'BECAUSE IT FEELS FUCKING AMAZING': RECENT BRITISH DRAMA AND BODILY MUTILATION

'"Because It Feels Fucking Amazing": Recent British Drama and Bodily Mutilation.' Cool Britannia? British Political Drama in the 1990s. Eds. D'Monté, Rebecca and Graham Saunders. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2008. 192-207.

Cool Britannia? British Political Drama in the 1990s is a collection of essays, some of which came from the conference In-Yer-Face? British Drama in the 1990s held at the University of the West of England, in September 2002. But with some additional commissioned essays, the piece has a redirected focus on political theatre - though 'political' has been defined very broadly.

My piece is a revision of the paper I gave at that conference. It notes the ubiquity of images of bodily mutilation in 'In Yer Face' and other plays of the mid-1990s. It then presents a series of postmodern accounts of the body and its permeability, asking whether this might be the appropriate frame in which to look at these moments. It concludes not and that these ideas are incoherent. Instead it suggests these images are not celebrating the end of bodily wholeness, but images of corporeal fragmentation are phantom images of moral and ethical disintegration and are, in fact, a reminder of the mutual connections and obligations which are specifically being compromised by late capitalism. To emphasise that point, I look at cultures of the body in capitalism from Ford's production line to Jane Fonda's Workout Book.

There's a related, shorter essay which repeats some of the historical material but places some of the 90s theatre in the context of the Young British Artists' work around the time of the Sensation exhibition. Click on the title to read it.

'Violence and the Body: Dissecting Recent British Drama.' Anglo Files.  126 (December 2002): pp. 15-26.