Cock Tales: Homosexuality, Trauma and the Cosmopolitan Queer
Fintan Walsh explores the queer(ed) side of Irish cinema.

The unlikely reunification of Ireland would surely figure in film as a feature-length, screen-shattering orgasm. For if our national cinema teaches us anything it is that a kiss is never just a kiss; a sigh never a sigh; a (yet to be seen) riotous orgasm is the kind of sexual relation condemned to signify the climatic resolution of the country’s accumulated tensions. The truth is, while issues surrounding national identity have thematically dominated the history of representation in Irish films and films about Ireland, these battles have typically taken place within the context of gender and sexuality. Topics recurrent in Irish culture such as colonial pressure, historical burden and socio-political crisis have often played out in film through the matrices of gender, sexual identity, desire and practice. The upshot of this pattern, however, is that the close treatment of personal identity politics has largely been sacrificed in the service of considering Mother Ireland and Father State.

It has often been claimed that constructions of gender in Irish culture (literature, drama, film, etc.) implicate institutional, national, colonial and global power dynamics in an active-passive, progressive-regressive, modern-traditional struggle. Less has been said of sexuality, not least of all because it is more difficult to define. If we consider representations of gender to refer to physicalised and embodied depictions of masculinity and femininity, then we might think of sexuality as the more fluidic, quick-fire crossing of feelings, desires and identifications that can disturb all conceptions of ‘normal’ gendered identity and related social categories. Unlike other figurations within the filmic mise-en-scène, then, the slipperiness of sexuality affords it with a unique disruptive agency that allows it to cross boundaries of identity, time, place and form. Representations of sexuality, therefore, can readily turn the logic of a film world on its head – perhaps by screening, consciously or otherwise, a stray look or a lingering glance – and in so doing signpost possible new identities, relationships and realities.

Given this bind, and perhaps contrary to popular perception, we might say that sexuality is curiously central to Irish film. Curious in the sense that it often functions as a highly symbolic device that shapes and critiques the ostensible world represented; more curious still in that it is a sexuality generally devoid of energy, feeling and eroticism. Viewed against the arthouse outputs of our European neighbours, for example, there is little in Irish film to match the easy sexiness of Fellini’s work, the latent carnality of Buñuel’s or the libidinous charge of Breillat’s. Even in the films of Neil Jordan, that are regularly lauded for their attentiveness to the subject, sexuality as a mobile charge that might flit between actors, spectators and their associated worlds is more often than not contained by narrative and extensive allegory.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 120.