 | Nightclub: Bouncers, Risk, and the Spectacle of Consumption Subjects: Bouncers; Nightclubs -- Social aspects; Consumption (Economics) -- Social aspects; Risk -- Sociological aspects; Private security services -- Case studies; 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. 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. |
