Women on Ice: Feminist Responses to the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan Spectacle

ISBN-13: 9780415911511 / Angielski / Miękka / 1995 / 300 str.

Cynthia Baughman

Opis

This study offers a critique of the media soap opera which unfolded after the attack on Nancy Kerrigan at the 1994 US Figure Skating Championships, with contributions by feminist academics, journalists and critics who were intrigued with the depiction of this event in the media and society. The essays included explore a number of issues raised by the Harding/Kerrigan scandal: the roles women are meant to uphold in public (and that public women are meant to play in private), the prices extracted for violations of notions of femininity, fantasies about social class and upward mobility, and the ways in which the media reaffirm gender and cultural stereotypes.

Recenzje

"The soap opera from hell explained with a genderized twist." -- A Weekly
"The contributors of Women on Ice, all aficionados of the forever up-and-coming academic discipline of cultural studies, scrutinize the Kerrigan-Harding wars in ways that have nothing to do with sports but everything to do with winners and losers in America." -- IN These Times, Dec.25, 1995
"That these passages constitute bad writing is merely our opinion. It is arguable that anyone wanting to pursue an academic career should assiduously imitate such styles as are represented here. These are your role models." -- Philosophy and Literature
"...most essays in this collection are are as intellectually agile, impudent and occasionally dazzling as one of Surya Bonaly's trademark backflips...There's also a nifty glossary of skating terms in the back of the book that'll be a must-have TV accessory for the next Olympics." -- Newsday, Sun.,Nov.19, 1995

Spis treści

I: Skating; 1: Nancy and Tonya and Sonja; 2: “A Radiant Smile from the Lovely Lady”; 3: Pure Desire; 4: What Tonya Harding Means to Me, or Images of Independent Female Power on Ice; 5: Fear of Falling; II: Pairs; 6: Viktor Petrenko's Mother-in-Law; 7: Tonya's Bad Boot, or, Go Figure; 8: Feminists on Thin Ice; 9: The Glass Slipper; III: Television Spectacles; 10: Tales of the Ice Princess and the Trash Queen; 11: A Skater is Being Beaten; 12: Cool Medium on Ice; 13: Narrative, Gender, and TV News; IV: Fantasies; 14: An American Tragedy; 15: Tonya, Nancy, and the Bodily Figuration of Social Class; 16: Tonya, Nancy, and the Dream Scheme; 17: The Olympics and Post-Cold War Femininities; 18: Dreaming of Tonya

O autorze

Cynthia Baughman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema and Photography at Ithaca College.