The Feminist Manfesto
A thought-provoking new theatre production, Trilogy, may serve to re-open the debate about feminism. Plus: Fitzgerald and Stapleton go naked...
Valerie Flynn, 12 Oct 2010
ove over, lovely girls in frilly pink tutus: the avant-garde dance productions at this year’s Dublin Fringe Festival will reveal the naked truth about 21st-century feminism – literally.
For a while now, it really hasn’t been the done thing to call yourself a feminist.
Everyone, from pop-stars to politicians, seems to want to disassociate themselves from the big, dirty f-word.
Lady GaGa declared herself “not a feminist” because she “loves men” (feminists hate men, you see). Actress Kristen Stewart has hit back at the feminist critics who say her Twilight character is a sap (“It takes a lot of power and strength to subject yourself to someone completely”).
So much for showbiz. But even those women who are avowedly political don’t want to be seen as gender-political. In a recent interview with Hot Press, Lucinda Creighton TD, one of Fine Gael’s rising stars, said: “I think we are in a post-feminist era… I don’t know too many women in politics who would brand themselves as being feminist. I certainly don’t.”
The idea that feminism is anachronistic and more than a little naff – an embarrassing throw-back to the 1970s, in the same league as multi-coloured mullets, or a reunion of The Nolan Sisters – has serious traction. But two dance productions in this year’s Fringe Festival want to throw caution – and cool – to the wind, and reopen the debate about our attitudes to women.
It’s no accident that Nic Green’s Trilogy picks up exactly where the 1970s left off. The three-part dance production has at its centre a “performative response” to footage of arch-feminist Germaine Greer squaring up against fabled misogynist Norman Mailer at a public debate in New York in 1971.
It was when she was working with young people for a previous production that Green decided it was time to return to the explicit feminism of an earlier era.
“Some of the young girls would be particularly conscious of their bodies and relate that to what they ate – and they were only eight. I’d never encountered anything like that in young girls.
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