This study explores the nature of female embodiment within Northern Irish women's dramatic writing and theatre practice. I suggest that the prevalence of 'non-normative' forms of female embodiment within this repertory; by virtue of illness, aging, disability and sexual violation, both speaks too and challenges the traditional disembodiment that characterises female presence on the Northern Irish stage, and, woman's attendant reconfiguration as image or symbol. By foregrounding the female body, I argue that women playwrights and performers re-negotiate Northern Irish drama's preoccupation with nationalist, masculinist, and colonial explorations of identity, and, the cultural privilege afforded the 'literary' over an awareness of physicality, performativity and female subjectivity. My central thesis, therefore, is that by emphasizing the materiality of the female body, through the axis of embodied differentiation, women playwrights and theatre practitioners challenge the web of social discourses and cultural codas that repeatedly define 'woman' in relation to her body.