sticking in the throat/keyword bitch: aesthetic discharge in debbie tucker green’s stoning mary and hang

Abstract

The chapter explores how tucker green’s plays stoning mary (2005) and hang (2015) use an aesthetics of pain to address injustices of race, gender and class embedded historically in language and in modes of perception. Influenced by Raymond Williams’ cultural excavations of ‘keywords’ (an approach Inchley applies to the word ‘bitch’), by Denise Riley’s reflection on the wounding qualities of words, and by Sara Ahmed on the mobility of affect, Inchley attends to the affective charges and discharges of tucker green’s language. The chapter argues that exposure to tucker green’s dialogue, in which language carries affective charges and material histories of pain, causes audience members to undergo aesthetic experiences that ‘stick in the throat’. The dialogue resists pleasurable consumption, acting as a pointed reminder to audiences and of wider structures of privilege and oppression.