Introduction / Laurie Frederik -- Race and Breed: Showing Off "Natural Bodies". Saddle Sensations and Female Equestrian Prowess at the National Horse Show / Kim Marra -- Painting the Body Brown and Other Lessons on How to Dance Latin / Laurie Frederik -- Shamu the (Killer) Whale and an Ecology of Commodity / Jennifer A. Kokai -- Hyping Clyde Beatty and His Wild Animal Show / Virginia Anderson -- Power and Presence: The Politics of Showing Up. Princess Beatrice's Ridiculous Wedding Hat and the Transnational Performances of Things / Marlis Schweitzer -- Strobridge Posters and Late Nineteenth-Century Melodrama / Katie Johnson -- Carnival Bands, Popular Politics, and the Craft of Showing the People in Haiti / Chelsey Kivland -- The 2014 Sochi Olympiad Presents Putin's (New, Great, Open) Russia / Catherine Schuler -- Provocation and Titillation: To Show Off the Unshown. The Intimate Provocations of Showing Religion in Secular France / Elayne Oliphant -- Not-for-Profit Pornography and the Benevolent Spectator / Joy Brooke Fairfield -- A Paradoxical Show of Hunted Ghosts and Haunted Histories / Robert Thompson -- Strip-Showing and the Suspension of a Naked End / Daniel Sack -- Coda.
Summary:
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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