Sporting Performances

Sporting Performances is the first anthology to tackle sports and physical culture from a performance perspective; it serves as an invitation and provocation for scholarly discourse on the connections between sports and physical culture, and theatre and performance.
Through a series of intriguing case studies that blur the lines between the realms of politics, sports, physical culture, and performance, this book assumes that sporting performances, much like theatre, serve as barometers, mirrors, and refractors of the culture in which they are enmeshed. Some of the topics include nineteenth-century variety show pugilists, athletes on Broadway, sumo wrestlers, rhythmic gymnasts, and Strava enthusiasts. While analyzing sport through the lens of theatre and performance, this anthology reflects on how physical culture and sports contribute to identity formation and the effects of nuanced imprints of physical activity on the mind, soul, and tongue.
Written primarily for those interested in physical fitness, sports, dance, and physical theatre, this interdisciplinary volume is a crucial tool for Performance and Theatre Studies students and those in the fields of Sports Studies, Cultural Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, and American Studies more broadly.

Shannon L. Walsh is an Associate Professor of Theatre History at Louisiana State University, USA.

Introduction: The Field of Our Play; Part 1: Containing Political Violence on Fields, Stages, and Dohyos; 1 "You're Out!": Presence and Absence at the Ballpark - Sean Bartley; 2 Constraint and Violence: Boxing on the Popular Stage in the Nineteenth Century - Susan Kattwinkel; 3 "Sumo: Pressure to Perform as a Capitalist Sport." - John D. Swain; Part Two: Playing Global Politics: the Olympics and Fútbol; 4 Sport and Spectacle in Olympic History: Moving the Body Politic at the 1912 Stockholm Games - Susan Tenneriello; 5 Relational Movements: Fútbol and Peace-building in Colombia - Lisa Jackson-Schebetta; 6 The Politics of Performing the Butterfly Stroke: Yusra Mardini and the 2016 Olympic Refugee Team - Kelsey Blair; Part Three: The Biopolitics of Sports and Physical Culture: the Regulated and Regulating Body; 7 Skirting the Ideal: Embodying Hyperfemininity through Rhythmic Gymnastics' Evolutionary Leotard and Other Aesthetic Sports' Vested Vestments - Christine Mazumdar; 8 "If You See Me Collapse, Pause My Strava": Biopower, Fitness Data, and the Anxious Online Performance of the Fit Body - E.J. Westlake; 9 Fit and Fierce: (En)Countering CrossFit - Shannon L. Walsh; Part Four: Political Efficacy: Spectacle, Celebrity Athletes, and Protest; 10 At Play: Cap Anson's Performance of "Cap Anson" in A Runaway Colt - Travis Stern; 11 Not Knowing Who Won: Muhammad Ali and the Broadway Musical - Stephen Harrick; 12 NFL Activism and Protest in the Age of Trump - Noe Montez; Epilogue: Sporting Performances from Organisms to Algorithms - Kimberly Jannarone