SEXTANT: masculinities, sexualities & decolonialities

ABSTRACT

The dramatic monologue has been established by male dramatists in the twenty-first century as a key phase in the Irish theatrical tradition. These male monologists have often deployed the form to criticise the discursive production of crisis masculinity in Irish culture while representing men’s lived experience of crisis. The progressive politics of this representation are ultimately undermined by the same text’s ignorant treatment of women’s subjectivity and their lived experience of an Irish culture of violence and rape. A textual analysis of Conor McPherson’s Rum and Vodka (1992) and Eugene O’Brien’s Eden (2001) reveals that these monologue plays operate in a dual didactic register by criticising the national discursive production of crisis masculinity while ignoring the systematic subjugation of women and girls in Ireland under the patriarchal power structures which underpin the very discourse these dramatists seek to criticise.

KEY WOrDS

crisis masculinity; discourse; monologue; rape culture; patriarchy

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