Liberation Past, Present Stagnation: Queer Nostalgia and Memories of the Northern Irish Troubles

The troubled past looms large in Northern Ireland decades after the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement. This article examines how queer memories of the Troubles mobilise nostalgia to contest linear narratives of progress from conflict and homophobia to peace and liberation in Northern Ireland. Drawing on interviews with seven lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer participants, selected from a wider collection of forty-five interviews, this article traces how recollections of queer sociality and space unsettle celebratory accounts of the Agreement. Participants’ memories of bars, sex and activist scenes reveal a nostalgia for structures; a longing for forms of community, risk and mutuality that have been eroded in the shift to neoliberal peace. Queer nostalgia here is not a desire to return to violence, but a critical, or perverse, orientation to the past that exposes the limitations of peace in the present and the material consequences of post-conflict transformation for queer sociality and space.