Hollywood's Vision of Team Sports: Heroes, Race, and Gender (Garland Studies in American Popular History and Culture)

Book Description

This book analyzes the ways in which sport reflects, imitates, and questions cultural values. It examines the representation of team sports, heroes, race, families, and gender in films and other media. Analysis of the ways in which broadcast media and films create such images allows us to map the ways in which traditional cultural beliefs and practices resist and accommodate changes. Films about sport do not reproduce a simple, unified set of values-rather, they exhibit the complications of attempting to negotiate ideological contradictions. During the last 50 years, sports films have shifted from the heroic idealization of The Babe Ruth Story (1948) to films revealing complexities, controversies, and uncertainties within the sports world, like Everybody's All American (1988).
These contradictions are especially strong in the areas of race and gender, which are related major changes in the traditional notion of the hero. The book traces the transformation of the image of the hero in sports films within the context of the development of the sports celebrity, epitomized by Michael Jordan.

Book Description

The First Major history of cross-dressing in theatre

Whether it's Ziggie Stardust strutting the stage in a white satin gown or a troupe of Kabuki actors masquerading as women to a mesmerized male audience, the evocative transvestite performer offers a subliminal homoerotic fantasy and provides the lasting image of the show long after its closing night. Award-winning theater historian and critic Laurence Senelick synthesizes a vast array of material from archival research and a lifetime of theater-going to provide a monumental record of cross-dressing on the stage. Pantomimists, dame comedians, principal boys, glamour drag artistes, androgyne rock stars, and male impersonators are traced from their roots in tribal ritual and Christian pageantry to today's forms -- the dandyism of Little Richard, the queer sensibility of Sylvester and the Coquettes, the thrift-shop drag of Boy George -- capturing the allure and excitement of gender-bending performance: its rebellion, it's public spectacle, its amusements, its tragedies, its escapism. Senelick brilliantly elucidates the dynamic between the theater as both mainstream forum and anti-establishment haven for misfits, ravers, radical activists, and outcasts. With 100 rare photographs, The Changing Room offers a voyeuristic vision of a lifestyle watched by many, but lived by few, and a compulsively readable, authoritative account of the theater at its most sexual and effective.

Customer Reviews:

It's Not a Drag!.......2000-09-29

Laurence Senelick's The Changing Room is an entertaining and well-written exploration of the "inherent sexuality of all performance, the ability of the live theatre to construct gender variants unencountered anywhere else, and an abiding 'queerness' in the most authentic types of theatre...."

Scholars will mine the rich lode of material found in the text and the footnotes. Less exacting readers, including this reviewer, will find the book a curious admixture of fascinating, funny, and illuminating. I am still smiling at Senelick's description of the untimely passage of Bert Savoy, an entertainer with whom i was not familiar: "Rumour ran that he had exclaimed 'Mercy, ain't Miss God cutting up something awful!' just before he was struck by lightning.

The book is illustrated by numerous photographs which are equally interesting.

The Changing Room's greatest accomplishment is to synthesize many centuries of material in a manner which places our contemporary experience in perspective. I ordered the book to read about an entertainer who particularly intrigues me. I ended up spending the weekend reading the whole book. It is without any reservation that I heartily recommend The Changing Room to all readers.

Cool topic, but as enjoyable as reading a phone book.......2000-08-25

Drag performances tend to be funny and light. Of course, studying gender and studying gender in relation to theatre warrants a "heavier" reading of such performances..... But STILL, this book is as fat as a binder and is as dense as a computer manual.... Nothing you could read from cover to cover -- and I think that this would have been a lot more fun.

Great Pretenders: A History of Female and Male Impersonation in the Performing Arts

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Great Pretenders: A History of Female and Male Impersonation in the Performing Arts
Anthony Slide
Manufacturer: Olympic Marketing Corp
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross-Dressing

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Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross-Dressing
Lesley Ferris
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0415062691

Book Description

Cross-dressing in theatrical performance has generated a lively, controversial debate in the last decade. This collection examines cross-dressing as a culturally determined performance phenomenon, and brings a wide range of arguments and historical evidence to bear on this fascinating subject. The essays focus on cross-dressing in theatre, cabaret, opera and dance, and address everything from the significance of the cross-dressed classical Greek actor to the Renaissance tradition of adolescent boys playing female roles: from Restoration breeches roles to "vogueing."

Using critical perspectives drawn from social history, anthropology, psychoanalysis and gender theory, contributors discuss performance traditions within the wider context of sexology and sexuality, and draws out the differences of their approach.

Contributors include Jill Campbell, Yale University; Elizabeth Drorbaugh, Hofstra University; Lynn Garafola, Senior Editor, Dance Magazine; Marybeth Hamilton, University of London; Jean E. Howard, Columbia University; Peggy Phelan, New York University; Isa Ragusa, Princeton University; Laurence Senelick, Tufts University; Alisa Solomon, staff writer for The Village Voice.

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Deconstructing Deconstructionism

Female Impersonation
Carole-Anne Tyler
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0415916887

Book Description

Female Impersonation is a feminist and psychoanalytic investigation of the contemporary fascination with impersonation. Evident everywhere from television talk shows to cultural theory, masquerade and "passing" are now at the center of both popular and scholarly explorations of dominant gender, sexual, race and class identities and cultural values. When--and for whom--is a performance of an identity a masquerade, rather than the real thing? Why do people try to pass as what they are not? Is there a difference between masquerade and passing if both make identity an unnatural act?

Carole-Anne Tyler considers these questions raised by female impersonations in a wide range of contemporary media and texts, from Dolly Parton and Renee Richards to Luce Irigaray and Jacques Derrida. Female Impersonation will be of interest to readers concerned with the complex politics at stake in every discussion--and performance--of identity.

Customer Reviews:

Deconstructing Deconstructionism.......2004-06-12

Carole-Anne Tyler takes on the world of feminist criticism in Female Impersonation. The back cover states that she "explores what it would mean to take seriously the notion that gender is an artifice, that one's very identity is in fact a socially mandated impersonation." And it's this that is meant by the title. Female Impersonation is not primarily about drag queens; it's certainly not a "how-to" book, nor a sociological study of the phenomena. While transgendered issues do appear, they are not the main focus of Tyler's attention and primarily serve to attempt to illustrate her basic premise, that gender is imposed and not innate.

Here, though, is where the whole thing goes astray. Tyler's interest is in culture, not biology, and she looks solely at cultural artefacts to make her points. It's clear she's well read and thoughtful, but just because Simone de Beauvior, in The Second Sex, wrote, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman...this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine", that doesn't mean it is true. It's certainly a provocative claim, and one that has had great influence in gender studies, but there's a growing body of biological evidence that directly contradicts it. This is a fundamental failure of Tyler's to confront the truth, or at least what appears now to be the truth: that while gender and sex are not identical, they are both biological in origin. Certainly any particular outward manifestation of gender is cultural (one merely needs to compare courtly male attire of Louis XIV to a Can-can dancer at the Moulin Rouge); but that is a far cry from claiming that gender itself is artificial.

Further weaknesses result from Tyler's single-minded cultural approach. When she does discuss drag queens, transsexuals, and other transgendered people, it seems apparent that she's only seen them on TV and in the movies, and maybe not too often, at that. In one chapter, Transsexual Impersonation: the Ultimate Sacrifice, she repeated speaks of TV movies about transsexuals and makes broad generalizations about them and how they reflect the societal view of gender. Never mind that every transsexual would be livid about the chapter title; it's impossible to argue the point that transsexuals are not impersonating women, they are becoming women--or even, they have always been women but are making their physique match their gender, with someone who believes that natal females are female impersonators! No, what's particularly odd here, especially given the breadth of her source material elsewhere, is that after practically being given the impression there's a transsexual movie-of-the-week, Tyler apparently knows only one TV movie about transsexuals: Second Serve, the Renee Richards Story. It's a problematic example at best to learn anything about transsexualism--Richards now professes unhappiness with her gender change, and Dr. Richard Stoller's theories, summed up as "too much mother and too little father makes a feminine boy" are widely recognized today as simply inaccurate. Stoller is the only medical professional cited in the work, and that from work published in 1985. Tyler is either unaware of or ignores more recent studies, such as one indicating differences in brain physiology between transsexuals and non-transsexuals; this surely gives the lie to her fundamental premise. Nor did she employ basic sociological research. Should Tyler have gone and interviewed transgendered people, she might have gotten a real impression of their experience and what gender really means. If one wants to write about gender and culture, and use the incongruities of gender and sex as examples on which to base one's point, to not speak directly to those people is unconscionable. Failing to step out of the ivory tower and truly consider the accuracy of comments by "authorities" is common to far too much academic writing; I speak as an academic myself.

Book Description

An Evening at the Garden of Allah takes readers back in time with its vivid, exciting oral history of this shining moment in America's gay and lesbian past.

Customer Reviews:

Amazing, Well-Written Cultural History.......2001-03-17

What an amazing find this book was! The authors artfully unveil the little-known world of drag clubs in the Fourties - and let me tell you it's NOTHING like the drag world today. Full of artists who sang for themselves (no lip-sync here!) and took their art form very seriously, it really opens up your perspective on what it must have been like to be a gay person in that era. You get both a feel for the times and a perspective that makes you appreciate today.

Told as a series of short biographies of people and places of the day, it is very readable, accessible, and educational at the same time.

Book Description

A great way to give your brain a workout and have fun at the same time. The seventh entry in our BrainBusters™ series will have you hooked in no time!

Book Description

This book will help you solve more than 300 of the most common and not-so-common tasks that working Visual Basic 2005 programmers face every day. If you're a seasoned .NET developer, beginning Visual Basic programmer, or a developer seeking a simple and clear migration path from VB6 to Visual Basic 2005, the Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook delivers a practical collection of problem-solving recipes for a broad range of Visual Basic programming tasks.

The concise solutions and examples in the Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook range from simple tasks to the more complex, organized by the types of problems you need to solve. Nearly every recipe contains a complete, documented code sample showing you how to solve the specific problem, as well as a discussion of how the underlying technology works and that outlines alternatives, limitations, and other considerations. As with all O'Reilly Cookbooks, each recipe helps you quickly understand a problem, learn how to solve it, and anticipate potential tradeoffs or ramifications.

Useful features of the book include:

Over 300 recipes written in the familiar O'Reilly Problem-Solution-Discussion format
Hundreds of code snippets, examples, and complete solutions available for download
VB6 updates to alert VB6 programmers to code-breaking changes in Visual Basic 2005
Recipes that target Visual Basic 2005 features not included in previous releases
Code examples covering everyday data manipulation techniques and language fundamentals
Advanced projects focusing on multimedia and mathematical transformations using linear algebraic methods
Specialized topics covering files and file systems, printing, and databases

In addition, you'll find chapters on cryptography and compression, graphics, and special programming techniques. Whether you're a beginner or an expert, the Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook is sure to save you time, serving up the code you need, when you need it.

Customer Reviews:

Useful, but also contains filler.......2007-07-09

There are various sections in this book that are pretty basic and unnecessary to even an amateur programmer but there are also lots of other sections that are just chock full of great stuff and even advanced programmers would benefit from them. It also suffers from the common tendency to say very simple things using a lot of words in order to take up a lot of space. I think I even found a tip or two which show up twice in different sections. That being said, there's still a whole lot of worthwhile material in this book.

Perfect For VB 2005 Developers!!.......2007-04-06

'Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook: Solutions for VB 2005 Programmers' by Tim Patrick is a perfect reference and solution manual for any and all Visual Basic 2005 developers. Written in typical great O'Reilly cookbook fashion, this book is chock full of nuts with 700+ pages of goodness.

Chapter Overview

01. VB Basics
02. Development Environment
03. Application Organization
04. Forms, Controls, Other Objects
05. Strings
06. Numbers And Math
07. Dates & Times
08. Arrays & Collections
09. Graphics
10. Multimedia
11. Printing
12. Files & File Systems
13. Databases
14. Programming Techniques
15. Exceptions
16. Cryptography & Compression
17. Web Development

This is simply a fabulous book that any and all VB programmers of today need to pick up. Not only will you save time, you'll enjoy doing it while reading this wonderful guide!!

***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Outstanding Reference for the "Rest" Of Us.......2007-04-04

If you're new to programming in Visual Basic .NET, but have programmed in some other langauge before, there is always this barrier that one faces when they know, to a certain degree, the task they want to accomplish, but often fall short trying to figure out the syntax or method to implement it here. That is what this book does. It's an essential cookbook, in the language of choice, that bridges that barrier.

It's also a great side-companion for beginners, mainly because the intro books do a fair job of getting people started, but they also need to figure out specific tasks or methods of doing things that tutorial books won't cover. It does not overstate the obvious, and it serves up pretty clear impressions and explanations on what it delivers.

Great ideas for the newbie.......2007-03-17

Very helpful for a casual programmer like myself. Just remember to download the "recipies" to avoid retyping.

Very useful VB 2005 reference.......2007-03-09

I've found this book quite useful. There are lots of practical tips, tricks and techniques for VB 2005. I've gleaned a multitude of ideas for use in an intermediate VB class that I teach.

Microsoft Visual Basic .NET Programmer's Cookbook

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Programmers Cookbook
WOW!!!
Recommended
Excellent Information, Poorly written.
The standard for programming language writing

Microsoft Visual Basic .NET Programmer's Cookbook
Matthew MacDonald
Manufacturer: Microsoft Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 073561931X

Product Description

Filled with the code recipes that developers need, this is the logical place to start building development projects or to learn more about Visual Basic .NET. With a generous helping of code examples, code snippets, and solutions to common development prob

Customer Reviews:

Programmers Cookbook.......2007-05-15

The book was new as presented and came very quickly in the mail. Thank you

WOW!!!.......2007-01-10

If you're familiar with VB.Net, then this is a great book for you to learn how to add those tricky little details that can make or break
the professionalism of your Applications.

If you are a beginner, you may want to book mark this book and get it
when you feel more comfortable, because you will need it.

Although just about everything can be learned from the MSDN Library and help files that come with Visual Studio.
Its hard to find what your looking for when you dont really know exactly what it is that you need.

Thats where this book comes in. This book covers a vast array of
possibilities, that it'll truely keep you drawn into the fascinating
world of VB.Net coding, and without such a headache in research.

This is a book worth having as a refernce.

Note: some of the examples you may need to modify to bring from a console app to a regular windows app. Which is no big deal.
Just omit "Console.Writelines" for "textboxname.text = "

Recommended.......2007-01-09

The Programmer's Cookbook is a great collection of "how-to" articles. It is filled with practical and useable code samples that you can use in your programs. It will not solve all your coding problems, but it is a great place to start when you are trying to solve some specific problem.

Excellent Information, Poorly written........2006-02-23

This book is like the college professor that is an expert in his field, knows everything, and can't teach worth a hoot. The book has all sorts of excellent information but is poorly written for someone who is trying to learn VB .NET. If what you're after is an excellent reference manual, this will do the trick. If you're after something that reads easily and guides you through creating VB .NET applications, I'd suggest you keep looking.

The standard for programming language writing.......2005-11-07

The author has that perfect mixture of good writing style and a profound knowledge of both the language and the .net architecture. I read through the book once, with a fairly shallow understanding. Now I refer to it all the time and find guidance for almost any project I am working on. His code snippets (which all work...unusual for a programming book) are instructive, well commented, and always elegeant and concise. He has a focus in his code for efficiency, but the logic is easy to follow.

I only wish this author wrote the C# sister book. In fact, I would read THIS book to learn C#! BY far the best programming book out there and the standard by which all others should be judged.

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