Throughout her plays, Christina Reid explores the lives of women in Belfast and successfully offers a bold interrogation of other facets of Belfast history from a Protestant women’s perspective. Reid’s examination of the politics, entrenched in the private and public lives of Northern Irish women, is the central focus of The Belle of the Belfast City. In the play, the current political unrest in Northern Ireland is set in relation to sexual and racial minorities, which in turn, are enforced by the misogyny embedded in sectarian violence and religious dogmatism. Far
from simplifying these questions, Reid takes extra care to show how the familial, social and political facets are all connected to the perpetuation of the prejudice surrounding idea of the Other and the nation. In addition to this, this play also combines the experience of exile in relationship to gender and sectarian violence through the stories of Belle, Dolly’s half-black granddaughter. As a narrator and inheritor of the matrilineal heritage, Belle by her existence raises questions about the national and racial categorizations of politics.
In this play, while male authority uses the female body to marginalize and exploit it, Reid successfully turns the victimized female body into a site of resistance and subversion of that authority. In addition to the family photographs, the songs and dances that are performed through the medium of the female body are unmistakably subversive. While the female voice and body within Jack’s idea of nation are objects of repression and silence, however, the women’s bodies and voices are freed and released in the ritual of female bonding that celebrates the subversive potential of the feminine body. With these theatrical devices, Reid carefully depicts and subverts the portraits of women whose roles and images have been imagined in the discourse of conflict-ridden Belfast.

• Moon, Hyeweon(Ewha Womans University)