ABSTRACT
This chapter explores contemporary screen productions written, directed and led by women, which interrogate questions of race, gender, class and sexuality, probing the socio-political impact of austerity on personal relationships. TV series Normal People (2020) and independent film Kissing Candice (2018) both foreground young, female and minority ethnic characters in their examination of formative experiences, structural inequalities and social membership. While each production reinforces heteronormativity and colourism through a focus on straight, white protagonists and their mixed-race lovers, they also reconceptualise constructions of Irishness, producing a multiracial snapshot of the nation. Utilising melodrama’s potential for exposing the precaritisation produced by neoliberal systems, Normal People and Kissing Candice examine how individual lives are imbricated within systems of power as well as the channels of resistance open to the minoritised individual. Through their protagonists failure to overcome or reform systemic barriers, these narratives offer a critique of the social order and a provocation to reimagine it, refusing the order of narrative closure by allowing more structurally emancipatory semiotics to escape the boundaries of the frame.
