Indecent Acts in a Public Place : Sports, Insolence and Sedition

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?"