ABSTRACT
In recent years, Irish filmmakers have responded to Ireland’s growing inward migration and socioeconomic changes with films that engage with migrant narratives and representation. Described by film critics as an emerging ‘intercultural cinema’ (Kakasi 2011; Villar-Argáiz 2014), these films address issues of racism, inclusion and intercultural dialogue inherent within the migrant state of ‘outside belonging’. They further imply the potential for new relationships to form between those different identities that have historically been excluded from Ireland’s national narrative, including sexual and racial minorities. Focusing on the fictional films Adam & Paul (2004, Abrahamson) and Calvary (2014, McDonagh) and the documentary Here to Stay (2006, Grossman and O’Brien), this chapter argues for the migrant experience as a form of queer belonging that emerges through non-normative relations to time and space and that captures ‘an ongoing inbetweenness’ (Probyn). All three films blur the lines between the native and the outsider, inclusion and exclusion, to suggest the potential for new social bonds to form between the migrant and the queer through shared experiences of marginalisation. The chapter uses Elspeth Probyn’s ‘outside belongings’ as a queer model for the bodily migrant experience. For Probyn, the desire to belong is constituted by the desire for an attachment to a space, a community, or a way of being, and manifests itself from a position that is already peripheral to the social centre. The disruptive potential of such ‘outside belonging’ emerges when such longing to belong propels the desiring body from the periphery into the social milieu, destabilising normative configurations of power and social relations. In capturing these disruptive moments of queer movement and the new social relationships that result, Calvary and Here to Stay undermine the nation as a natural and unified formation by exposing the gaps and forms of unbelonging that are necessary to its claim of hegemony.
