Indecent Acts In a Public Place

Sports, Insolence and Sedition

by Rod Dubey

Indecent Acts In A Public Place offers four provocative essays that mark a radical departure from traditional descriptions of sports as a cultural event. It rejects any notion that sport is merely a passive consumer activity that indoctrinates the participant into particular social values and acceptance of his representation. Instead, these essays look at challenges by sports fans and athletes to the cathartic spectacle and their own seeming impotence. They argue that what is absolutely essential to sport, and what makes sport so popular, are its qualities of contestation of external authority and representation, hedonism and possibilities for creativity. For it is just these qualities (noise, disruption, festival, sensuality and antisocialness) that sport, as a business, seeks both to contain and commodify.

Indecent Acts In A Public Place considers sport with an attention to current critical theory that is usually reserved for `high art,' yet at the same time it is accessible, polemical, imaginative and witty. Along the way it takes up such fascinating and amusing questions as "Why do baseball players spit?" and "Why are athletes usually stupid?"

Selections from the text:

Introduction by Domhnaill M’Grath

Awash In Bodily Fluids is an essay that considers the men’s society of the sporting fraternity. The spectacle of athletes more in the news for their womanizing, gambling and drug-taking than their play on the field shows how this manifestation of men’s society has become a Men’s Society, one of those groupings found in various societies that contests moral and social norms.

Playing Dumb , the second essay, looks at the tendency of play to challenge authority, particularly the hierarchical and corporate organization of sport. This is seen as a structure that compels that resistance to it will be violent, perpetually adolescent and ganglike. In this context, the history of soccer violence is outlined as a form of rough justice and an attempt to control popular culture

The Sporting Gaze is a look at sport as an active and accessible realm of fantasy and popular myth-making that makes sport far more popular than competing spectacles, such as politics. Also, it describes the tribalism of the sports fan as a means of autonomous representation.

Brute Strength is an essay on the commodification of the body. The athletic body, and the ideological and aesthetic values it represents, are promoted as substitutes for participation. Challenges to the values symbolized by such a body, however, have been redirected, intensifying commodification. It is a body (symbolic of sport), that behind its increasingly synthetic veneer and simulated play, gradually atrophies, decays and begins to generate only disgust.