"We Can't Keep Painting Over Our Problems": Murals, Social Media, and Feminist Activism in Ireland

Abstract

"We Can't Keep Painting Over Our Problems":Murals, Social Media, and Feminist Activism in Ireland Rachael A. Young (bio) On 26 July 2016 eighty protestors gathered in the space in front of Dublin's Project Arts Centre. Dressed in black "repeal" jumpers and blue face paint, the group chanted "What do we want? A woman's right to choose!" while holding up photographs of a red heart with the words "Repeal the 8th" written inside. The photos replicated a mural that was painted over the previous day. Activist Andrea Horan had commissioned popular street artist Maser to paint the pro-choice mural, but Dublin City Council announced that the artwork lacked necessary permits. Project Arts Centre director Cian O'Brien was forced to paint over the image, leaving a plain blue wall where the mural had previously resided. But this censorship could not remove Maser's artwork or the idea it represented from the public sphere. Indeed, Irish feminists and activists refused to allow the mural image to be forgotten or erased. Standing in front of the protested space in Temple Bar, one activist argued, "You can paint over the mural. You can cover us up, but the problem is not going away. We're still here. It's not going away with a little bit of blue paint."1 Refusing to be "painted over" anymore, Irish feminist activists and their allies used murals to create both a physical and digital space [End Page 320] to discuss and advocate for women's issues during the repeal movement. This article considers how murals created a forum-like space, both corporeal and virtual, and allowed Irish citizens to interact with feminist issues and debates in their daily lives. Many academics have discussed how art has created a dissident space for feminist activists, exploring how Irish women have created and navigated these spaces to challenge an oppressive patriarchal system.2 In this article I will build on this work, specifically exploring how contemporary feminist murals in Ireland integrate and combine physical and digital space. Replicas of Maser's mural spread across Ireland, creating material locations in which viewers could physically insert themselves into the abortion debate while simultaneously allowing people a digital method to claim the issue as their own via personal social-media accounts. This amalgamated space allowed people to interact with Maser's mural, and through it the repeal movement, in a personal and continual manner. In using both physical murals and their socialmedia interactions, Irish feminists successfully helped to repeal the Eighth Amendment and created a precedent for feminist activism to use street art to engage with other issues concerning female bodies, including the subjects of sexual violence and body positivity.3 This article will examine four murals that all engage with Irish women's struggle to end patriarchal control of the female body. I begin with two pro-choice murals, Maser's 2016 Repeal the 8th and the 2018 Savita by Aches. I then analyze two artworks by street artist Estr, the 2018 work Not Asking For It, which addresses the topics of consent, sexual violence, and rape culture in Ireland, and a 2019 mural depicting singer Lizzo that aims to combat the stigma of shame [End Page 321] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Maser's Repeal the 8th mural after being painted over. The HunReal Issues, (@HunRealIssues), Twitter, 26 July 2016, 12:58 pm, https://twitter.com/HunRealIssues/status/757545602825748480. surrounding female bodies and sexuality by embracing body-positive ideals. Building upon the success of Maser's work, I argue that each of these murals created a combination of physical and digital space that was used by Irish feminist activists as a new tool to challenge patriarchal authority over women and their bodies. Feminist Activism, Street Art, and Social Media: Parallel Functions of Creating Space The 2020 themed issue of Feminist Review concerning abortion in Ireland begins with a familiar feminist cry, a refusal to apologize for creating space "to express the injuries involved in the everyday experience of living as a woman in Ireland's 'police state.'"4 One method...