Friel's drama frequently features unruly bodies which flout the corporeal regime of their particular community, social environment and historical moment, perhaps most hauntingly enacted by the Mundy sisters' defiant and desperate dance in Dancing at Lughnasa (1990). This chapter will explore the tension between such unruly bodies or performances and their suppression or marginalization within Friel's fictional worlds. My title draws on the work of Judith Butler, whose concept of gender as “performative” has become highly influential in both gender and theatre criticism. Butler formulates “performativity” as a regulatory force: it indicates a “reiteration of norms, which precede, constrain and exceed the performer.” However, she also articulates a resistant performativity, located in the disruption and reappropriation of normative gender patterns: “the possibility of a different sort of repeating.” Taking these terms as a starting point, I will consider how particular characters in Friel's drama either submit to or subvert the social and gender conditioning of their world. My argument will come to focus on The Loves of Cass McGuire (1966), a relatively early play in which Cass struggles with the forces of normalizing performativity in 1960s Ireland.