Sixth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

This paper examines a now globally popular sitcom set in 1990s Northern Ireland. My analysis underlines its innovation in the comic dramatization of political history, in its representation of Irish working-class identity, private versus public memory, and the link between pronounced ethnicity and class. In portraying the suppression of whites by other whites within a colonial hierarchy, Derry Girls encourages us to think about the power dynamics beyond a white versus non-white binary and within a strongly class-contoured patriarchy. My aim is to contribute to cultural studies of the media: first, to complicate notions of racial subordination and representations of Irishness in British media, and second, to theorize how class and ethnicity are foregrounded and mutually exaggerated in the comic mode. I will predominately employ textual analysis, with occasional auto-ethnographic contextualization based on my own experience growing up in the sitcom’s setting. A close reading of this series helps reconceptualize some theoretical stances regarding the dramatization of ethnicity, class, history, and politics. Specifically, I discuss how and why working-class characters are portrayed as more identifiably ethnic and comic than middle-class characters and how this series successfully contains ethnic conflict and violence within the comic mode. Another insight is that strong fictional localization can produce real-life validation for those being represented: specifically, Northern Irish Catholic females and the economically starved Derry City. Overall, this analysis suggests the sitcom’s potential for popular political expression and the global viability of comic settings that are highly localized, politically informed, and historically situated.