This chapter explores how Olwen Fouéré’s Sodome, my Love (2010) and riverrun (2013), address the disparity between the fixity of mythic ‘woman’ and the complexity of actual women, through the performing body. Susan Leigh Foster’s ‘claim for a writing-dancing body’ enables examination of Fouéré’s corporeal intervention in the cultural production of myths of femininity; a writing body inscribed by an archive of myths of femininity but also generating other possibilities. The chapter utilizes Jean-Luc Nancy’s work in Corpus to enable examination of that which is beyond inscription: the excluded creative female body as the other edge of signification. Fouéré’s corpus draws attention to the transformative process of writing the body and of self-sculpting to explore women’s exscribed-being and thereby intervenes in the performative reassertion of limiting myths of femininity which silence a desiring and creative female corporeality. The chapter concludes that the corpus of women’s mythmaking in Irish theatre, the genealogy proposed by this book, articulates the exscribed edge of women’s corporealities.

This chapter looks at Lady Gregory’s Grania (published 1912) and Marina Carr’s The Mai (1994), in which the central women live in exile, yet attempt to negotiate expression of their embodied subjectivity. The capacity to generate new forms is pursued through attention to the process of corporeal change: how the metamorphic body might refute and escape its unhomeliness. These protean bodies can draw attention to, and undermine, the relationship between form and the limitations it imposes, and furthermore evoke a female morphology which demands expression through an alternative cultural imaginary. While the chapter draws on Luce Irigaray’s advocation of a creative female corporeality which evokes a female imaginary, it also looks to Judith Butler’s work on those bodies which fail to signify or matter, and are delegitimated and abjected at the boundaries of the dominant social order. The chapter proposes that Grania’s and The Mai’s metamorphoses question interpretations of both plays’ endings as an act of despair and submission to abjection, instead offering performative confrontations with cultural representations of viable bodies.