Feeling Out of Place: The ‘Affective Dissonance’ of the Feminist Spectator in The Boys of Foley Street

Abstract

Shonagh Hill takes a feminist approach to inhabiting, uncomfortably, the spectator position during her participatory experience of The Boys of Foley Street (2012), the third installation of ANU Production’s four-part site-specific Monto Cycle set in Dublin’s north inner city. The Boys of Foley Street is set in the 1970s, a time of unemployment and recession, when ‘the boys’ of these streets turn to thievery and drugs. Hill’s chapter focuses on scenes centred on women’s lives, which at first seem to explore domestic claustrophobia, but soon reveal their deeper entrapment in domestic and sexual abuse through prostitution and drug dependency. The scenes of abuse raise uncomfortable questions about neoliberal understandings of women’s empowerment as shaped by free-market values and individualism.