Rethinking the Armagh Women’s Dirty Protest

Abstract

On February 7, 1980, in Northern Ireland (NI), 32 female republican inmates, held in Armagh Women’s Prison, joined their 400 male comrades in Long Kesh men’s prison in what is known as the “dirty protest.” Unlike the hunger strike that would commence in 1981, the dirty protest represented a new form of challenge to authority that had no pattern in existing political culture, but was one that entailed the use of bodily waste as a political weapon. For the same reasons as their male comrades, the 32 women were protesting against British colonialism. However, the similarity between the protests was negated by the presence of menstrual blood that tapped an experience of the feminine excluded from NI’s conservative public discourse. This meant that in order to deploy their own protest of utilizing dirt, the Armagh women needed to fight essentialist ideals present in the dominant establishments of the time. These included the male-dominant republican movement, the unitary feminist movement, and the patriarchal Catholic Church. On reflection, it became apparent that the women required a female voice; one that rejects sameness, equality, and a shared identity; one that acknowledges difference and destabilizes phallic language to question cultural hegemonic images of femininity.KeywordsPolitical IdentityMenstrual BloodBritish ColonialismShared IdentityNorthern IrelandThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.