Social Science Popular Culture
Nightclub
Bouncers, Risk, and the Spectacle of Consumption
- Publisher
- McGill-Queen's University Press
- Initial publish date
- Mar 2008
- Category
- Popular Culture, General
-
Hardback
- ISBN
- 9780773533615
- Publish Date
- Mar 2008
- List Price
- $110.00
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780773533622
- Publish Date
- Mar 2008
- List Price
- $40.95
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9780773578012
- Publish Date
- Mar 2008
- List Price
- $37.95
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Description
People go to nightclubs to see and be seen - to view others as aesthetic objects and to present themselves as objects of desire. Rigakos argues that this activity fuses surveillance and aesthetic consumption - it fetishizes bodies and amplifies social capital, producing violence and crises fuelled by alcohol. At closing time, patrons flow out of the insular haze of the nightclub and onto city streets, moving from private spectacle to public nuisance. Bouncers are thus both policing agents in the nighttime economy and the gatekeepers of an urban risk market - a site of circumscribed transgression and consumption that begins at the nightclub door.
About the author
George S. Rigakos is associate professor of law, criminology, and political economy at Carleton University, and the author of The New Parapolice: Risk Markets and Commodified Social Control, 2002.
