‘Good man, Mary!’ Women musicians and the fraternity of Irish traditional music

Abstract

The study of gender is ‘inherently a study of relations of asymmetrical power and opportunity’ (S.B. Ortner and H. Whitehead, 1981. Introduction to Sexual meanings: the cultural construction of gender and sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 4 ). In the masculine space of the Irish pub, women musicians respond to this power differential by adopting an array of tactics aimed at increasing their musical participation and enjoyment. The impediments to women's public performance of Irish traditional music must also include consideration that the Irish pub is a social space in which women historically had no legitimate presence; but this is only part of the story. Untangling the complex relationships between music and gender in symbolic representations of the Irish nation further reveals a strand of cultural meanings that persists in configuring ‘woman’ and ‘music’, ‘Ireland’ and ‘nation’ in ways that are disempowering to women musicians today. This essay draws on Foucault's theory of discourse to examine the gendered historical and contemporary representations of Irish music and musicians and on postmodern feminist theory of the performativity of gender to demonstrate how deeply embedded are our gendered conceptions of subjectivity, music, and nationality.