Viewing pleasure and being a showgirl : how do I look?

CARR, Allie (2018). Viewing pleasure and being a showgirl : how do I look? Sexualities in society . London, Routledge.

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Abstract

Drawing on interviews with a breadth of different showgirls, from shows in Paris, Las Vegas, Berlin, and Los Angeles, as well as her own artworks and those by other contemporary and historical artists, this book examines the experiences of showgirls and those who watch them, to challenge the narrowness of representations and discussions around what has been termed ‘sexualisation’ and ‘the gaze’. An account of the experience of being ‘looked at’, the book raises questions of how the showgirl is represented, the nature of the pleasure that she elicits and the suspicion that surrounds it, and what this means for feminism and the act of looking. An embodied articulation of a new politics of looking, Viewing Pleasure and Being a Showgirl engages with the idea (reinforced by feminist critique) that images of women are linked to selling and that women’s bodies have been commodified in capitalist culture, raising the question of whether this enables particular bodies - those of glamorous women on display - to become scapegoats for our deeper anxieties about consumerism.

Item Type:	Authored Book
Departments - Does NOT include content added after October 2018:	Faculty of Science, Technology and Arts > Department of Media Arts and Communication
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315268996
Depositing User:	Carmel House
Date Deposited:	01 Aug 2018 11:20
Last Modified:	18 Mar 2021 11:15
URI:	https://shura.shu.ac.uk/id/eprint/22148

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