Indecent acts in a public place
Subtitle: sports, insolence and sedition.
Edition: 1st
Publisher: Charivari
Published: 1990
Place of publication: Peterborough, Ontario
Language: eng
Number of pages: 68
Subjects: Sports
First sentence: Shrill voices cut through night air like the floodlights shredding the sky.
Description: Indecent Acts In A Public Place offers four provocative essays that mark a radical departure from traditional descriptions of sports as a cultural event. It rejects any notion that sport is merely a passive consumer activity that indoctrinates the participant into particular social values and acceptance of his representation. Instead, these essays look at challenges by sports fans and athletes to the cathartic spectacle and their own seeming impotence. They argue that what is absolutely essential to sport, and what makes sport so popular, are its qualities of contestation of external authority and representation, hedonism and possibilities for creativity. For it is just these qualities (noise, disruption, festival, sensuality and antisocialness) that sport, as a business, seeks both to contain and commodify.

Indecent Acts In A Public Place considers sport with an attention to current critical theory that is usually reserved for `high art,' yet at the same time it is accessible, polemical, imaginative and witty. Along the way it takes up such fascinating and amusing questions as "Why do baseball players spit?" and "Why are athletes usually stupid?"
Table of contents: pagenum: ix
class: section
title: Introduction by Domhnail M’Grath; pagenum: 3
title: Awash in Bodily Fluids
label: 1; pagenum: 15
title: Playing Dumb
label: 2; pagenum: 33
title: The Sporting gaze
label: 3; pagenum: 45
label: 4
title: Brute Strength; pagenum: 59
title: The End of Sport
label: 5; pagenum: 65
title: Select Bibliography
label: 6