“They Think We’re Foul-Mouthed Sluts”: Discomfort, Bourgeois Spectatorship, and Fellow Feelings of Feminism in Patricia Cornelius’s SHIT

Abstract

The question of how spectators engage emotionally with what they see on stage has always been of interest to theatre scholars and performance-makers. This article offers a small-scale analysis of audience responses to Patricia Cornelius’s SHIT (2015) that was performed by Dublin theatre collective THISISPOPBABY at the Project Arts Centre in March 2022. The vulgar and aggressive protagonists confront spectators directly about what it means to barely scrape by as a déclassée woman who has to protect herself daily from male violence. Thus, the play allows for an intersectional perspective on gender and class by asking uncomfortable questions about the privilege of spectatorship. Deliberately marking them as Other, SHIT opens up a rift between its protagonists and the middle-class audience it constructs, but occasionally bridges the distance by allowing for feminist attachments between the two sides.