Gender, autoginography and performativity in Margaret Skinnider

Abstract

Gender, autoginography and performativity in Margaret Skinnider
Through the analysis of the autobiography of the feminist and nationalist militant Margaret Skinnider, who acted in Ireland’s decolonization process, I examine in this paper her transgressive use of clothing in the performative constitution of gender, highlighting her instrumentalization of clothing in microrresistences operated in the openings of disciplinary technologies which relegated women to a subordinate position in the military nationalism. Attentive to the way Skinnider played with clothing patterns, I will demonstrate that the militant doubly transgressed gender normativity, both through a strategic condescendence in which she cheated codes of femininity in the very act of their supposed iteration, and through the practice of travestility, which favored a constant fluctuation between male and female poles.