Karaoke. The word conjures all kinds of visions_possible stardom, abject performance terror, or just head-shaking bewilderment. Ten years ago when the Japanese craze had only recently arrived in the U.S., Rob Drew was drawn to the phenomenon as subject of research. What he discovered will fascinate and surprise you, whether you're a student of popular culture or just curious what's going to happen next Saturday when you get up to sing your first song at the corner bar. Karaoke Nights is both a keen observation on the external behavior of deejays, performers, and audience and an intimate...

Humorous yet touching, Performing Femininity challenges traditional and feminist perspectives on gender. As "a woman whose brand of feminism is suspect," Lesa Lockford places herself in the most shameful, the most abject circumstances: an image obsessed weight-watcher, an exotic dancer, and a theatrical performer. By exposing herself to the abject, she reclaims her body's symbolic value from society. This experimental autoethnography provides a provocative model to the ethnographer and rewards the student of gender studies with a rare perspective.

In this innovative book, Stacy Holman Jones presents torch singing as a much more complicated phenomenon than the familiar trope of a woman lamenting her victimhood. With an ethnographer's eye, she observes the bluesy torch singers, asking if they are possibly performing critiques of the very lyrics they sing. From this perspective, we see the singer giving expression not not only to desire but also to an incipient determination to resist and change. Holman Jones also reveals points of contact in the opposition between spectators and performers, emotion and intellect, and love and power....