo by the incredible Kenneth O'Halloran.
“Revolutionary Threads: The Mediation of Gender and Political Identity in Women’s Irish Dance Costume, 1917–1937”
Currently in review
ABSTRACT | This article explores the ways in which identity politics and women’s political activism directly influenced the development of the female Irish dancing costume between 1917 and 1937, focusing particularly on the emergence and brief adoption of the “kilt and coatee,” a male Celtic Revival costume adapted to the female dancing body. As will be argued, the revival of Irish dance at the turn-of-the-century, coterminous with a period of escalating political tension, militarization, and ultimately, revolution and civil war, resulted in the politicization of dance as a cultural embodiment of Irish Republican Nationalism. Subsequently, the first dancing costume, a style of dress bred to promote a conservative sexual and racial identity, was abandoned in favor of a mode of dress that embodied and commemorated martyred republicans. The article touches upon the influence of “revolutionary women” on Irish dance culture and costuming, suggesting also that the suppression of republican women in the immediate post-revolution period contributed to the decline of the kilt and coatee and the return to heteronormative stability in dancing dress. Further, this paper seeks to contribute to the growing body of material culture scholarship, illustrating the potential of material culture analysis to illuminate marginalized lives and hidden histories.
Currently in review
ABSTRACT | This article explores the ways in which identity politics and women’s political activism directly influenced the development of the female Irish dancing costume between 1917 and 1937, focusing particularly on the emergence and brief adoption of the “kilt and coatee,” a male Celtic Revival costume adapted to the female dancing body. As will be argued, the revival of Irish dance at the turn-of-the-century, coterminous with a period of escalating political tension, militarization, and ultimately, revolution and civil war, resulted in the politicization of dance as a cultural embodiment of Irish Republican Nationalism. Subsequently, the first dancing costume, a style of dress bred to promote a conservative sexual and racial identity, was abandoned in favor of a mode of dress that embodied and commemorated martyred republicans. The article touches upon the influence of “revolutionary women” on Irish dance culture and costuming, suggesting also that the suppression of republican women in the immediate post-revolution period contributed to the decline of the kilt and coatee and the return to heteronormative stability in dancing dress. Further, this paper seeks to contribute to the growing body of material culture scholarship, illustrating the potential of material culture analysis to illuminate marginalized lives and hidden histories.
‘Emerging from the Shamrock’: Gender and Post-Nationalism in the Irish Step Dancing Costume
Currently in review
ABSTRACT | This chapter explores the changing lives of women in Ireland through the fashioning of the female Irish step dancing costume. A contrived symbol of Irishness, the institutionalization of women’s step dance costume at the turn of the twentieth century conformed to a broader sociological practice of invented traditions (Hobsbawn & Ranger, 1983) associated with the formation of nation states across Europe. Modest, homogenous, and homespun, costume expressed and enforced the sartorial morality of the nation, promoting ethnic pride at home and abroad. However, the last twenty years of step dance costuming have negated past practice entirely, incorporating the individual agency of dancers into entirely unprecedented and endlessly diverse forms of dance dress. These forms are hyper-feminized, largely free from past iterations of Irishness, modern (even fashionable) in appearance and extravagantly consumptive in both cost and manufacture.
While male costume has experienced similarly significant change to little notice, the modernized female costume is, by contrast, hotly contested, criticized as a dangerous threat to the “performance” of Irishness. As Chapkis has observed, women’s bodies have been historically objectified, valorized and vilified as the carriers of culture, heritage, and morality. (1988) In Ireland, this feminization of Irishness has had a particularly strong hold on social consciousness, with depictions of the ‘Sean-Bhean Bhocht’ (poor old woman) or ‘Kathleen ni Hoolihan’ linking perceptions of femininity with a colonial legacy of oppression. These representations have historically constituted a peculiar, hegemonic force on the practice of female step dance costuming. Through the intervention of time and its relational processes at the macro and micro levels of history and society, the emerging collective value system of the dancing community would come to upset the costume’s traditional ‘colleen’ aesthetic and its previous associations with the body politic of the Nationalist Free-State project.
The debate over the appropriateness of costume as a national symbol highlights critical discourses in a multitude of disciplines, of which gendered dress practice and the relevance and purpose of nationalism in post-modernity will be discussed. As will also be argued, ‘constitutive creativity of action’ (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998:969) has re-invigorated the practice of Irish culture at home and abroad. In stark contrast to past practice, Irish dancers today create culture, resulting in unprecedented empowerment and global popularization of the art form. This chapter explores the historical and contemporary practice of step dance costuming focusing particularly on the ways in which the costume has absorbed changing attitudes towards nationality and gender in Irish life. Through the analysis of secondary resources, primary documentary evidence, and in-depth interviews the author explores the development of costume, its making and meaning, through the unique agentic processes situated within the temporal dimensions of Irish cultural and social history. In doing so, this body of research argues that the unorthodox modernization of the costume, rather than reflecting the oppression of beauty culture and objectified consumerism exclusively (Greer 1999; Felski 1995), communicates also a confident liberation from post-colonial trauma in the lives of Irish women.
Currently in review
ABSTRACT | This chapter explores the changing lives of women in Ireland through the fashioning of the female Irish step dancing costume. A contrived symbol of Irishness, the institutionalization of women’s step dance costume at the turn of the twentieth century conformed to a broader sociological practice of invented traditions (Hobsbawn & Ranger, 1983) associated with the formation of nation states across Europe. Modest, homogenous, and homespun, costume expressed and enforced the sartorial morality of the nation, promoting ethnic pride at home and abroad. However, the last twenty years of step dance costuming have negated past practice entirely, incorporating the individual agency of dancers into entirely unprecedented and endlessly diverse forms of dance dress. These forms are hyper-feminized, largely free from past iterations of Irishness, modern (even fashionable) in appearance and extravagantly consumptive in both cost and manufacture.
While male costume has experienced similarly significant change to little notice, the modernized female costume is, by contrast, hotly contested, criticized as a dangerous threat to the “performance” of Irishness. As Chapkis has observed, women’s bodies have been historically objectified, valorized and vilified as the carriers of culture, heritage, and morality. (1988) In Ireland, this feminization of Irishness has had a particularly strong hold on social consciousness, with depictions of the ‘Sean-Bhean Bhocht’ (poor old woman) or ‘Kathleen ni Hoolihan’ linking perceptions of femininity with a colonial legacy of oppression. These representations have historically constituted a peculiar, hegemonic force on the practice of female step dance costuming. Through the intervention of time and its relational processes at the macro and micro levels of history and society, the emerging collective value system of the dancing community would come to upset the costume’s traditional ‘colleen’ aesthetic and its previous associations with the body politic of the Nationalist Free-State project.
The debate over the appropriateness of costume as a national symbol highlights critical discourses in a multitude of disciplines, of which gendered dress practice and the relevance and purpose of nationalism in post-modernity will be discussed. As will also be argued, ‘constitutive creativity of action’ (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998:969) has re-invigorated the practice of Irish culture at home and abroad. In stark contrast to past practice, Irish dancers today create culture, resulting in unprecedented empowerment and global popularization of the art form. This chapter explores the historical and contemporary practice of step dance costuming focusing particularly on the ways in which the costume has absorbed changing attitudes towards nationality and gender in Irish life. Through the analysis of secondary resources, primary documentary evidence, and in-depth interviews the author explores the development of costume, its making and meaning, through the unique agentic processes situated within the temporal dimensions of Irish cultural and social history. In doing so, this body of research argues that the unorthodox modernization of the costume, rather than reflecting the oppression of beauty culture and objectified consumerism exclusively (Greer 1999; Felski 1995), communicates also a confident liberation from post-colonial trauma in the lives of Irish women.
