The making of mainstream

Abstract

The play Mainstream is a piece of fiction. It is a love story that depicts the endurance of pain and the pressure to assimilate. It attempts to honour and respect the Traveller and disability aesthetics. When writing this piece, the cultural ephemera of the rhetoric in theatre stating that diversity matters, heavily influenced my thinking. This chapter, like the play, touches upon impairment, identity, sexism, racism, Traveller identity, disablism, “passing”, shame, sexuality, stigma, violence, segregation, pride, homophobia, distress, fear, history, memory, power, hierarchy, proscribed identity, compulsory “normality”, “settled” Irish identity, paternalism, and intersectionality.