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Social Science Popular Culture

Nightclub

Bouncers, Risk, and the Spectacle of Consumption

by (author) George S. Rigakos

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.

George S. Rigakos' profile page