This course is an exercise routine for your brain and thighs. While writing my book Jazzercise is a Language, I read anything I could to understand those famous videos of skinny blondes in leg warmers and neon dancing away to jazz pop and how I could make them into poetry. If you want to get with the complicated world of exercise videos, that has evolved today to Zumba and Crossfit (among many others), put down the sweatband, lay in bed, and pick up a book. Though our primary sources are a star-studded panel of Jane Fonda, Richard Simmons, and Judi Sheppard Missett, you’re going to need the help of these texts along the way. These books cover Jazzercise itself, exercise, dance, VHS tapes, pop voyeurism, white womanhood, instructions, and sports-poetry.
- “Where is the Jazz in Jazzercise?”– Sherrie Tucker
- Shifting Time and Space: The Story of Videotape – Eugene Marlow, Eugene Secunda
- Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File-Sharing -Caetlin Benson-Allot
- “The House That Jazzercise Built”– Kimberly Cunningham
- “Down with Disembodiment; or, Musicology and the Material Turn”– Holly Watkins, Melina Esse
- “Queer Exercises”– David Getsy
- “Next Bodies: With a Difference”– Faith Wilding
- “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers”– N. Katherine Hayles
- “Female Imagery”- Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro
- “Becoming an Image,”“Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture” – Cassils
- Relationscapes– Erin Manning
- Grapefruit– Yoko Ono
- White Girls– Hilton Als
- Action Kylie –Kevin Killian
- Letters to Kelly Clarkson– Julia Bloch
- Mature Themes – Andrew Durbin
- Box Score– Kevin Varrone
- “Fitness is a Feminist Issue”– Tara Brabazon
- Missing Richard Simmons(podcast)
- “Jazzercise Lives On in the Age of Zumba”– Hilary Howard
