Queering Normalisation

In 2010, the Northern Ireland Executive completed its first uninterrupted term of government since the 1998 Agreement. It seemed as if the end goal of the ongoing peace process—that of a shared society in which the pursuit of politics using violence was a thing of the past—was a step closer. Political disagreements were playing out in a constitutional manner that resembled other Western states, particularly the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. That year, the Irish Times triumphantly declared that the successful passage to fresh elections marked ‘the normalisation of daily life through the Assembly and power-sharing executive’ (Anonymous, ‘The Northern Ireland Elections’, Dublin (Irish Times, 10 May 2010), p. 15, p.15). Such statements depicted progress as the clear demarcation between representative political institutions and the domain of ‘daily life’. The normalisation of the latter involved the delegation of political contestation and dissent to the appropriate elected custodians. For Northern Ireland to be truly ‘post-conflict’, revolutionary and emancipatory politics would be taken off the streets and safely contained within the sphere of representative democracy. This rhetoric of normalityNormalisationnormality and was alluring precisely because of its apparent incontestability. Who would not want to live their daily lives in the comfort and boredom of the everyday, free from bombs and sectarian strife? But behind such ideas lurked a set of ideological assumptions based, first and foremost, on the pacification of public spaceNormalisationpublic space and and the depoliticisation of the everyday.