“The Shite of Dublin”: Body Metaphors, Biopolitics, and the Functions of Disgust in Sebastian Barry’s The Pride of Parnell Street and Gianina Cărbunariu’s Kebab

Abstract

Body metaphors are omnipresent in our daily lives and languages. They structure ideas and ideals of human interaction and society and shape our experiences of ourselves and the world. However, the body is used to make sense not only of ‘healthy’ human interaction and society but also of problems and people who are constructed as an infectious threat to a community. Using Michel Foucault’s ideas of biopolitics and biopower, theories on normativity and normalisation as well as providing an analysis of the role of a politics of disgust, the article explores body metaphors and their built-in danger of naturalising hierarchies and justifying violence against people seen as dirt or germs. These concepts are then applied to two plays that assess marginalised groups in Dublin, The Pride of Parnell Street by Sebastian Barry and Kebab by Gianina Cărbunariu. The plays show how people are metaphorically turned into dirt in order to purge the ‘healthy’ social body from the ‘diseases’ of ethnic difference, poverty, and criminality. The plays challenge an identity politics that essentialises ideologies of inclusion and exclusion, and they denaturalise feelings of disgust and ideals of health and normality.