Beyond Hostile Borders: Re-negotiating the Gendered Embodiment of resistance and Agency in the film 'Some Mother's Son'

Abstract

This paper focuses on the re-deployment of gendered bodies as sites of resistance in the Northern Irish conflict It brings together an interdisciplinary mix of Peace, Film and Gender Studies in a close analysis of the film Some Mother's Son (Terry George 1996). In focusing on this film text we are able to identify the extent to which socially patrolled gendered binaries dictated the levels of agency afforded to mothers and their sons in the context of the 1981 Hunger Strike in Northern Ireland. We make explicit connections between the gendered embodiment of resistance and the atrophying effects of fixed notions of rendered violence and power. We argue that the disfigurement and self-harm inscribed upon the bodies of the imprisoned male hunger. strikers enacted a characteristically 'feminine' strategy of resistance. Indeed, the foregrounding of the body in their campaign of resistance also positioned them as in a relatively 'feminised' position in relation to the political (and, ostensibly, 'rational') discourse of those enforcing their incarceration. The subsequent agency and public profile of their mothers, who initially spoke and acted on behalf of their sons, allowed for their exploration of different gender roles and for the adoption of different modes of operation within the wider conflict, leading to altered priorities within the political struggle. The transgressive agency enacted by these mothers challenged longstanding borders between male and female and secular and state, demonstrating that the larger conflict was underpinned by various culturally entrenched hostilities.