After Marriage: The Assimilation, Representation, and Diversification of LGBTQ Lives on Irish Television

Abstract

Since Ireland’s 2015 Marriage Equality referendum, emerging trends, variances and understandings of LGBTQ identities have begun to emerge on Irish television. At the crux of this post-marriage equality queer visibility lies a friction between the assimilation of queerness to an acceptable homonormative alternative to monogamous heteronormativity versus broader representations of indeterminate variety and fluidity. In exploring the dynamic between assimilation and representation, the article makes a two-pronged argument. On the one hand, post-marriage equality television becomes a site of containment, performing a regulatory function configuring queer visibility through a homonormative paradigm, reflecting the mainstreaming evident in the marriage equality campaign. On the other, post-marriage equality Irish television has enabled cultural scripts to emerge pertaining to the challenges still remaining for the gay community in response to more intersectional, complex understandings of diverse LGBTQ experiences.