Geographers have productively employed recent theories of performativity to investigate the ways in which space and identity (that is, gender, sexuality, and race) are interdependent, in that they produce and reinforce each other. Expanding on such work, in this paper I explore the spatial and performative aspects of artist Bill Featherston's representation of the sports and pastimes of his working-class hometown, specifically that of demolition derbies. Such theatrical spaces, both actual and represented, present a somewhat unusual challenge to geographers interested in how meaning and identity are negotiated within and through the production of specific sites. I examine how gender and the performance of capitalist production are at once reinforced and subverted through the creation and consumption of the spaces of realist art.
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