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Showing Off, Showing Up: Studies of Hype, Heightened Performance, and Cultural Power
Laurie Frederik, Kim Marra, and Catherine Schuler, Editors
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The interdisciplinary essays in Showing Off, Showing Up examine acts of showing, a particular species of performance that relies on competition and judgment, active spectatorship, embodied excess, and exposure of core values and hidden truths. Acts of showing highlight those dimensions of performance that can most manipulate spectators and consumers, often through over-the-top heightening and skewing of presentation. Many forms of showing and of heightened performance, however, operate more enigmatically and covertly while still profoundly affecting the social world, even if our reactions to them are initially flippant or unconcerned because "it's just a show." Examining a wide range of examples—from dog shows to competitive dancing to carnivals to striptease, the essays illuminate how such events variously foster competition, exaggerate a characteristic, and reveal hidden truths. There is as much to be learned about the power of showing through subtlety and underlying intentionality as through overt display. The book's theoretical introduction and 12 essays by leading scholars reveal how diverse, particularly efficacious genres of showing are theoretically connected and why they merit more concerted attention, especially in the 21st century.
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Cover
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Title
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Copyright
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Contents
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Acknowledgments
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Introduction
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Section I. Race and Breed
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Chapter 1. Saddle Sensations and Female Equestrian Prowess at the National Horse Show
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Chapter 2. Painting the Body Brown and Other Lessons on How to Dance Latin
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Chapter 3. Shamu the (Killer) Whale and an Ecology of Commodity
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Chapter 4. Hyping Clyde Beatty and His Wild Animal Show
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Section II. Power and Presence
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Chapter 5. Princess Beatrice’s Ridiculous Wedding Hat and the Transnational Performances of Things
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Chapter 6. Strobridge Posters and Late Nineteenth-Century Melodrama
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Chapter 7. Carnival Bands, Popular Politics, and the Craft of Showing the People in Haiti
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Chapter 8. The 2014 Sochi Olympiad Shows Off Putin’s (New, Great, Open) Russia
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Section III. Provocation and Titillation
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Chapter 9. The Intimate Provocations of Showing Religion in Secular France
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Chapter 10. Not-for-Profit Pornography and the Benevolent Spectator
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Chapter 11. A Paradoxical Show of Hunted Ghosts and Haunted Histories
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Chapter 12. Strip-Showing and the Suspension of a Naked End
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Coda
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Contributors
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Index
Citable Link
Published: 2017
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
- 978-0-472-07346-7 (hardcover)
- 978-0-472-05346-9 (paper)
- 978-0-472-12276-9 (ebook)