debbie tucker green and (the Dialectics of) Dispossession: Reframing the Ethical Encounter

This paper uses Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s rich interchange, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (2013), to rethink the ethical encounter in two plays by black British playwright debbie tucker green:  dirty butterfly (2003) and hang (2015). Dispossession is understood by Butler and Athanasiou in two senses: in one sense as the material and lived experiences of marginalized subjects (dispossession of property, home, labour, citizenship, biopolitical power, normative value), and in another, quite different, sense as the performative refutation of concepts of personhood which reify the autonomous sovereign subject and its propriety. Reading tucker green’s plays – with their antagonistic, truculent and confrontational female protagonists – through these two senses of dispossession helps us to make sense of their difficult, politico-affective subject matter. Diverging from a scholarly consensus that interprets tucker green’s drama as providing edifying ethical experiences, we instead suggest that tucker green’s plays not only withhold a straightforward ethical encounter but make such withholding a key way through which the political power of the play is expressed. There is a dialectical dynamic, we suggest, between the discursive mediation of violent dispossession and victim-protagonists whose self-possession is (always) in question, a dynamic that invites audiences to think/feel the violence of this negation. This withholding of resolution creates, we argue, an aggressive, but energizing demand for a different form of social and political relationality.

Dr Siân Adiseshiah is Senior Lecturer in English and Drama at Loughborough University. She is co-editor (with Jacqueline Bolton) of debbie tucker green: Critical Perspectives (Palgrave, 2019, forthcoming). She is also co-editor (with Louise LePage) of Twenty-First Century Drama: What Happens Now (Palgrave, 2016) and co-editor (with Rupert Hildyard) of Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now (Palgrave, 2013) and author of Churchill’s Socialism: Political Resistance in the Plays of Caryl Churchill (CSP, 2009). She has published many journal articles and book chapters on contemporary British theatre and is currently working on a forthcoming monograph Utopian Drama: In Search of a Genre (Bloomsbury Methuen, 2020). She has recently started working on ageing (particularly female old age) and theatre, and is Principal Convenor of the British Academy conference ‘Narratives of Old Age and Gender’, 12-13 September 2019, London: https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/events/narratives-old-age-and-gender

Dr Jacqueline Bolton is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at the University of Lincoln. She is co-editor (with Siân Adiseshiah) of debbie tucker green: Critical Perspectives (Palgrave, 2019, forthcoming). She is author of the Methuen Student Guide to Pornography by Simon Stephens (2014), as well as the Methuen GCSE Guide to the stage adaptation of Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2016), and Editor of a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review: ‘David Greig: Dramaturgies of Engagement and Encounter’ (2016). She has published on new writing and contemporary theatre-making in Studies in Theatre and Performance and Contemporary Theatre Review and contributed book chapters to Modern British Playwriting: voices, documents, new interpretations: the 2000s, (eds) Richard Boon and Philip Roberts (Methuen, 2013) and British Theatre Companies: From Fringe to Mainstream Volume II, (eds) John Bull and Graham Saunders (Methuen Drama, 2015). She is currently writing a monograph, The Theatre of Simon Stephens, for Bloomsbury Methuen. She is an Editor of Studies in Theatre and Performance.