Women’s Troubles: Abject Femininity in Willie Doherty’s Same Difference and Closure

Abstract: The work of internationally acclaimed lens-based artist Willie Doherty proposes rich and nuanced understandings of the agency and participation of women in the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In a large number of visual and cultural representations of the ethno-nationalist violence of the Troubles, the conflict is often gendered as masculine, with women featuring primarily as victims and innocent bystanders. This essay examines Doherty’s Same Difference (1990) and Closure (2005), two key works that incorporate a female subject. It considers these works in relation to the concept of “abject femininity”, a non-normative femininity that is at odds with dominant representations of women as passive, nurturing care-givers or victims of conflict. This essay argues that the non-normative femininities in Same Difference and Closure offer opportunities to complicate understandings of women’s public and private roles in Northern Ireland.