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Disordered States and Affective Economies in Stella Feehily's O Go My Man (2006)

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2021

Abstract

Stella Feehily gained recognition as a playwright in the early 2000s with work that offered ambivalent images of the altered conditions of life in Celtic Tiger Ireland. Her first full play, Duck (2003) and, to a lesser extent, O Go My Man (2006) have been discussed by various theatre scholars mostly with attention to the politics of gender within the Irish context.

In this chapter, I explore the politics implicit in the play's images of circulation. Reading O Go My Man as more than a mere satire of Irish middle-class sexual proclivities, I argue that Feehily's work advances a suggestive image of, following Raymond Williams's coinage, the "structures of feeling" that delineate selfhood in the neoliberal, globalized space of twenty-first century Ireland, a space increasingly similar to those of other privileged Western locations.