One of the first collections of articles on performance studies, this reader maps the field for those new to the discipline and shows the way in which a variety of events and rituals may be read as performance. The articles included help clarify what constitutes performance studies, as well as providing a valuable introduction to the many theoretical perspectives, including feminist, queer, post-structuralist, and post-colonial theories, which are used to read performance in culture. Acts considered range from those that can be easily identified as performance, such as the strip show, to those that are more theoretically complex, such as performative speech.