Representing peace and conflict in public spaces: the place and role of women in Belfast murals

Keywords: murals, feminist peace, visual politics
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 6

Abstract

Murals are part of public space and transform urban geographies by offering different representations of conflict and peace. In Northern Ireland, murals have been widely used by armed groups and the wider community to make political statements and spread specific representations of who and what peace, conflict and politics look like. They also help to locate the conflict and the peace process beyond the negotiating table, and understand its spatial dynamics. These representations rarely include women (Rolston 2018), and, when represented, women in contexts of violence are usually confined to categories of ‘mother’, ‘monster’, or ‘whore’, which denies their agency (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007). My presentation aims to show how women are represented in murals in Belfast, assuming that visual representations and political representation are linked (Bleiker 2018; Harvey 2020; Rose 2016), and that “women being erroneously defined as exterior to war means that they are exterior to formal power as well.” (O’Keefe 2013, 114). Belfast features a juxtaposition of murals painted before the 1998 peace agreement and newer murals, painted in ‘peace time’. I will use the framework of visual social semiotics (Aiello 2019) to analyse murals painted by Republican groups and in Republican communities through the archives collected by Claremont College. Drawing on the literature of geographies of peace (Koopman 2017), this will offer a new, located, understanding of conflict and peace in Belfast. I aim to understand the role(s) women are assigned through public visual representations and the political space they are given or carve for themselves.