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The Year's Work in Showgirls Studies
Edited by Melissa Hardie, Meaghan Morris and Kane Race
Contributions by Anna Breckon, Kara Keeling, Adrian Martin, Kieryn McKay, Jane Chi Hyun Park, Zahra Stardust, Billy Stevenson and Shawna Tang
Published by: Indiana University Press
428 Pages, 25 b&w illus.
- eBook
- 9780253068187
- Published: December 2023
$39.99
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The Year's Work in Showgirls Studies is a fan culture volume that deconstructs how and why Showgirls, a 1995 drama with a female lead bent on becoming a famous performer in Las Vegas, became a much-contested cult film despite being a critical failure when it released.
The collection orchestrates a conversation between scholarly essay work and archival documentation offering a magnificent representation of the array of responses generated by the film, its makers, its promoters, and its audience. A multifaceted approach to the film, its popularity, and its social relevance results in a new text for understanding normative social hierarchies of sexuality, race, and gender.
The Year's Work in Showgirls Studies engages with the figurative and actual place of sex work and feminized affective labor in our society.
Acknowledgments
Introduction, by Melissa Hardie, Meaghan Morris, and Kane Race
Part I: Essays
1. Getting It Just Right: Elizabeth Berkley's Ways of Knowing in Showgirls, by Anna Breckon
2. Self-Shattering in Showgirls and Black Swan, by Kane Race
3. "Ain't anyone ever been nice to you?": Discharging the Guilty Pleasure of Showgirls, by Kieryn McKay
4. Badness, by Adrian Martin
5. Showgirls, Showgirls 2, and the Fate of the Erotic Thriller, by Billy Stevenson
6. Fifty Shades of Showgirls: Better Living through Mediation, by Melissa Hardie
7. The Instability of Evil: Double Trouble and the Working Girl, by Meaghan Morris
Part II: Conversations
8. The Accidental Showgirl: Reminiscing with Performer and Pioneer Feminist, Lynne Hutton-Williams, by Jane Chi Hyun Park and Shawna Tang
9. "Fuck you! Pay me": Stripper Art and Storytelling Speaking Back from the Stage, by Zahra Stardust
10. On Cliché, Camp, and Queer Temporality: Discussing Showgirls, by Kara Keeling and Meaghan Morris
Part III: Archive
11. Loose Slots: Figuring the Strip in Showgirls, by Melissa Hardie
12. Round Table: Showgirls, Film Quarterly 56, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 32–46
Index
Melissa Hardie is Associate Professor of English at the University of Sydney. Her recent work appears in Australian Humanities Review, Textual Practice, Film Quarterly, and Angelaki and her most recent book chapter (with Amy Villarejo) appears in Television Studies in Queer Times.
Meaghan Morris is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She is author of The Pirate's Fiancée: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism; of Too Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture; and of Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture.
Kane Race is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. He is author of Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs; of The Gay Science: Intimate Experiments with the Problem of HIV; and (with Gay Hawkins and Emily Potter) of Plastic Water: The Social and Material Life of Bottled Water.
"This book does nothing less than stage a major reconsideration of one of cinema's most cherished and contested works. Collectively, these articles offer the reader an invigorating account of the complex intermedial and historiographic relations that can be generated by one movie over time. Whether rethinking what constitutes powerful acting, opening up new trajectories in the study of sex work on film and beyond, or activating a treasure trove of archival material, The Year's Work in Showgirl Studies is an indispensable book for scholars of cinema, performance, and culture."
~Ryan Powell, author of Coming Together: The Cinematic Elaboration of Gay Male Life, 1945-1979
"Smart, intricate and delightful, this collection does full justice to the complexities of camp through explorations of Showgirls, the most canonized of bad films. A true treat."
~Susanna Paasonen,author of Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography