Resumen de Engendering Change in the UDA: Gary Mitchell's Loyal Women
Gary Mitchell's most recently published play, Loyal Women, continues his systematic exploration of the Ulster loyalist mindset, focusing this time on the role of women within the UDA. Whereas on the face of it, the play moves forward through what are presented as a series of sharp, irreconcilable oppositions -UDA/IRA, women/men, domestic/public, inside/outside- it emerges in the end that the fundamental organising principle behind the play, and by extension behind the paramilitary society it represents, is rather that of refraction, or more precisely, replication. As a result, any potential for evolution, individual or collective, is quickly subsumed into an apparently inescapable logic of duplication and repetition. In a profoundly pessimistic reading of post-Agreement Northern Irish society, Mitchell focuses on the embedded nature of a culture of violence and in the process presents an intimate, first-hand reading of the tensions within contemporary loyalist paramilitarism.
