Reflections on Repeal: Bodies, Places, Nations

In 2018, Ireland’s highly restrictive laws on abortion were changed via referendum to ensure the introduction of a more liberal regime. The landmark popular vote formed a sea change in reproductive politics in Ireland, which has historically been marked by patriarchal, postcolonial nation-building processes centred on the tight circumscription of all gender and sexuality-related matters. It was the result of increasing pressure brought to bear – both nationally and internationally – on a traditionally conservative, and reluctant, political class, and reflected the efforts of the decades’ long campaign fought by feminist activists in Ireland – and by its diaspora abroad. This paper explores the latter stage of that campaign, focusing particularly on the final weeks before the vote. Taking its cue from the duality of the idea of "the nation" – in terms of a physical, bounded territory on the one hand, and an "imagined community" on the other – it examines whether and how Irish nationhood was re-imagined by honing in on the material dimension of canvassing in Ireland’s capital, Dublin. Drawing on Butler’s "performative theory of assembly" and Arendt’s "space of appearance", the paper establishes the significance of highly visible, gendered bodies populating public spaces, and addresses whether the symbolic and the material aspects of bodies, places, identities, and communities may be politically implicated in each other.