Schoolgirls at Truck Stops: Tracing Place, Things, Bodies and Fictions

Abstract

This article explores how new theoretical resources of materiality and affect can be put to work to interrupt the conventions and habits of text analysis. It draws upon the “thing-power” of Bennett (Vibrant Matter) to “horizontalise” relations between humans and objects, and on the “intra-activity” of Barad (Meeting the Universe Halfway) to press a text beyond representationalism and the realist tropes of character, plot and setting. The argument pivots on a scene from a recent play set in western Sydney – Truck Stop by Lachlan Philpott (2012) – that portrays schoolgirls having sex for money. It considers how the material and the discursive intra-act in the playscript, in the live performance in the theatre, and in the archive of artefacts surrounding and exceeding the performance. In doing so, this article investigates how the materialities of place are mobilised to bring western Sydney into being as a place where girls are at risk. Rather than focusing on conventional codes of character and narrative, the article experiments with a diffractive reading of the truck stop scene that foregrounds the affectively potent and volatile entanglement of matter, affect and discourse that moves the girls, the actors, and the audience, in place in the world.