SPM4015 exam 2

module 6: femininity PDF Daniels 2005: You Throw Like a Girl: Sport and Misogyny on the Silver Screen

****introduction: Sport has traditionally been accepted as a male domain. In- correct beliefs in and about the histories of games and sport, and their inherent invisibility of girls and women as participants, have built a foundation of myths upon which the contemporary culture of sport and the construction of masculinity have been built. As is true in many versions of history, women are absent from inclusion unless an individual woman or group of women was recognized as being exceptionally outstanding. The same is true for the history of sport. The invisibility of girls and womens games and events, not to mention many events held for women and men together in cer- tain periods of history for certain classes of people, leads one to believe that only the Amazons, Annie Oakley, Mildred Babe Dirdrickson Zaharias, or the Edmonton Grads had any skills in physical activity or sporting prowess.2 This is as untrue as any history that relegates women and their involvement in various societies and cultures to footnotes or invisibility. Most contemporary North American references to girls and women in sport began in the late 1800s. Common sense under- standing and acceptance of the involvement of women in sport since this time is based, to a great extent, on myth and misunderstanding. For the most part, facts about women and sport are delimited to stories about and health cautions around physical activity for white, middle and/or upper class, heterosexual women. The sporting practices of poor and/or working class women, certain groups of immigrant, non-white, Aboriginal, and lesbian women are invisible in the mainstream historical records, newspapers, news- reels, and collective memories of most North Americans. The participation rates of girls and women in sports and other physical activities skyrocketed in the 20th century. Women surpassed record setting performances by men in only a few years. Women participate in activities such as rugby, boxing, mountain climbing, tae kwan do, and hockey as well as in traditional gender appropriate activities for females such as gymnastics, swim- ming, tennis, and figure skating. Although there is growing acceptance across North America for girls and women to engage in all of these activities, there is still an underlying tone that they really do not belong in the male realm of sport. The abilities of women athletes are constantly compared to those of men. The femininity and sexuality of women athletes are often called into question and the value of women athletes both financial and personal based more on heterosexy femininity than on athletic excellence. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how language directed toward male athletes in sport genre films may have contributed to the traditional and collective beliefs about girls and women and their involvement in and relation to sport today. Has the practice of motivating men through language that demeans women in myriad, 20th Hollywood motion pictures about men and their sporting practices, perpetuated and reinforced the second class status of girls and women as athletes? ***setting the scene: There are two primary factors that can be critically analyzed to construct the contemporary foundation upon which many beliefs and practices about girls and women participation in sport and physical activity can be based: the social and economic conditions that led to the first wave of feminist activism in North America and the movement to rekindle the spirit of sport and manhood through the rebirth of the Olympic Games. These factors likely contribute to the basis for the belief system about women and the role of women in the sport films used in this analysis. A third factor, relative to the purpose of this paper, the role of misogynistic language in feature films about mens sport, was the actual development of the first motion pictures. This technology was also developed at the end of the nineteenth century and will be briefly discussed. *****all women are not equal: The first of the factors that must be considered in an overall analysis about girls, women and their relationship to sport and physical activity in North America are the social and economic conditions that existed in the 19th Century. At Seneca Falls, New York in July 1848, the first Womens Rights Convention in the United States began a period of activism and education that started significant social change for women in the United States, some- times referred to as the First Wave of Feminism. Social rights, including access to education and a womans right to vote became the agenda for a group of, primarily, white women and men. Womens universities and state universities first opened their doors to women following the U.S. Civil War. This access to higher education spawned great criticism regarding the effects of education on womens health and their ability to reproduce. Educators and doctors, primarily male, wrote and lectured that girls education should be tailored to their physiological functions, *** specifically to the biological requirements of menstruation and reproduction. Dr. Stanley Hall, president of Clark University (1880- 1890) was a strong proponent of an education for girls that was not only different, but also less scholastic than for that of boys. Hall said that: The data from physicians showed, that the more scholastic the education of women, the fewer the children and the harder, more dangerous, and more dreaded is parturition, and the less the ability to nurse children. During menstruation, a girl should step reverently aside from her daily routine and let the Lord Nature work. Failure to tailor girls education to their physical need to rest during menstruation would endanger their reproductive powers.**** It is obvious to see how beliefs such as these, supported by physicians and educators, might lead the general public to believe that sports and physical activities, especially rough and tumble games, were not only not appropriate for girls and women, but could also be physically (read: reproductively) harmful although no proof existed for such admonitions and no such cautions, however correct, were made regarding boys. Although medical data is available, now, which refutes these beliefs about girls, physical activity, reproduction and health in general, it is very important to note that these early criticisms were not applied universally to girls and women. They were only applied to females of certain classes and races. At the end of the nineteenth-century there were large numbers of immigrants pouring into the United States and Canada. Significant amounts of racist and classist behaviors existed to relegate these people to second-class status. To protect the alleged superiority and desirability of white people as central to the leadership and development of North American society, it became important to situate middle class white women as the focus of all educational and social matters. The reproductive health and the actual number of children being born to white women were of particular concern. As women were entering post-secondary schools and professions, they had a tendency to have fewer children. Immi- grant and non-white populations, on the other hand, were experiencing an increase in birthrates as their basic needs were being met in the new world.í While white girls and young women were discouraged from engaging in any activities that doctors and educators of the day, mistakenly, felt might interfere with their ability to get pregnant and carry healthy babies to term, hard physical labour and rough and tumble activities and sports appeared to have no ill-effects for poor women or women of color. It was only the daughters and wives of the privileged classes of North America who seemed to be negatively affected by heavy physical labour and sport participation. The pale, thin woman of the Victorian era was indicative of a woman who did not have to labour hard in the sun. These were obviously women of class and they set a social and physical standard of desirability against whom all women would be judged. Upper class women, however, were not strangers to physical activities. There were many activities that were deemed appropriate for women of their social station. Horseback riding, croquet, lawn tennis, and golf were among the activities engaged in by up- per class women (Cochrane). Winter activities such as curling and ice-skating were also popular activities. Womens participation in sporting activities was not accepted without criticism and frequent ridicule. However, women did participate and they demanded greater opportunity to be involved in university and private club sports as they were accepted into these institutions. It is interesting to note that among the first events open to women in the modern Olympic Games were the traditional, upper class sports of golf and tennis. This adds further to the myths regarding womens involvement in sports, as country clubs and hunt clubs were generally restricted and built behind walls that not only kept out undesirables, but kept womens involvement further hidden. ******nationalism and the pride of youth: The second factor from the late 1800 which has had an impact on our beliefs about the abilities and appropriateness of girls and women in sport to this day was the *****birth of the modern Olympic movement. Concerned about the health of aristocratic youth, Baron Pierre de Coubertin of France was instrumental in resurrecting the ancient spectacle of the Olympic Games. He was concerned that French youth were not prepared to be soldiers. He saw the athletic contests of the Olympics to be a training ground for the bodies and minds of future soldiers and statesmen. The vision that de Coubertin had for the Games was not unlike that of the Greeks. The first recorded Olympic Games (776 B.C.) barred women entirely from this religious and political event. For these sacred celebrations only the public being men were allowed to be present. Women, the private beings, could not even view the Games and faced the death penalty for entering the sacred grounds (Boutilier and SanGiovanni 221). Although de Coubertin concept of the Modern Olympic Games did not include death to women spectators, he did envision only male athletes. The role of women in the Modern Olympic Games was to cheer on the male athletes and to garland the winners. Women were not included in the first Modern Olympic Games, held in Athens in 1896. The Paris Games of 1900 did include nineteen women in three sporting events: Golf, Tennis, and Croquet. It ought to be noted, as was indicated in the previous section of this paper on social and economic factors, that these events were activities engaged in primarily by upper class, aristocratic, white women. The growth of womens inclusion in the Modern Olympic Games has been one of struggle and controversy over the century in which they have been held. Certain sports are still not offered for women competitors. The addition of sports for women to the Olympic program has always been criticized and an uphill battle. The nineteenth century notions of womens frailty and potential dangers to their reproductive health has held sway for decades beyond the dissolution of these myths and obvious success of high performance women athletes with no negative health repercussions. However, the opposition to womens sporting involvement was strong and public through the first six decades of the 20th century, which was also the time of the development and growth of the modern motion picture industry. As women athletes, of all social classes and more diverse races, were gaining success as high performance athletes in the Olympics, concerns regarding their femininity and sexuality paralleled this success. Gold medal contenders in track and field and various team sports were suspected of being males masquerading as females. How could women be that good? In 1968, the Inter- national Olympic Committee began a practice of femininity testing on all women entered in the Olympics to prove they were female (Daniels). This practice spread to other world championships as women continued to improve in sport and shattered world records set by men only short time periods previously. The practice of sex testing or gender verification came under strong censure and the IOC finally curtailed the practiced for the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. Questioning the sexuality and femininity of women athletes did not end with the stopping of the testing. Girls and women in sport continue to face criticism from various media, school athletic departments, and many in the public who see females in sport as trespassers into this still male domain. ******lights, camera, action: Sport had a significant role to play in the creation of the very first moving picture. As the technology of still photography rapidly developed in the late 1800s, the ability to capture images of moving objects mostly people and animals improved. The first moving pictures were actually a serial presentation of still photographs shown at a rate that took advantage of the phenomenon of persistence of vision. This optical process tricks the brain into seeing normal motion when one image is superimposed on another at a rate of projection equal to that of the rate of pictures taken, generally 24 images per second for normal human motion. Children toys, including flip book and the early nickelodeons, were designed on this principle. Edweard Muybridge, a California photographer, was the first known producer of serial motion photographs. As the science of photography rapidly advanced, he used a variety of techniques, including multiple cameras and trip wires to obtain photographs in series. His early works were displayed on a device he called a zoopraxiscope (Muybridge). The first images that Muybridge used in his work were of a running horse, but he quickly turned his interest to the human body, in mostly, athletic actions. In 1883, the University of Pennsylvania chose to support a program in photographic research, focusing primarily on human movement. Muybridge provided his services to the faculty (Muybridge). The men and women who performed before his battery of cameras were, in part, connected with the university. The professor of physical culture, the champion runner, instructors at the Fencing and Sparing Club and a well known pugilist were among the male performers. The women were chiefly since many of them appeared nude professional artists models, but the premiere danseuse of one of the Philadelphia theatres also danced before the 48 cameras on the university campus. The hundreds of sequences, composed from thousands of individual photographs, showed women and men in a variety of movements. The photographs, displayed rapidly in sequence, were the first moving pictures. These sequences had an important impact on physical culture as well as visual art as accurate motion capture was finally available to show the detail of human movement. It is of particular interest to note that Muybridge took hundred of sequences of photographs of men and women performing myriad tasks. Men were photographed performing some actions from daily life such as swinging an axe, carrying a rifle and digging with a spade. The majority of the sequences of mens movements were sport related. Muybridge captured on film, men walking, running, jumping, hurdling, throwing balls, a javelin, and a discus. He filmed sequences of men kicking balls and striking with tennis rackets and baseball bats. He captured boxing, wrestling, acrobatics, and fencing. The variety and number of sporting activities shows how well sports movements lent themselves to film. Although Muybridge did capture some women throwing balls, jumping, running, and dancing, the majority of the sequences photographed of women illustrated women carrying out some- what bizarre, if not presumably feminine, activities such as walking with hand to mouth, walking and turning while pouring water from a watering can, woman turning, throwing a kiss, and walking upstairs, and turning while carrying fan and flowers. It is likely this difference in the sequences, when shown in academic and public forums, invited more interest in the men in athletic movements and sparked further interest in this area for the burgeoning film industry. ********sports on the silver screen: The first commercial motion picture was made and shown in New York City in 1896. The film was a staged remake of the prizefight between Gentleman Jim Corbett and Pete Courtney (Sports on the Silver Screen). Boxing lent itself naturally to early motion picture technology restrictions. The ring became a stage on which the motion was confined to a small space and lighting was easily controlled. Because the plot of a fight was well understood by the audience, boxing made for a good subject of silent films. However, even once talkies became possible, boxing remained a popular film subject. Within the genre of sport films, more movies have been made about boxing (a sport that might epitomize masculinity) than any other sport. Sports heroes became natural movie stars as their popularity was already well established. Gentleman Jim Corbett became the first personality to sign an exclusive movie contract (Sports on the Silver Screen). Many famous athletes became cross-over stars in the movies including Babe Ruth (The Babe Ruth Story), Jackie Robinson (The Jackie Robinson Story), Babe Dirdrickson Zaharias (Pat and Mike), Ben Hogan (The Caddy), and Gussie Moran (Pat and Mike). Many Hollywood stars fulfill their dreams of being professional athletes by creating or accepting movie roles as athletes. Kevin Costner (baseball) and Sylvester Stallone (boxing) have made numerous movies with sport themes. Some of Hollywoods most prolific and successful actors have played athletes: Robert Redford (The Natural), Robert DeNiro (Raging Bull), Gene Hackman (Hoosiers), Tom Selleck (Mr. Baseball), and even Frank Sinatra (Take Me Out To The Ball Game) have taken up bats, balls, clubs, and gloves to play athletes on the silver screen. Some actors have transformed themselves and their bodies in order to realistically depict a real or fictional athlete on the screen. Pat Morita knew nothing about martial arts until he was cast as Mr. Miagi in The Karate Kid (Sports on the Silver Screen) and Denzel Washington and Will Smith trained and reinvented their bodies in an attempt to become Hurricane Carter and Mohammad Ali, respectively. Although fewer athlete roles for women have been available, Elizabeth Taylor (National Velvet) and Katherine Hepburn (Pat and Mike) were among the early women box-office favorites to ake on the role of an athlete in a motion picture. Sport can provide all the drama and excitement that Hollywood attempts to capture in motion pictures. Drama and pathos, humor, ethos, poignant coming of age stories, fantasy, hope and tragedy have all been captured on film through the grit, sweat, blood, sorrow, joy, and even, the corruption of sports. The range of films on sports includes everything from fictionalized biography (Raging Bull, 61*), fantasy (Field of Dreams), make believe (It Happens Every Spring, Angels in the Outfield), political issues (Chariots of Fire, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings), prison movies (The Longest Yard), exploration of sexuality (Personal Best, The Broken Hearts Club), and musicals (Damn Yankees, Take Me Out to the Ball Game). Many family movies are about children and sport (The Bad News Bears, The Big Green). Sport movies cover themes from the ridiculous (Flubber) to the sublime (Bang the Drum Slowly). The importance of a film can be judged, to some extent, on the recognition given to it through the Academy Awards. In just the third year of presentations, The Champ (1931) won the Oscar for Best Actor (Wallace Beery) and Best Original Screenplay. This film, centered on boxing, was just the first of many sport films to be recognized for their excellence. Sport films have won the Academy Award in every major category except one. Rocky (1976) and Chariots of Fire (1981) won for Best Picture. In 1980, Robert DeNiro (Raging Bull) won for Best Actor. Best Supporting Actor and Actress winners were Cuba Gooding, Jr. (Jerry Maguire 1996) and Ann Revere (National Velvet). The Hustler (1961) won Oscars for both Art Direction and Cinematography. Chariots of Fire also won Academy Awards for Best Original Score, Best Costumes, and Best Original Screenplay. Rocky won for Best Director and for Best Editing. Other Best Editing Oscars went to Raging Bull, National Velvet and Pride of the Yankees (1942). The one category obviously missing from this laudatory list is Best Actress. ************the 'All American' (sic) hero: One of the reasons for the popularity and success of the sport film genre is that male athletes fill a need for heroes in a culture in times between wars and other aggressive political activities. In America, sports continue to be the strongest reference point for promulgating the most sacred values of a male dominated, success oriented, and status seeking society. Reflection theory posits that sport is a mirror of society. If a culture values and beliefs are seen to be present in sport, then sport and the athlete will be seen to be a positive aspect of a society. Therefore, sport represents a positive way for children to be socialized into the norms of that society. However, sport is traditionally seen as a male activity and, therefore, the role of girls and women is tenuous at best. Sports and masculinity have become entwined to the point that the normative characteristics of a masculine male and the normative characteristics of an athlete are nearly identical. If athlete means masculine, where do femininity and females fit into the equation? Another normative, although generally unspoken, requirement of the athlete, beyond masculinity, is that of heterosexuality. In our culture, male homosexuality is a violation of masculinity, a denigration of the mythic power of men. In many important respects, the difference between an athlete who is homosexual and an athlete who is heterosexual is nonexistent. Sexuality has no bearing on the hitting of tennis balls, speed of skating, height of jumping, precision on gymnastics apparatus, or any other strictly athletic phenomenon. But in our culture, athletics has more than purely athletic significance. And sexuality is not just a matter of the pleasure of flesh meeting flesh. Both sexuality and athletics draw meaning from our cultures myths of sexuality and gender. Because homosexuality and athletics express contradictory attitudes to masculinity, violation and compliance respectively, their coexistence in one per- son is a paradox, the stuff of irony. So, to be an athlete is to be masculine and heterosexual. To be feminine and/or homosexual is antithetical to being an athlete. Thus the foundation for the place of women in sport and in relation to sport is built. **********the distaff side: If the majority of sport theme films are about men and/or mens sports how does the treatment of women (and men) within these films contribute to or impact upon contemporary attitudes about girls and women in general, and as athletes in particular? Investigating the variety of roles for women in sport films and their relationships to (or the absence of relationship with) men, may tell us a great deal about the struggles that women athletes face today. Although there was an increase in films containing a women and sport theme in the late 20th century, their numbers and popularity in no way match those about men and mens sports in the same time period. ************women weaken legs: This phrase was spoken as a fact and an admonition by Meredith Burgess, playing the boxing manager, in Rocky. A recurring theme in sport films is that women, specifically sex with a woman, will drain a man and interfere with his ability to perform as an athlete. The no sex before sport myth is a recurring theme in sport films. A scene in Rocky has Adrian attempting to get close to Rocky. Rocky, getting increasingly frustrated with her emphatically states: ìHey, hey, come on. No foolin around, a wright?.....Hey, Adrian! Im serious now. Theres no foolin around during training. Ya unnerstan, I wanna stay strong. A similar scene in Raging Bull has Jackie, Jake LaMottas wife, attempting to resist his advances, stating: You said never to touch you before a fight and ìYou made me promise not to get you excited.î Jake, not able to resist his wifes eventual attention, gets out of bed and pours ice cubes down his shorts. Whether films took the no sex idea from actual sporting mythology or whether the myth was kept alive through sport films hardly matters. The message being sent is that women are bad for athletes at least during training and before competition. The curfew set for athletes was more about keeping them away from women than for getting them ready for a game. In the musical, Take Me Out To The Ball Game, OBrien, one of the baseball players, bemoans: ìWhen I think of all the dames I lost because I had to be in bed by 10 oclock. Athletes are notoriously superstitious and the no sex rule is alive and well. Many professional teams still keep their players away from women before games and the no-sex myth among boxers is a strong as it ever was (Davison). The notion of women interfering with athletic performance is taken to its ultimate conclusion with Lola from Damn Yankees. Lola is sent by the devil to seduce the star player from the Washington Senators and actually drain him of all his baseball skills. Ball players? I havent got ball players. Ive got girls. Girls are what you sleep with after the game, not what you coach during the game. Tom Hanks, playing coach Jimmy Dugan in A League of Their Own, bemoans this to the league representative and illustrates the other side of women as sexual beings, not athletes, as portrayed in sport films. Once the games are over, women are for sex, and the only role for a woman during the game is to be a pretty cheerleader. In many films the treatment of women as sex objects is degrading and violent. Women are hardly seen as human beings. Throughout the movie Varsity Blues the high school football players are constantly making crude remarks about girls and sex. Getting sex is the only reason to be with a girl. ìWill ya listen to me? A wright. Bitches are all just panty droppers. Listen, you give em a Percoset, two Vicadin and couple of beers, and the panties drop. Very nice. Very nice (Varsity Blues). Not only are drugs and coercion seen as appropriate ways to treat a woman, physical violence is also seen as normal behavior. A football player at a party, carrying a baseball bat, is singing ìShe broke my heart, so I broke her jaw (Varsity Blues). This was received by his friends with cheers. Even in more light-hearted movies, such as the musical Take Me to the Ball Game, Ed, one of the players says: ìDanny, tell em about the girls, the quails, the mice.î Danny goes on to sing a song called ìLove em and leave em. The notion that women, and by extension women athletes, are considered somewhat less than human is illustrated at a later point in this film when the three star players are spying on the team owner as she swims. She is never referred to as a woman, and the implication is that sex is all she wants. The role that women are allowed to play in the games is that of wife (usually seen sitting in the stands in the Players Wives section) or cheerleader. The cheerleader in sport movies is often viewed as a potential sex partner and it is imperative that these women possess heterosexy femininity. In What Price Vic- tory, Robert Culp playing the arrogant president of a fictional NCAA Division I university football boosters club, remarks to team officials: While were at it, can we get some real good lookin cheerleaders? In Eddie, the new owner of the New York Knicks announces to the crowd that the games will be more entertaining and that Youre gonna see cuter cheerleaders.î This is done only to increase the number of fans and make more money. That cheer- leaders supply something more than just enthusiasm to the players and fans can be seen in The Longest Yard. A football game is staged in a prison between the prisoners and the guards. The cheerleaders for this game are other prisoners, dressed in drag. If the only function of cheerleaders was to lead cheers, then the men would not have to dress in drag to play the part. **********we're honored to have the lady athlete in our class: In the made-for-TV movie, Quarterback Princess, Tammy Maida has successfully tried out for quarterback on a high school football team. A teacher in the school made the quote above as she took attendance in her class on the first day. The potential meanings behind this statement are troubling for two reasons: one, either there are no athletic teams for girls at all in this school, or two, the only way to be an athlete is to play on a boys team. The idea that women cannot be real athletes is put forward in a number of ways in various sporting films. In What Price Victory, the importance of college football above all else is implied by the president of the booster club, while encouraging the university to bend rules to recruit the best football players. He says, ìOf course, were not talking ladies volleyball here or tippy toe gymnastics. Were talking major ball. When a woman athlete does appear in a sport film, she is generally the only woman on a team and a cause for conflict among the players, for other teams, or some sort of joke. In Necessary Roughness, when the coach recruits a woman soccer player to be a place kicker on a losing football team, the players comment either on their embarrassment at having a woman on the team or they focus on her as a sex object. In one exchange, one of the players laments: Well be the laughing stock of college foot- ball.î Once the players see the skill of their new kicker, they are still less impressed with her as an athlete than as a woman: Shes got some foot......and it keeps getting better on the way up. In The Big Green and Little Giants, even though the one girl is the best player on her respective soccer and football team, the presence of these girls creates conflict. In The Big Green an opposing coach pulls his all boys team off the field, remarking: Get rid of the girls.î His comment implies that the game would be diminished and an embarrassment to his players if they had to compete against (and possibly lose to) girls. Becky (Icebox) OíShea is the best player on her football team in Little Giants. A very cocky boy will not play on the team with girls. Because Becky likes this boy, she quits the team and becomes a cheerleader (with all the other girls). Of course, she comes back to the team in the final crucial moments to win the game, but she struggled with her role as an athlete because of the attitude of the boy. Even when female players are seen to be skilled, their femi- ninity is highlighted at the expense of their abilities. In A League of Their Own, Marla Hooch, powerful switch hitter, is going to be left behind because the scout does not think she is pretty enough. The uniforms the players are required to wear have short skirts and are designed to show off the femininity and sex appeal of the players. When the players comment on the inappropriateness of the uniforms: Excuse me, thats not a baseball uniform, What do you think we are? Ball players or ballerinas? the league representative lays down an ultimatum: Ladies, if you cant play ball in this, you cant play ball with us. Right now there are 38 girls getting train tickets home who would play in bathing suit if I asked em. The players are also required to go to charm school to make certain that they appear feminine and lady like on and off the field. The newsreels made of the AAGBL (All American Girls Baseball League) showed the players powdering their noses, pouring coffee and knitting rather than playing ball. At the end of the first season, even though the league eventually became a very successful sporting and commercial enterprise, Mr. Harvey, the owner of the league, expresses his real feelings about women and sport when he states: ìI love these girls. I dont need em, but I love em. ... There is no room for girls baseball in this country once the war is over.î Although the actual AAGBL did continue for a few years, the sensibilities of 1950s America did not provide for the support of such a masculine activity for young women. ***********gender slurs: It can be seen that the representation of the presence of girls and women in sport film is one of tolerance at best. Even in films that are primarily about women athletes, the players are always judged in relation to men or they have their femininity and/or sexuality questioned. In films that highlight highly successful women athletes, such as A League of Their Own or Pat and Mike, there is still an undercurrent of caution regarding the suitability of women to sports participation, especially those sports traditionally deemed masculine. Organized youth, school and professional sports were originally designed by and for boys and men. As reported by Messner: Organized sport, as we know it, emerged largely as a masculinist response to a crisis in the gender order of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The world of sport gave men a retreat from what they feared was a feminized modern culture, and it gave white upper-class men (initially) and working-class and minority men (eventually) a means of naturalizing dominant forms of masculinity. Throughout most of the twentieth century, this masculine institution of sport existed alongside a vibrant but much less visible tradition of womens sport. The fallacious beliefs of participants and spectators that only males can participate in sport was reinforced through the popularity of sport films about men and boys (and in other forms of media), which contributed to the invisibility of womens sports and helped to establish the normative domain for all sporting contexts as male. Girls and women have always been involved in various sports and physical activities to some degree. The age, race, and socio-economic class might have dictated the appropriateí activity for the participants, but this is as absent from the silver screen as it is from historical accounts. What does show up, repeatedly, in sport genre films is the attempt to motivate male athletes through the vilification of women and homosexuals. If only masculine males have a right to the domain of sport, then the implication that an athlete who is not masculine would not only impute his ability as an athlete, but would cause question of who he is as a man. In previous sections of this paper, it has been demonstrated that the relationships of male athletes to women have been primarily sexual, or if athletic, reluctant at best. What is clear from watching sport related films is that nothing is a greater insult to a male athlete than to imply that he is female, feminine, or homosexual. Gender slurs, insults, that are directed toward men that are meant to imply that they are less than masculine or not completely heterosexual, have been used time and again as a motivating factor by coaches, fans or other athletes to get a man to strive for greater athletic success. This can be seen in countless sport films. This can also be seen in the actual practice and game situations, and in the locker room interactions of boys and men in sports. **********girl's are the worst: Boys learn very early to believe that sports are their exclusive domain, no matter how good a girl is as an athlete. Girls are ridiculed and form the basis for some of the worst insults that boys can hurl at one another. In The Sandlot, a film about a group of misfit boys who join together to play baseball to support the one truly skilled athlete in their group, the insult of implying that a member of a rival team plays like a girl is the one slur that raises a challenge between the two teams. This last insult, delivered with more gusto than any of the previous indignities, caused the other players on both teams to get very quiet and to have the looks on their faces turn to horror. The player from the organized team is so shocked by this barb that he is momentarily struck dumb, knowing that he could not possibly top, or even equal, this ultimate insult. The only possible response is to accept the challenge of a game in order to prove themselves as males and as athletes. It is not only young boys who lament at any similarities between themselves and females. In one scene in Raging Bull, Robert DeNiro, playing Jake LaMotta, is lamenting that he will never be able to fight Joe Lewis, the best fighter of his day. In conversation with his brother, LaMotta, bemoans: I got these small hands. ... I got...girl hands. ... Like a girl. He likens his eventual failure to a quality that he deems feminine. In sport movies that involve teenage boys and young men, the juxtaposition of sport, girls and sexual innuendo is frequently present. Throughout the football film Varsity Blues players are constantly talking about girls as sexual objects. They demonstrate their superiority over friends and other players by referring to them through slang expressions describing females in order to get them to do their bidding. Dialogue lines such as Hey, Mox, you skinny-assed bitch, lets roll are heard throughout the film. The coach in Varsity Blues, in an attempt to show his contempt for the poor level of play of the team, says to the players: Why dont you let the pom-pom girls play for you? This slur is meant to humiliate the players by equating them to pretty girls who have been referred to throughout the movie as only sex objects. Above the Rim, a relatively new form of sport film which highlights en- tire groups of young black males, rather than the one breakthrough hero on an otherwise white team, has dialogue between players that reflects what has been popularized as street language. Throughout the film the basketball players refer to each other as pussy or bitch in lines such as Youre a pussy...without the hair. Reductive language that has been used to equate women to animals, toys, foods, and body parts, is a hegemonic practice that keeps males in an artificially superior position to females (Ayim, Baker). This language form is used frequently in sport films about adolescent males. The attempt to motivate male athletes through language that vilifies females is common in sport films focusing on adult male athletes in a variety of sports and settings. The level of sophistication of the language may vary, but the common denominator is to slur women in an attempt to motivate male athletes to perform better or to train harder. Coach to player and teammate to teammate interactions often utilize language degrading to women to spur on a team or player. The following dialogue bits are representative of numerous examples to be found in many sport films, generally those about male team sports: Youre playing like a bunch of girls out there, everyone of ya (The Longest Yard)!; Sit down and shut up you mouthy prima dona (The Natural)!; Crush: I dont believe in fighting. Ebbie: Thats sweet, you pussy (Bull Durham)!î; and ìIf youre going to act like a loser, raise your hand. If youre going to act like a pussy, raise your hand (Any Given Sunday)! Even in the movie Eddie, in which Whoopi Goldberg plays a fan-coach of the New York Knicks, she repeatedly refers to the players as girls and ladies in both practice and game situations in an attempt to get their attention and performance. Gender slurs can also be combined with other epithets to raise the level of certain male athletes over other male athletes. In Slapshot, as a Francophone hockey player from an opposing team is announced to the crowd, one of the home team players calls him a frog pussy thus slandering both his gender and his heritage. In a later scene in the same film, a teammate of the player who made this slur says to his own teammate: Youre the biggest ****in pussy in the league indicating that it is not only rivals toward whom gender slurs are thrown. ***********the only thing worse is being a fag: Misogynistic comments are not the only slurs that coaches, athletes, and spectators use to put down or to motivate male athletes to train harder or to strive to a higher level of performance. What might be a worse aspersion to the masculinity of an athlete than to imply that he is feminine or in any way female, would be to question his heterosexuality. As sport is seen to be an overtly masculine and heterosexual culture (Messner 155), the very idea of homosexual male athletes would not only be untenable, but would even be frightening to athletes who share numerous homosocial encounters on and off the field and in the locker room. The presence of a gay man in a team sport environment would challenge the well constructed myth of the masculine athlete, not to mention the masculine male, at its very center. The presence of homophobia in sport is demonstrated through words and actions in the same way, and for the same purposes, as misogyny. In Slapshot, one of early age restricted rated sport films, the hockey players are participating in a fashion show for publicity. One of the players in protest exclaims: ìI look like some cock suckin******. Nowhere in my contract does it say I gotta make a fool outta myself.î Throughout this film players refer to each other and taunt each other with accusations of ë******í or fag. In Bull Durham, another R rated sport film, the rookie pitcher is enticed into wearing black underwear and a garter belt to help his concentration. He defends this strange behavior and tells a team- mate: ìThis underwear makes me feel kinda sexy. Dont make me a queer, right? Right! I aint no queer, no, I aint. Later in the film, a veteran player gets into a shouting match with an umpire and calls him a ********er. This, not surprisingly, causes a fight to break out. Psyching players up in the locker room before a game or during half time became an important vehicle in sport films be- ginning with the win one for the Gipper speech, reenacted in the 1940s film Knute Rockne: All American (Thomas). Whether Rockne ever actually said this mythic phrase, the ever present locker room inspirational speech was certainly defamed by a foot- ball player in Varsity Blues who intones over and over again, prior to a game: And, yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no ****** from Bingville. *******the critics corner: At the end of the nineteenth century, the cautions around girls and womens participation in sport were primarily directed toward the potential harm to their reproductive systems that might occur through vigorous physical activity. These admonitions did not concern the more lady-like activities such as dance or gymnastics or the traditional sporting activities of the upper class female. They were directed toward the more rough and tumble activities that were considered more appropriate for boys. Although these myths have been proven fallacious, they still surface from time to time as resistance to the success of women athletes, and their entry into all activities, lingers. Throughout the 20th century, two different, but related themes have plagued women athletes as they have attempted to take their rightful place on the playing fields: masculinization and lesbianism. The concerns over reproductive harm have been replaced by a possibly greater need to preserve the domain of sports for men. If the athlete epitomizes masculinity, then the female athlete must be masculine. If the female athlete is masculine or wants to participate in masculine activities, then maybe she really wants to be a man. This often translates into the rationalization that women athletes are lesbians. The association of women athletes and lesbians roils beneath the surface as a subtext of all discussions about women athletes and their appearance, prowess, and acceptability (Griffin ix). The language and innuendo used and implied in sport films about women in general and women athletes in particular support these two stereotypes that have plagued women athletes for more than one hundred years. Many sport genre films, along with other forms of media, have reinforced the misogynistic attitudes toward women athletes that have blocked their entry into sport, camouflaged their improvements and successes, and kept girls and women in a second-class status with respect to sport for over a century. Attacks on femininity and homosexuality directed toward male athletes are a tool that has solidified a common sense under- standing of athlete as male: masculine and heterosexual. Women, then, become trespassers in the domain of sport. Womens serious participation in sport brings into question the natural and mutually exclusive nature of gender and gender roles. If women in sport can be tough minded, competitive, and muscular, too, then sport loses its special place in the development of masculinity for men (Griffin 17). The sport film, and its often misogynistic celebration of male athleticism, may be one of the barriers to womens full acceptance into the world of sport. **********thats a wrap: 19th century Victorian beliefs about gender and gender roles, Baron Pierre de Coubertins ideals in resurrecting the Olympic Games, and Edweard Muybridges breakthrough photographic techniques that led to the beginnings of the motion picture industry are all woven together in a complex tapestry that has, concurrently, sanctified sport as a North American cultural form for men, and vilified it for women. It is unlikely that the gender and sexual slurs used in movie dialogue (and in actual team rooms and sporting venues) to motivate male athletes to strive for excellence were included for the intended purpose of demeaning women athletes. The effect, however, frequently repeated and coupled with other misogynistic beliefs and practices, just maybe had that exact effect. One of the barriers that women athletes must overcome might be explained by dialogue from a sport film primarily about women athletes. In the Katherine Hepburn / Spencer Tracy movie, Pat and Mike, when a golf pro asks the Hepburn character: Whats your handicap?, her response is simply: "A fellah."

module 9- sports guide pdf: - Kusz chapter films: - lords of dog town (2005) - blue crush (2002) - endless summer (1966) - gleaming the cube (1989) - rad (1986) - warrior (2011)

***Subculture - This is a group of people with their own distinct culture or aesthetics that are situated outside what is considered the mainstream. For example, while we might think of Elvis, the Beatles, or Michael Jackson as exemplars of mainstream pop culture, artists who sound different, use different aesthetics, etc. might be examples of subcultural musical form. Other forms of subculture can be related to but not limited to sport, film, dance, religion, location, gender, generation, culture, ethnicity style etc. Someone can locate oneself within a culture or subculture by the type of music they listen to, or the clothes they wear, the sport they play, etc. These actions can either locate someone as a subcultural insider or as a subcultural outsider. ****Emergence of Countercultures: Over time, as subcultures are folded into the mainstream, different ways of creating that membership and belonging emerge, these are often through consumption. For example, getting a tattoo or even buying a T-shirt. Below are some of the subcultural groups: - 1960s Hippie Counterculture Movement - This was a group of people who, through art, performance, and the way they conducted themselves, created a lifestyle that ran contrary to what was considered the mainstream American life. - Punk Movement - Mid-to-late 1970s, this movement started in the UK. They used music art, aesthetics, and dress to resist dominant cultures. Cutting their hair in particular styles and dressing in a particular fashion were ways in which they resisted mainstream culture and conventions. - The Green or Environmental Countercultural Movement - A subculture that promoted practices of conservation and sustainability. These behaviors challenged the status quo and mainstream cultural practices and ideas of farming practices and industrial practices, etc. - Anti-Globalization Protest Movement - In 1990s -2000s People were on the streets in places like Seattle, London, and more recently on Wall Street. These people were protesting and resisting policies and mainstream economic and cultural practices. ****Deviant subcultural groupings: These are groups that come together and are connected through cultural practices that are illegal in most societies. An example of this would be the illegal use of drugs. Other groups that can be considered deviant subcultural groups are gangs and terroristic groups who engage in violence and other criminal activities. The illegal activities stand as oppositional to the mainstream rules and laws of a given society. As these groups try to be different a commonality occurs, because they have to conform to resist conformity to the mainstream. For example, the commonalities can be seen in the way they dress, their cultural preferences, how they behave and how they speak to each other etc. ***Some of these common factors include: • Values and ideals • Personal style/aesthetics • Cultural preferences • Language codes and expressions • Bodily practices and behavior Subcultural Incorporation or Colonization? This is where subcultural formations in resistance to the mainstream hold the potential to be incorporated into the mainstream, usually for commercial purposes. One such example is Bob Dylan who was able to mimic Woodie Guthrie's accent and folk politics for commercial use. Woodie Guthrie was popular among middle class America and Bob Dylan capitalized on that knowledge. Businesses have been able to find a way to capitalize on the forms of resistance. ***Cooptation - subcultures are being hijacked for specific reasons for example commercial purposes to capitalize on specific markets. Many of the things done to resist conformity, have been used by business entities for commercialization. If you cannot beat them, coopt them. ***Colonization - These alternative groups are subcultures and become colonized as new market entities. The politics of the counter movement get lost in the cooptation along the way. They lose something of their original intent by being folded into the mainstream. ****Examples of Groups Resisting Conformity: - The Mod movement - 1960 a subcultural movement in London modernist and critical modernist aesthetic - The Goth subculture - This group emerged in the 1980s as a post punk cultural critical movement. However today a lot of young women and men are still dressing in goth but in a cool new hip way. This dress is not necessarily demonstrative of the original intent of the Goth movement. - Emo - This is a musical form that started in 1980 from the hardcore punk movement. Musicians are confessional in their lyrics with a hard rigid sound coupled with thought provoking lyrics. - Rastafari movement - Bob Marley is a figurehead of this movement and symbolized by reggae music. The movement represents the political, cultural, and spiritual movement that was in resistance to the oppression of his ancestors. - Punk movement - anti-war, anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, and anti-poverty; but now they are they are taken up today are more the pop that are easily transferable and can dance to. *****How Sport Fits into Alterneity: Modern sport like football, baseball, volleyball and basketball were used in important ways to produce young people. By being involved in these activities young people were being trained to become healthy, productive and obedient citizens. Physical Education in early 1900s in America was a form of disciplinary institution to use bodies and conform in specific ways giving themselves over to ruler or manager etc. a good citizen in a modern capitalist society always in relation to group ****Californian Sports: In the middle of the 20th century, sport was used to challenge the dominant ideas and mainstream sporting practices, and the disciplining nature of sports like team sports. Team sports were put aside in favor of sports that were more expressive and artistic. Bourdieu (1978) referred to these sports as "Californian Sports", which include the following features: • Creative • Athlete-centered • Non-competitive • Un-regulated • Expressions of youthful alternative physicality Individualistic lifestyle became an important part of the broader lifestyle in the 1960, 1970 and 1980s in the form of these California sports. Alternative sport played an important role in defining that way of life. It was centered on hedonism, individualism and self-expression as a way of fighting against conformity and structure and expressing oneself. There is irony in this because in order to be a member of this alternative lifestyle it meant having to fit in to be a member, so in essence there is conformity in resisting conformity. In the early days skate boarders used the built environment within a urban space on their own terms so they would ride down the rail, which is normally used for walking or ride on side walks challenging the structure of the city as a form of resistance. In the 1980s, entities like ESPN, Nike and the film industry capitalized on the growing extreme lifestyles by commercializing these activities and selling them on a broad scale. One such example is Mountain Dew using skateboarding in an advertisement to market their product to that particular subcultural group. Subcultural groups are doing things to resist mainstream but the mainstream is using the resistance and capitalizing on it. An example of this is the French group, Le Parkour/ Free Running. Similarly to the early skate boarders, this again is A way of young people challenging what the city was used for jumping over building etc. and using their bodies in expression that redefines what the city is used for. Within a few years commercialization took over in the form of video games, documentaries and movies scenes. This commercialization eroded the fundamental elements of freedom to play and freedom of expression and replaced them with forms that are rehearsed, and scripted. Cultural forms that were meant to be forms of political commercial resistant become coopted into significant parts of what they are actually trying to challenge How alternative subcultural formations are used in film There is a fascination by the public with subcultural groups that perpetuate violence. The film industry is able to capture these subcultural groupings we are not apart of but are fascinated with. We do not belong to them but we are able to understand them without actually belonging to them through film. ****Films that portray subcultural formations: - Romper Stomper, American History X, and This is England - In these films the skinhead subculture becoming an important part of film industry and its output. The ethnic nationalism creates a good story in a commercially viable way. - Clockwork Orange - Violent but audience is fascinated. We don't live in it but we are fascinated by it. - Trainspotting - extreme nature in which certain cultures live their lives. It is only extreme when it is defined against the norm. - Repo Man - violence and drug subculture *****Punk Subculture movies: The Decline of Western Civilization and Suburbia - alternative countercultural lives and what it means to be a part of those cultures Control - This depicts a post-punk band in the 1970s to 1980s. Most significant influencers of music of the time ******Sport Subculture Films: - Green Street Hooligans - Represent subcultural groups where members enact extreme violence on a regular basis. Explicit representation of what life is like in one of these football hooligans subcultural groups. - Lords of Dog Town - Another film that capitalizes upon 'California' sports cultures. Hollywood capitalizes on the skateboarding, surfing and BMX-ing by making movies to capture the subculture for commercialization.

module 8- social class pdfs: - Baker chapter 4 - Zirin chapter films: - cinderella man (2005) - body and soul (1947) - breaking away (1979) - chariots of fire (1981) - rocky (1976) - slapshot (1977)

Social Class Based Themes in Films ***Meritocracy - In the United States, this concept usually means a person's standing or relevance in society is based on that person's ability to contribute to society. So someone who is perceived to contribute more to society will have a higher standing, while someone who is perceived to contribute less to society, will have a lower standing. This is usually defined around economic wealth or political influence. ****Egalitarianism - This is the popular notion that in American society, everyone is equal. If someone works hard enough they can make it. But in reality that is a myth, as it is an impossibility that if everyone works hard, everyone will make it. That does not make for real life in society. However, the myth of egalitarianism serves important political and ideological functions that serve particular interests. ****Classlessness - This is the now-widely dismissed idea that there are no social classes in America. In reality, someone has to work in in a factory or a low-wage serve job, or someone has to work as a teacher, or someone has to work as a banker or the economy falls apart. Everyone cannot earn the same income or the economy crashes. Thus, there is a division of wealth/income that creates varied social class positions. ****Theorization of Social Class: Most societies are stratified—meaning that there are different strata in society and when organized in a specific way are organized in a hierarchy that positions persons who are born into wealth with more advantages than those who are born into positions of less wealth. The more you have the more you have control over your life. Conversely if choices are limited the pathway to making it is harder. ****The different strata are defined by common groups in America, who share some of commonalities with regard to: • Wealth • Income • Occupation • Lifestyle • Education • Social network An example of the stratification of social class can be seen in the types of sports played by the different groups. Quite commonly, sports like polo, golf, and lacrosse are being played by persons in upper class groups, while sports like boxing, basketball and football are over-represented by participants from the lower end of the social class hierarchy. Social class positions are reproduced through social relationships—for example, the types of sports played, the preference for music or what is eaten. The more we take up these cultural practices in relation to our social class location, the more we start to produce the politics of social class stratification. ***The Cycle of Class Reproduction: The level of education often determines the type of occupation, which is connected to income, which allows the purchase of a particular house within a particular neighborhood. So generally rich people live near rich people and poor people live near poor people. The equity of the house can be used as investment in education, so the more invested the better the education and the better the job, and the cycle is perpetuated. Some Notes of Interest • The United States has a disproportionate wealth distribution. The rich people are making most of the money: 43% of the wealth is owned by 1% of population in the US. 80% of population has 7% of the nations wealth. • The bottom 60% of Americans make less than they made in 1979 but the top 20% is making more. • There is significant increase in the number of families inhabiting the working class. Social scientists have shown that more and more people who are born in the working class social scientists have shown that more than likely will die in the same class • There is less upward mobility today than most other historical periods ****Meritocracy in Pop Culture: Throughout U.S. history, books and films have often portrayed the rags to riches narrative (basically, pulling oneself up by the bootstrap). This story suggests that although someone is born in a certain social class, it is possible to pull oneself out through hard work. Through hard work and ingenuity, anyone can make it in America. But statistics show that narrative to be a myth. These stories do not reflect the reality of a lack of meritocracy. • Class Passing by Audrey Foster shows how popular media are used to promote the idea of upward mobility. Conversations about class tend to be avoided because then it means dealing with a broader systemic issue in society. • America on Film - This film unpacks the history of meritocratic sensibility in pop culture Historically, books and film have each been used to reinforce or challenge the idea of meritocracy. The following are popular media forms that have been used to challenge dominant myths of meritocracy: ***Books: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair tells the story about a meatpacking factory in Chicago The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck - Oklahoman farmers are set up for exploitation when they move to California to push down the cost of labor Following are films that have been used to challenge the idea of meritocracy in America *******In Film: • Robin Hood - Robin Hood challenges the hierarchy in place and band together with the oppressed Saxons to overthrow the ruling class. See the Errol Flynn version, it's very good! • Spartacus - he leads a group of slaves against the Roman Empire. Willing to die as a group instead of individual gain. Check out the film directed by the great Stanley Kubrick. • Lagaan - musical sports drama about a town that is under British colonial rule. It provides a narrative that shows how sports can be used to challenge broader structures. • There Will Be Blood and Gangs of New York - Both are films that show the how established and ingrained some hierarchies are and what it would take to break through them. ******Contextualizing Cinderella Man: Cinderella Man is a sport film that is directed by Ron Howard and used to promote the history of that time during the great depression. James Braddock was an up and coming boxer who broke his hand. He subsequently struggled in fights due to the injury, and his ranking fell. He was then forced to turn to welfare but tried to get work when he was able to. He then gets to fight Max Baer and unexpectedly defeats Bayer. Braddock did not fight for two years then fought Joe Louis who defeated him. Joe Louis prior to fighting Braddock fought Schmeling and lost. He returned to America from Germany after that loss and was demonized by white America as a black athlete who had failed them. The second time, America was at war with Germany and he beats Schmeling. He was then praised by white America as a symbol of the nation in this time of conflict. As the context changes in 1936 when white Americans celebrated Schmeling's victory over Louis a white man defeating a black man and shifts 2 years later to all Americans hailing an American over a German. We see race, nationalism, and ideology come together and coalesce in this period of time between 1936 when Louis loses to Schmeling, in 1937 when he defeats Braddock and 1938 when he defeats Schmeling. *****Things to look for in the movie: • How Howard connects working class conditions of the great depression to the stresses and uncertainty to what many workers in America had during the time that the film was made and what was the onset of the great depression. • How he uses Braddock to define ideas of responsibility. Where Braddock goes back and repays welfare. Basically saying the nation is there for him but he should not rely on it. Which ties into some of the broader narratives about a segment of the population that relies on the government for their wellbeing. • How Max Baer is treated as a clean, very specific, even nationalistic version of political ideology.

module 7- masculinity pdfs: - Giroux films: - raging bull (1980) - bull durham (1988) - fight club (1999) - friday night lights (2004)

Violent Masculinities: Mediating Hegemonic (White) Masculinity Gender is the social construction of sex (a biological construct). It is often thought of as a cultural binary, which is defined in social interactions as two oppositional elements that are distinct from, if not diametrically opposed to, one another. Masculinity, according to many societal norms, is usually associated with being the leader, actor, aggressive, powerful, strong, calm, pragmatic, subject, and dominant. Conversely femininity is often associated with being a follower, nurturer, passive powerless, weak, emotional, romantic, object, and being subordinate. This cultural binary or oppositional positioning of femininity and masculinity in broad terms is considered to be a consequence of patriarchy. Patriarchy is a set of personal, social, and economic relationships that enable men to have power over women and women's roles within those social formations. Patriarchy is deeply tied to history and typically men have held the position of privilege in most walks of life. Historically, we have seen the emergence of micro-politics of patriarchy, whereby there is perpetuation of privileging men over women. This can be seen in institutions, like higher education, politics, the media, military, religion, and the family unit. Men earn more money than women across all ages even when men and women are equally qualified. ***Problems of Patriarchy: These hierarchical gender roles in the various institutions today are still defined in patriarchal terms and this is problematic because women are subordinated before they enter the institution—and thus their roles are defined before they can define their roles themselves. Conversely men are frequently seen to inherent a "natural" position of authority. ****Value in Patriarchy: Today in the United States, when men and women apply for the same job, men on average make more money than women, even when equally qualified. Most CEOs are men while the technocratic work force is typically overrepresented by women. **Hegemonic Masculinity: The dominant role of men in many social contexts is often described as hegemonic masculinity, which is a term used for the commonly accepted ideas of the male form and male function. In other words, this is how a society often perceives how men should present themselves both in their performance of masculinity and their embodiment of masculinity. Historically sport and the military have been key institutions where hegemonic masculinity is promoted. For example, after the U.S. Civil War, men were thought to be losing strength and vitality. In late 1800s, American Football was used to "rescue" men. The idea was simple: by playing a violent team sport, young men could learn to embody and perform a dominant hegemonic masculinity. That created a paradox in that men were also dying on the football fields but the football field is an important site for promoting hegemonic masculinity so the sport thrives. In recent times, though, traditional notions of American masculinity are being challenged with the arrival of emerging trends and themes in pop culture. Scholar have pointed out some of the following as contributing to the "crisis of the American (hegemonic) masculinity": ***Crisis of Hegemonic Masculinity: • The "queering of the American Man". The soccer player, David Beckham, who embodies the traditional notions of masculinity but also demonstrates the embodiment of being a family man, exemplifies this theme. This is seen to be unsettling to the idea of what it means to be a man in America. • "Soft" Masculinities. Again this does not sit well with many in American society, as it is not representative of the John Wayne and the traditional hard masculinities of the American forefathers. • Another theme that is seen as a crisis is the coming out of gay players in sports who are seen to be typically capable of embodying the traditional norms of masculinity. This crisis of challenging hegemonic masculinity is not new and in most mainstream American discourses. However, today perhaps more so than in any previous era, we are repeatedly told by the media that the American man is under assault. In turn, we see Hollywood (and Sporting Hollywood in particular) serving the critical function of providing a compensatory public pedagogy—where the filmic protagonist comes to embody and re-insert a hard, tough, mythologized hegemonic masculinity in the public sphere. As such, Hollywood plays an instrumental role in redefining the dominant hegemonic views of masculinity through a complex mosaic of different scenes and films over time (here are a few examples): ***Rescuing of (White) Masculine in Film: • Gone with the Wind - The man in the lead role rescues his manhood through his sexual conquest of a woman. • The Outlaw Josie Wales - Mans capacity for death and to create death for another is a significant feature of what it means to be a man in Hollywood. • The Godfather - Mans ability to command other men. Calculated pragmatism in dealing with the situation and rescuing his manhood. • Tombstone - Mans ability to command other men. Power and control over others and space. Typical of what it means to be a man in America • Full Metal Jacket - Physical imposition on junior officer. • A Few Good Men - The man is the provider of security for the family, organization or nation. Violence for the sake of non-violence. • Wall Street - The businessman as embodiment of savvy, cutthroat, entrepreneurial masculinity. ***The Reagan Revolution: In the 1980s, the cinema was an important way in defining masculinity during the Reagan Revolution. Reagan was an actor, but many thought his greatest skill was as an actor who was able to capture the nation's imagination through his performances as a politician. Americans were unsettled by the rise of the Soviet Union, the Cuban missile crisis, and the slowing of the economy. Regan was able to restore America's economic strength and morale. He embodied the idea of recovering the American empire. During that period, actors like Jean Claude Van Dam, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger came to embody an idealized Reagan-era hard-body masculinity. Through their filmic exploit, Hollywood was telling a similar story in telling the world that the American man was able to go in other territories and other parts of the world and through military imperialism, economic imperialism was able to reassert itself in the larger global setting. *****Films Representing Man in America Today: • Apocalypse Now - embodied hard tough American masculinity. Pragmatic cold relationship to war. The necessity of death as an important part of nation building. • Christmas Vacation - man as unapologetic and crass in social settings saying something of what it means to be an American man *****Role that Sport Plays in Defining Masculinities: Sport offers a unique site to emphasize the body with physicality: strength, violence, etc. Athletes, through sports, become the embodiment of hegemonic masculinity. Sports that entail explosive physical power and domination are elevated in our culture and are expressed through aggressive bodily contact and collision. For example, boxing American football and MMA. These can be categorized as hyper-masculine sport performances and often coalesce around, in, and through what Messner (2002) calls the "triad of violence." ***Hyper-Masculine Sport Performances • Physical strength and stamina • Physical toughness and bravery • Capacity for physical violence • Assumed/compulsory heterosexuality • Unemotional pragmatism ***Triad of violence: • Violence against other athletes - violence is an essential part of the game. The body is used as a weapon to create violence against another body. If the violence is taken out, it loses the appeal to the audience • Violence against themselves - body becomes site of pain and that pain is a point of pride for the hyper masculine athlete. Athletes often turn to other substances to deal with pain and the public then vilifies them for drug abuse. • Violence against outsiders - domestic violence and violence against animals.

module 6- femininity PDF Boyle, Millington, & Vertin: Representing the Female Pugilist: Narratives of Race, Gender, and Disability in Million Dollar Baby

Clint Eastwoodʼs Million Dollar Baby won five Academy Awards but also came under attack from female boxers and disability activists. Ostensibly a drama about a tenacious womanʼs quest to become a professional fighter and the male coach who assists her, Million Dollar Baby appears to insert a radical portrayal of femininity, female athleticism, and power into the male-dominated genre of boxing films and, more generally, a media that has been largely hostile to female boxing. We explore the extent to which the female lead can be viewed as a trans- gressive figure along with the discourses of containment that reduce her threat to longstanding cultural myths about boxing as a male preserve. Our analyses of the filmʼs racial, gender, class, and disability politics contend that its focus is not womenʼs boxing, disability, or the right to die; rather, like boxing, this film is about the male struggle to protect masculinity in a sporting world deeply shaken by the increasing presence of women. Clint Eastwoodʼs latest motion picture, Million Dollar Baby (henceforth MDB), received critical acclaim, winning Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actress (Hilary Swank), Best Supporting Actor (Morgan Freeman), and Best Director (Clint Eastwood). Film critic Roger Ebert called the production a "masterpiece, pure and simple, deep and true" (2005), an accolade reflected in the positive reviews it received and domestic box office revenues of over $100 million. Given that the storyline of MDB focuses on womenʼs boxing—a sport that until recently had been largely ignored or belittled by the popular media—its largely positive recep- tion from both fans and critics merits critical attention. Indeed, both Hollywood films and the sport media, in their unabashed celebration of male boxing and its concomitant masculine heroism (consider, for example, the Rocky series and the more recent Cinderella Man) have helped sustain popular rhetoric that ignores or trivializes boxingʼs female competitors. In this paper, we explore the seeming contradiction between widespread nega- tive sentiment towards female boxing and the mostly positive reception of MDB and its depiction of a successful and hard-hitting female boxer. We do this through textual analysis of the portrayal of the female lead and principle male characters as well as a discourse analysis of the filmʼs main themes.1 This permits an examina- tion of the representational politics of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability in the depiction of the female boxer and her male counterparts, with attention to the specific socio-cultural and historical contexts in which they are located—both within the film and in relation to womenʼs trespasses into male-dominated sport- ing arenas more generally. In asking what kind of cultural work the film does, we draw on feminist intersectional analysis that weaves issues of race, gender, disability, and class together to attempt a more nuanced and careful reading of the depiction of the female pugilist at work and her primary relationships to men in the film. We also examine critiques relating to the filmʼs representational politics mounted by disability activists and "real life" female boxers. In short, our intent is to analyze the deeper themes at work in the film and its ideological discourses concerning the trespass (and subsequent punishment) of women into a sport that has been traditionally viewed as an essentially masculine activity, associated with the male physique and psychology and with no organic connection with femaleness (Hargreaves, 1997, p. 35). Boxing, as Joyce Carol Oates declares (1987), is for men, all about men, and is men—a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity, all the more trenchant for being lost. Loosely based on a series of short works by F.X. Toole in Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner (2000), MDB follows the story of Maggie Fitzgerald (played by Swank), a 32-year-old working-class woman from southwest Missouri who seeks to pursue a career in boxing to escape poverty and a relatively depressing family life. Her quest takes her to the male-dominated Hit Pit boxing gym, where she is befriended by former boxer-cum-custodian, Eddie Dupris (played by Freeman), who provides support and helps her secure the grudging tutelage of boxing coach Frankie Dunn (played by Eastwood). As Maggie rockets through the ranks of amateur boxing under Frankieʼs guidance, the two develop a father/daughter-like bond that compensates for the loss of these figures in their own lives. At its climax, the World Bantam-Weight Championship in Las Vegas, the story takes a shocking and unexpected turn, when Maggie is rendered quadriplegic by the reigning world champion, the formidable Blue Bear. The film then spirals towards an emotional and tragic end, as Frankie struggles with his guilt for Maggieʼs accident as well as her request for him to end her life, an appeal to which he ultimately accedes. We begin our analysis by situating MDB within the context of "real life" boxing, exploring the extent to which the filmʼs depiction of female boxers and boxing is congruent with the lived experiences of actual athletes and events. From there we move to consider the potential ideological effects of the filmʼs representation of a female pugilist, developing our argument along three related themes. First, we consider the depiction of Maggie as a relatively transgressive figure whose unconventional gender performance can be read through Halberstamʼs (1998) concept of "female masculinity." Explained by Halberstam as "masculinity without men" (p. 17), this concept is used to account for, and render legitimate, female performance traits and desires normally attributed to males. The second and third sections of our argument consider the ways in which this transgressive portrayal of Maggie is simultaneously contained by her relationship to the male characters in the film, particularly to Frankie with whom she develops a father/daughter-like relationship. Using bell hooksʼ concept of "doing it for daddy," which epitomizes the ways in which white women and black men are positioned in relation to white men in popular culture, we suggest that Maggieʼs subordination to Frankie, the filmʼs father-figure, has the effect of marginalizing her story and re-centering Frankie as the white male patriarch and primary protagonist. We also deepen our discussion of the racial politics of the film by considering how Eddie, the Afri- can-American custodian of the Hit Pit boxing gym, is simultaneously positioned to "do it for daddy," thus reaffirming the centrality of Frankie as the filmʼs white male lead, a position that Eastwood has held historically as an actor, and that we consider in our analysis. Our final theme concerns the ideological function of dis- ability in the film that has garnered angry attention from disability activists. We suggest that Maggieʼs disablement further serves to contain her initially powerful identity, sustaining cultural anxieties about womenʼs participation in boxing based upon overly pronounced anxieties about the danger of injury and death to women (much more so than men). Here we also critically examine the filmʼs reliance upon emotional appeals to the audience, as it presents the deepening effects of Maggieʼs disability as grotesque and ultimately tragic, and renders female boxing ever more problematic (Bartra & Mraz, 2005). *************(Mis-) Representing Women's Boxing: Reality Versus the Dramatic Conventions of Hollywood Cinema Female pugilists have been swift to critique MDBʼs depiction of female boxing, given the contradictions between what we know in reality and what we see on the screen. Former boxer, Kate Sekules (2005, p. 1) points to the filmʼs "pushing of half truths and myths about womenʼs boxing" displayed in Frankieʼs refusal to train women, his reference to female boxing as "the latest freak show," and the hyper- masculine atmosphere of the Hit Pit boxing gym. These inaccuracies obfuscate the fact that increasing numbers of women have been training alongside men in gyms all over North America since the 1970s. The problem with the filmʼs understatement of womenʼs presence and partici- pation in boxing is that it nourishes a male-centric mythology about boxing as the exclusive domain of men. Yet womenʼs participation in boxing, in the West at least, dates back to the eighteenth century, when a number of mostly poor working-class women participated in public fights for profit. John Trenchardʼs London Journal of June 23, 1722, spoke of "two of the Feminine Gender" who maintained "a Battle with great Valor for a long Time to the no small Satisfaction of the Spectators" (Kloeren, 1935, p. 64). At James Figgʼs amphitheatre that opened in London in 1743, Irish women were said to fight stoutly and draw blood (Guttmann, 2004, p. 73). Numerous other reports spoke of regular, often ferocious matches throughout nineteenth century England and, by the end of that century, womenʼs boxing cham- pionship matches were reported on both sides of the Atlantic. In the U.S., they were frequently advertised in the Police Gazette and often pitted women against men in brutal spectacles on the vaudeville circuit (Guttmann, 1991, p. 75). So popular did these spectacles become that there was a sideshow of womenʼs boxing events when the third Olympic Games was moved from Chicago to St. Louis in 1904 (Beauchamp, 2001, p. 170). Womenʼs boxing became even more popular during the interwar years, epito- mized by Babe Didrickson sparring with Jack Dempsey as a publicity stunt. Not until the 1970s, however, did women begin seriously to challenge state boxing com- missions for entry to the sport as professional athletes, and the first fully sanctioned Womenʼs World Championship did not take place until 1995. This was largely enabled by the signing of Leila Ali by Don King, one of boxingʼs most powerful promoters (Hargreaves, 1997, p. 39). When Christie Martin and Deirdre Gogarty stole the show on the 1996 Mike Tyson-Frank Bruno heavyweight championship card in Las Vegas in 1996, they proved to over a million TV viewers that "women could fight with skill, bleed, ʻget rocked,ʼ come back for more, and continue until the final bell" (Beauchamp, 2001, p. 168). Martin went on to become the first female boxer to be profiled on the cover of Sports Illustrated—posing with fists up and bloodied. Female boxing is now a burgeoning sport in which women have made significant inroads into coaching, judging, and management positions. Indeed, the year 2000 saw the first female become head of the International Boxing Federation, several years before the release of MDB. Nonetheless, female boxing continues to face strong opposition from many quarters and remains banned in a number of countries. Female fighters struggle for media recognition and much needed financial backing as well as against the current of sexist and deligitimizing medical discourse about the dangers to their reproductive health. As a result, the pool of qualified female boxers is small, and promoters have been accused of setting up embarrassing mismatches to draw paying customers and deflect attention from displays of female skill and mastery. Furthermore, women remain subject to a different set of rules than men, reflecting ingrained male attitudes about what women can and cannot do with their bodies.2 Though the number of female boxers is still relatively low, interest has soared since USA Boxing lifted its ban on womenʼs boxing in 1993, and the possibility of female boxing becoming an Olympic event has been publicly considered.3 MDB has also received criticism for its decidedly brutal depiction of womenʼs boxing that eclipses its "subtle, intricate, and even intellectual aspects" (Sekules, 2005, p. 2). Maggie ends most of her fights with a knockout in the first round, fore- closing a more intricate display of the finer aspects of female boxing. Indeed, the only prolonged bout, the climactic million-dollar world title fight, is characterized from the start by "dirty fighting," shrouded in an atmosphere of fear and anxiety. It ends early in the third round when Maggie receives the blow that renders her quadriplegic. Film critic Bernie McCoy (2005) attributes the neglect of a realistic portrayal of female boxing to the dramatic conventions of Hollywood cinema that foreclose any sustained interest in a realistic depiction of womenʼs boxing or rec- ognition for the accomplishments of female athletes. This is exacerbated perhaps by the conflation in popular commentary on the film between Hilary Swank, the actor, and Maggie, the character she portrays. Massive publicity around Swankʼs physical training for the role may well have had the effect of minimizing the dis- tance between the real life authority of a competitive female boxer and the fictional character she was required to play. By troubling the filmʼs depiction of womenʼs boxing, we are not suggesting that we measure the quality of this film by the accuracy of its portrayal, especially given Sekulesʼ negative view of MDBʼs fight choreography; rather, we aim to uncover the deeper issues at work in the story that appear to be more preoccupied with menʼs responses to a waning sense of their hegemony over the boxing world. In light of the filmʼs significant deviation from the real-life qualities of womenʼs boxing, we investigate the ideological function of Maggie in the film and the effects of her depiction. ************Depicting Female Masculinity: Transgressing Gender Performance in Hollywood Cinema The character of Maggie Fitzgerald can be viewed as a radical portrayal of a strong woman in the boxing genre of Hollywood cinema as well as a general challenge to the mainstream mediaʼs representation of female athletes. Indeed, popular portrayals of female boxing have tended to reinforce heterosexist attitudes towards menʼs and womenʼs roles, where women provide the "sexy" sideshow entertainment, while men perform the real labor of fighting. As Hargreaves (1997) puts it, "The potential radicalization of the female body in sport is contradicted by the ever present expression of compulsory heterosexuality and the attempt to justify female boxing on the grounds that it has an authentic feminine element" (p. 45). Popular portrayals of female fighters have been limited to "foxy boxing" —the boxing version of a mud wrestling match—as well as images of Hollywood "darlings," half-naked but for a pair of strategically placed and oversized boxing gloves (Beauchamp, 2001, p. 172). MDBʼs depiction of Maggie refuses many of these conventional treatments of women at the ringside, including an unflinching depiction of her fights, "showing knock-out punches that you can feel and sweat that is almost palpable" (Cruz, 2005, p. 4). It is perhaps the only film other than Girlfight (2000) to subject an audience to the full force of the womenʼs punches and graphic displays of broken noses, bruised bodies, and bleeding eyes, as they battle it out to the bell. From this angle, Maggie can be read as supporting the disruptive aspects of womenʼs boxing that evoke hostility precisely because fighting women dispel the myth of female passivity through the public demonstration of their speed, strength, agility, and courage—attributes typically associated with men. The female body in popular culture, and particularly in sport, has been the battleground for power struggles over gender dominance. Close attention to the treatment of Maggieʼs body in MDB is instructive given the filmʼs ambivalent gender politics—that is, its tension between celebrating and containing the power of a female athlete. When we first see Maggie training, she is robed in unflatter- ing sweats, causing the viewer to focus more on the honing of her boxing skills than the shapeliness of her developing body. As Maggieʼs training progresses, her body hardens and her sweats are replaced by functional shorts and a sports bra that reveal more of her body. In this sense, the gradual focus on Maggieʼs fit body as an instrument of self-actualization and physical power, rather than the object of menʼs desire, reflects the gains that women have made in terms of challenging gender stereotypes and undermining many of the mythologies that men have used to keep women out of sports. Indeed, Clint Eastwoodʼs body, once proudly exposed in his earlier films to exemplify his masculinity (Smith, 1993, p. 239), is now covered to shield the audience from the realities of aging and to avoid a possible comparison with Maggieʼs youthful, muscular, and taut body. It is also important to consider how Maggieʼs whiteness and slenderness contribute to the acceptability of her strong body and performance, sustaining long-held Eurocentric notions of beauty and normative body types (Dutton, 1995; Gilman, 1999; Hersey, 1996). The role of racial differences in shaping the audienceʼs response to Maggieʼs body is highlighted by the treatment of her darker skinned and hyper-muscular nemesis, Blue Bear, whose depiction as masculine, violent, and threatening conforms to racist depictions of black women (hooks, 1992). Heterosexuality as normative also complicates intersections of race and gender. The gradual exposure of Maggieʼs fit body reinscribes a "heterosexiness" on her body that conforms to contemporary aesthetics of what a "hot" female body should look like (i.e., muscular and toned without an ounce of fat but not "too" muscular). This is further underscored by the dramatic covering of her body once she becomes disabled—her disabled body now constructed as an abject state by the standards of female beauty. Maggieʼs preoccupation with improving her boxing skills and her seeming disregard for "all things feminine" negates her complete containment within gender norms. Indeed her passionate quest to become a professional boxer in a male-dominated sport and her refusal to shy away from pain and injury places her within the boundaries of what Halberstam (1998) calls "female masculinity." This concept describes the performance of conventionally understood masculine prac- tices and characteristics adopted by women. While Halberstam uses the concept more specifically in relation to the queer and lesbian, it is useful here for naming Maggieʼs disruptive gender performance and exploring her progressive potential. Her muscularity, coupled with the use of her body to inflict violence rather than provide "eye candy" at the ringside of menʼs fights, disrupts the gender order of the boxing gym and the male charactersʼ masculine identities that rely on the exclusion of women from boxing. Our celebration of her as an icon of female masculinity, however, is signifi- cantly complicated when we consider Halberstamʼs core definition of "masculinity without men" (1998, p. 16). Maggieʼs primary identification lies with her coach and father-figure, Frankie, as well as the kind and nurturing gym caretaker, Eddie. Continually surrounded by men whom she relies upon for guidance and support, Maggie significantly lacks positive and nurturing relationships with other women. The few other women in the film are depicted as agents of betrayal and abuse. Maggieʼs antagonistic relationship with her mother and sister, depicted as money- grubbing, welfare-dependent "trailer trash," reproduces sexist attitudes of women as dependent and lacking in courage to survive in a manʼs world. To push this point a little further, the female characters, other than Maggie, are all remarkable for either their reliance on others for support or for their hovering potential to do harm when they step too far outside of their gender roles. The latter is particularly apparent in the figure of the boxer who disables Maggie at the championship fight. Her isolation from other female boxers elides the realities of strong loyalties among actual female fighters as well as close relationships with female coaches and their female athletes. This negative depiction of women and the relations among them encourages sexist attitudes towards them as either overly passive or unnaturally aggressive. Maggie is meanwhile positioned as somewhat of an anomaly in the film, accepted by the men in the boxing gym through common bonds of class as just "one of the boys." This positioning of the female lead in the male-centered hierarchy of the gym occurs early on in the film and is captured in the scene in which Eddie imparts the logic of boxing to Maggie. On the surface, it is a gesture of inclusion on the part of Eddie who feels for Maggieʼs marginalization by the other men, yet his exclusive use of male pronouns when discussing "the boxer" serves to underscore the reigning masculine logic of the "sweet science" that either devalues the feminine or subsumes it within masculine codes of psychology and behavior. Our analysis so far reveals dialectical representational discourses at work in MDBʼs depiction of the female pugilist. The filmʼs attitude toward female power and masculinity operates through a complex set of discourses that both celebrate and undermine her power. We now turn to a deeper treatment of the aspects of the film that contain Maggieʼs presence as a potentially transgressive figure. In par- ticular, we apply bell hooksʼ (1995) concept of "doing it for daddy" to understand the gendered power relations at work in the relationship between Frankie and Maggie. Since this concept also accounts for racialized hierarchies among men in patriarchy, we examine the racial politics of Frankieʼs paternalism towards Eddie, the African-American ex-boxer and custodian of the gym. We argue that Maggieʼs and Eddieʼs often subtle subordination to Frankie reflects boxing hierarchies in which athletes are subordinated to the will of their coach or "white daddy" to use hooksʼ terminology. ***********"Doing It for Daddy": Recentering the White Male Patriarch bell hooks (1995) argues that patriarchy reproduces its hierarchical power structures by inviting the subordinated other "to find ultimate pleasure, satisfac- tion, and fulfillment in that act of performance and submission" to white men (p. 98). She uses the phrase "doing it for daddy" to describe situations where racial and gender hierarchies are reproduced through popular representations of white women and black men in relation to white males. More specifically, "doing it for daddy" captures a racist and sexist cultural narrative that is widespread in Holly- wood films and popular magazines such as Us and Vogue, where black males and white females are depicted as competing for the acceptance and affection of white "daddies." In these publications, black men and white women have been variously depicted in the boxing arena in some form of power struggle—presumably for the affection of the white male overseer who is absent from the image (hooks, 1995, p. 103). According to hooks, this kind of representation both objectifies and sub- ordinates black men (and increasingly, we would add, women), obfuscating their historical and vocal contestation of white male superiority in boxing (hooks, 1995, p. 105). With regard to MDB, hooksʼ "doing it for daddy" is useful in exploring the simultaneously gendered and racialized aspects of the complex relations among the filmʼs three central protagonists in which, we argue, Frankie fulfills the role of the white father. ********The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Eastwood's Intertextual Father-Figures in Hollywood Cinema Eastwoodʼs well-documented history of portraying a father-figure/patriarch throughout his acting career provides a degree of legitimacy to his role as Frankie in MDB. Indeed, since the 1970s, Eastwood has increasingly appeared in father/ patriarchal roles (Beard, 2000; Smith, 1993). These paternal representations have taken three dominant forms: the literal or biological father (see, e.g., Tightrope, 1984; Unforgiven, 1992), the metaphorical father or community leader (The Outlaw Josey Wales, 1976; Heartbreak Ridge, 1986), and finally, the substitute father, who stands in for an inadequate or absentee parent (Honkytonk Man, 1982; A Perfect World, 1993). Significantly, in each adaptation of the paternal role, Eastwood extends a composite, if at times paradoxical, position, as he often portrays an archetypal "good father" vis-à-vis a more mundane or anti-heroic brand of fatherhood. Far from monolithic, these roles, Beard (2000) explains, are laden with contradictions: The Good Father rarely makes an appearance in Eastwoodʼs cinema without some hint or presence of the weaker, limited one or some equivalent. In some of the films (mostly later ones) the two functions are actually combined, to produce a doubled, self-contradictory, or deconstructed father-figure . . .. The Eastwood-father is simultaneously a father and not a father, a protector and not a protector, a nurturer and not a nurturer. In both cases what we find is a persona who is simultaneously a sterling success and a mirage or failure, a charismatic figure of power and a fraud. (p. 93) Eastwoodʼs portrayal of Frankie in MDB is notable in that he assumes all three dimensions of the father prototype. He serves as metaphorical father at his training facility (where his office overlooks the gymnasium in panoptic fashion); as trainer and coach he stands in as Maggieʼs substitute father; and he plays the literal father to his mysteriously estranged daughter. Moreover, both the "good" and the "weak" patriarch are forefront in MDB: The "weak father" appears in Frankieʼs failed relationship with his biological daughter as well as with past fighters (including Big Willie, an elite fighter who escapes Frankieʼs overprotection and finds another trainer, and the now-retired Eddie), while the "good father" seeks atonement for these mistakes and appears in Frankieʼs (current) affiliation with Eddie and Maggie. Many features of Eastwoodʼs previous filmic representations thus resurface in his portrayal of Frankie—an articulation that we suggest legitimates his position as patriarch in MDB. It is about the relations between the "good father" Frankie, his trainee Maggie, and his employee/friend Eddie that we are most concerned here, as we would argue these latter two characters are positioned within the text to "do it for daddy." *******Paternalism in MDB: Containing Maggie and Eddie hooksʼ concept of "doing it for daddy" is initially helpful in illustrating how Maggieʼs seemingly transgressive female masculinity is contained through her subordination to "the father." As the filmʼs plot unfolds, it becomes increasingly apparent that Frankieʼs paternal bond with his female trainee serves to ease the emotional burden of a damaged relationship with his now estranged biological daughter (of whom we learn very little). At the same time, Maggieʼs pain from the childhood loss of her father is alleviated in part by Frankieʼs care and protection as her coach and his gradual development into a father-figure. This bond is rendered most explicit when Maggie tells Frankie "you remind me of my daddy." While this compensatory father-daughter relationship may appear touching and unproblematic on the surface, Maggieʼs placement as surrogate daughter in many ways serves to counteract her depiction as an independent and headstrong woman. From the outset of their relationship, Frankie makes clear the power relations of his boxing pedagogy, saying to Maggie: "If I take you on, you donʼt say anything. You donʼt question me. You donʼt ask why. You donʼt say a thing except maybe, ʻYes Frankie.ʼ And Iʼm going to try to forget the fact that youʼre a girl." Frankieʼs speech reveals in two related ways how the agency of the female pugilist is limited by her subordination to him. First, his claim that he is going to forget that Maggie is a girl sets a limitation on her acceptance within the gym and encourages her to emulate masculine codes if she is to find a legitimate place there. This attitude further perpetuates the masculine mythology that the boxing arena is no place for a woman. Second, Frankieʼs despotic approach is reflective of hierarchies among fighters and trainers. It is a pedagogy romanticized in a voiceover by Eddie who explains, "to make a fighter . . . you gotta make ʼem so tired they only listen to you, only hear your voice, only do what you say and nothinʼ else." This authoritarian training style echoes the "real" boxing world, where manager-athlete relations are characterized by unequal and often exploitative power relations and boxers are known to use slavery and prostitution metaphors to describe managers, trainers, and promoters (Wacquant, 2001). Consider, for example, the patronizing epithets employed by Frankie to address his 32-year-old female trainee as "girl" or "girlie" (to which Maggie generally responds by calling Frankie "boss"). Frankie also provides Maggie with the moniker Mo chuisle (spelled incorrectly in the film as "Mo Cuishle"), a Gaelic term of endearment meaning ʻmy pulseʼ or ʻmy darling.ʼ While this term can be viewed as a simple endearment, symbolic of the bond forming between these characters, it also reiterates the top-down flow of power in their relationship. The themes of ownership and submission that are embedded in Maggie and Frankieʼs coach/fighter relationship extend into many aspects of the father/daugh- ter bond that develops between them. They emerge most poignantly perhaps in the parallels that can be drawn between Maggieʼs life and the macabre story she relates about her own father and his beloved dog, Axel. Having lost the use of his hind legs, Axel managed to follow Maggieʼs father around loyally by dragging his body behind him. The story ends tragically, however, when Maggieʼs father is forced to destroy the dog—a disturbing portend to Maggieʼs eventual death in which she is euthanized with an injection of adrenaline given by her (surrogate) father Frankie. In fact, it is in asking Frankie to "Remember what my daddy did for Axel?" that Maggie frames her request to be helped to die. Disability activists have been outraged by this portrayal of an uncritical advocacy of euthanasia for quadriplegics that compares them to sick animals needing to be put out of their misery. And while we provide a deeper treatment of this issue in the final section of the paper, this point serves to highlight the ideological effects of the filmʼs jux- taposition between Maggie and her childhood pet, and its significance to MDBʼs prevailing theme of submission to "the father." ********White Daddies and Black Angels: Racializing Paternal Relationships Since hooksʼ concept speaks to the manner in which both white female and black male characters are contained by their placement below white male patri- archs (and white male patriarchy in general), we need to consider the extent to which Eddie also fulfills a subordinate role in MDB. In discussing films such as The Pelican Brief (1993) and Philadelphia (1993), hooks (1995) notes how the African-American actor Denzel Washington is positioned to "do it for daddy" largely through his construction as a "good" black. She argues that Washingtonʼs characters are made "acceptable" because they uphold the values of the existing white, patriarchal socioeconomic structure and are isolated from any personal relationships with other black characters. As they resolutely support a centralized white protagonist in these films (generally without explanation as to why), the existence of Washingtonʼs characters thus depends on white affirmation, an imag- ery that "reproduces the narrative of colonialism. The servant/slave has eyes only for the ʻmasterʼ" (1995, p. 102). In a similar manner, Morgan Freemanʼs Eddie is constructed as a "good" black in MDB in multiple ways and can thus be understood as "doing it for daddy." First, Eddie can be viewed as a "good" black character for his unquestioned acceptance of the inequitable patriarchal social structure in which he is positioned. His subordinate economic status relative to Frankie is highlighted by Frankieʼs repeated (and patronizing) financial and domestic advice, ranging from the state of his socks to instructions about saving his money. Although a former elite level fighter, Eddie now seems content to be, as Frankie condescendingly says, "clean- ing up other peopleʼs spit" at the Hit Pit while simultaneously taking up residence there. Given Frankieʼs ownership of this establishment, Eddieʼs living quarters are thus placed—using hooksʼ colonial metaphor—within "the masterʼs house." Eddie can also be seen as a "good" black for his continual and seemingly unreasoned assistance of MDBʼs key white protagonists. With respect to Maggie, Eddie supports her desire to box from the outset, providing encouragement, advice, resources, and additional prodding of Frankie to accept her as a trainee. For Frankie, Eddieʼs backing is most poignantly exemplified at MDBʼs conclusion, when his narration is revealed to be a letter for Frankieʼs daughter and intended to underscore what a good man her father actually is. Perhaps of greatest significance, however, is the affection that Eddie develops for the socially awkward young man, Diller Barch, or "Danger," as he is known at the gym. In spite of Dangerʼs naive racism (his first words to Eddie are "I ainʼt gots nothing against ******s"), he evokes Eddieʼs sympathy (and by extension the audienceʼs) for his dreams of becoming a fighter, which earns him regular ridicule from the other boxers. The construction of Danger as a sympathetic character is partly enabled by his juxtaposition with a young black fighter named Shawrelle Berry, who is portrayed as lazy, overly aggressive, and insecure, thus reproducing common stereotypes about black men. Eddieʼs fondness for Danger is expressed through his role as unofficial (and unpaid) trainer and defender against verbal antagonism from the other boxers. To be sure, Eddieʼs persistent support of Frankie, Maggie, and Danger can be rationalized by his role as caretaker at the Hit Pit, yet it can also be interpreted as symbolic of a racist trope common to Hollywood films in which black men are depicted as "black angels" who are concerned, for no apparent reason, solely with the interests of white characters (Gabbard, 2004; Hicks, 2003). This is most strikingly apparent in a scene in which Berry orchestrates a vicious attack on the innocent Danger. Hearing a fight from a corner of the gym where he is cleaning, Eddie intervenes to protect the battered Danger and takes it upon himself to violently discipline Shawrelle, thus both exercising his masculine authority and demonstrating "good" moral character for the wayward young black man. Finally, this reading of Eddie as a "good" black is reaffirmed when his depic- tion is considered alongside that of MDBʼs other black characters. Consistent with binaries of "good" and "bad" blacks in popular culture, and especially in the sports media (see Andrews, 1996; Wynn, 2003), the other black characters in MDB are portrayed as either "naturally" athletic but lazy (as in the case of Shawrelle, whose right hook, we are told, could "move a tank"), overly aggressive (Shawrelle again, as well as Blue Bear who paralyzes Maggie), or disloyal (Big Willie Little, who leaves Frankie for another manager). In that he is located in, and in many ways accepting of, his subordinate position to both Frankie as MDBʼs white male patriarch (among other white characters) and white patriarchy more generally, Eddie is constructed as a "good" black character and can be read as "doing it for daddy." Yet while the racialized binary of "good" versus "bad" potentially contributes to the frame of cultural reference through which audiences interpret Eddie, it would be inaccurate and misleading to read him simply as the "good" black who quietly and happily submits to his masterʼs will. Indeed, both Eddie and Maggie regularly challenge Frankieʼs authority and wisdom—Eddieʼs defiance usually stemming from his frustration with Frankieʼs overprotective training approach and Maggieʼs surfacing in her blatant disregard of Frankieʼs initial hostility over training women and his repeated requests for her to intentionally prolong her matches in order to sharpen her boxing skills. In many ways, through their corresponding subordinate location with respect to Frankie, Maggie and Eddie form a bond in defiance of the Hit Pitʼs white male patriarch. Indeed, from the filmʼs outset, it is the kindness and encouragement of Eddie that enables Maggie to create a space for herself at the gym and persuade Frankie to take her on. On the level of their friendship, the representations of Maggie and Eddie depart from hooksʼ "doing it for daddy," where black men and white women compete for the "fatherʼs" affection. Although we maintain our assertion that both Maggie and Eddie are marginalized and ultimately displaced by the patriarch Frankie, the MDB text is unquestionably polysemic. In the following section, we turn to an examination of the ideological effects of the depiction of Maggieʼs disablement in the boxing ring. Drawing on critical scholarship on disability, race, and gender, we place these considerations within mainstream cultural discourses on ability and disability, and amid special concerns about the presence of women in boxing. We suggest that Maggieʼs disability con- tributes to the containment of the transgressive aspects of her character and supports the centering of Frankie as the filmʼs central protagonist. ******Disturbing Disability: Narratives of Disability, Gender, and Race in MDB Shortly after the screening of MDB, the activist group Not Dead Yet assembled in several U.S. cities to protest the filmʼs stance on disability. The National Spinal Cord Injury Association, a national advocacy group of 13,000 members, also voiced concern over what they perceived as an uncritical advocation of euthanasia for quadriplegics (Davis, 2005). While the film could be defended on the grounds that it replicates the tragic plot twist from F.X. Tooleʼs short story, its extremely graphic and unnuanced portrayal of Maggieʼs experiences as a quadriplegic merits critique. As cultural and media studies scholars argue, film does not passively indoctrinate its viewers but acts as a powerful mediator of social relations, where representations contribute to the naturalization of cultural norms inscribed with notions about race, gender, and disability (Croteau & Hoynes, 2003; Schirato & Webb, 2004). Disability activists rightly argue that depictions of disability in this able-centric world matter a great deal and that only when films provide accurate depictions can peopleʼs understanding increase. Robert McRuer (2003, p. 151) argues that Hol- lywood film has been particularly guilty of inscribing disability within the binary options of cure or elimination that sustain able-centric notions of normalcy, beauty, health, and quality of life. The focus on either curing or eliminating disability perpetuates the notion that there is only one way to think about disability—as something entirely negative and life-threatening. McRuer cites Philadelphia (1993) and In the Gloaming (1997) as texts that present disabled characters as terminally ill and whose suffering is alleviated only by death—clichés that obscure the lived experiences of people with disabilities. Yet these stereotypical narratives remain popular, despite the fact that people with disabilities, as 15% of the population, are the largest minority in the United States and have a long history of campaigning for freedom from marginalization and discrimination (Davis, 1997, p. xi). Indeed, many embrace their identities and refuse the label of "disability" or a one-sided desire to be "cured" (McRuer, 2003, p. 153). MDBʼs treatment of disability as horrific and life-ending is consistent with the able-centric narratives of disability discussed by McRuer. Undoubtedly, the process of coming to terms with her state of disability would be harrowing for Maggie, but the narrative abruptly cuts short her life as a quadriplegic, describing her hospitalization as a gruesome and tragic downward spiral towards death. This is not entirely plausible, given her once feisty spirit as well as the care available for people with disabilities in most hospitals. Critics of this aspect of the film have pointed out, for example, that the kind of bedsores that might lead to an amputation would not have arisen in an upscale nursing home of the kind in which Maggie was placed and certainly not so soon in her stay.4 The lack of nuance and reliance upon emotive techniques to draw the audi- ence into the drama is further exposed by a comparison with other, more complex portrayals of "disability" in film. For example, the Oscar-winning Spanish film, The Sea Inside (2004), directed by Alejandro Amenabar, is a bittersweet story about 54-year-old Ramon Sampedroʼs struggle with the European Commission on Human Rights to end his life after living as a quadriplegic for 28 years. Paralyzed from the neck down after a diving accident off Spainʼs Galician coast, Sampredro fights to end his life after many years tied to his bed and completely dependent on his family. Far from a depressing portrayal, however, he is shown as having lived an active and thoughtful life, fallen in love, written poetry, read essays, invented machines, and listened to classical music. In comparison to Maggie, who is depicted in a downward spiral to death, Sampedro is portrayed as a lively and highly intel- ligent man whose passionate arguments with all those who try to persuade him against euthanasia reveal the complexity and nuance of the right to die as well as the tenacity of the will to live in a state of almost total paralysis. Unlike Maggie, Sampedro has a large group of friends and supporters, a stoic and tender family to nurse him, and a vitality of mind and heart. None of these supports is available to Maggie. There are no scenes in which she is offered counseling to help with depression, as would be expected from appropriate medi- cal care. One reviewer, particularly disturbed by the filmʼs euthanasia response to Maggieʼs disability, argued that this representation sells short disabled athletes, foreclosing opportunities for newly disabled athletes to live a high quality life and perhaps continue to compete (Davis, 2005, p. 4). The depiction of her death by a lethal dose of adrenalin is also problematic. Disability activists point out that, since 1990, there have been legal options available to allow patients to refuse life- sustaining treatment, yet this is not offered as one of Maggieʼs options. Maggie, they continue, had the legal right to refuse artificial respiration. Instead, the story has Frankie enter the hospital illegally to disconnect the machine and inject her with a lethal (and painful) dose of adrenalin. The theme of disability in MDB is also bound up with racialized notions of femininity and bodily difference. Significantly, the tragic blow to Maggie is deliv- ered by the black female boxer and world champion known simply as Blue Bear. Her characterization as a dirty fighting ex-prostitute who delights in the destruction of opponents is fairly consistent with racist depictions of black women who, when compared with white women, are often perceived as hypersexual, animalistic, and overtly masculine (hooks, 1992; Williams, 2000). Maggie herself contributes to Blue Bearʼs supernatural, subhuman status by claiming that she is "made of steel." Indeed, Blue Bearʼs characterization as a dangerous animal and masculine woman is partly achieved through her difference from Maggie, who is represented as more conventionally and appropriately feminine. For example, at the championship fight, Maggie appears with braided hair, her face fully visible beneath her green satin cape inscribed with Mo Cuishle (ʻMy Darlingʼ), which the crowd chants loudly. By contrast, Blue Bearʼs appearance brings forth silence and loud booing from the crowd, her scowling face partially obscured by the hood of her cape, except for her jaw which the camera focuses upon, emphasizing its strong, square lines. European anatomists in the 18th and 19th centuries traditionally classified facial angles of different races to contend that the squared jaws of Negroes and apes were inferior to the rounded jaws of more evolved whites, and one can see here hints of the continued circulation of centuries-old racist notions of black people being somehow closer to animals (specifically primates) that have been used to justify traditional racial hierarchies (Stepan, 1982).These associations are further suggested by the sound effects of an animalʼs harsh breathing that accompany Blue Bearʼs movements as she circles silently around the ring focusing on her prey. The shadowing of her face, the primary site (other than a womanʼs breasts) from which we are trained to read gender, contributes to the theme of Blue Bearʼs gender ambiguity. Indeed, suspicion about black womenʼs sexuality, based on a belief in their greater tendency toward masculinity than white women, is not uncommon in sport discourses. In her research on black female bodybuildersʼ experiences of racial and gender discrimination, Williamsʼ (2000) participants reported that their sexual identities were invariably questioned by those within and outside the bodybuilding community. For black women, says Williams, "if the questioning begins with gender it inevitably segues to sexuality" (2003, p. 108). There is a striking irony in all of this, given the casting of Lucia Rijker as Blue Bear. No vicious ex-prostitute here, Rijker has been described as "an exemplary athlete and a brainy practicing Buddhist who is arguably the worldsʼ top female fighter, pound for pound" (Sekules, 2005, p. 2). Nor is it likely she would be party to the illegal punches shown in the final fight, punches that would never be tolerated by any judge or referee in a professional boxing match. Maggieʼs disability transforms a previously tenacious woman eager to prove her strength and courage in the ring into a shadow of her former fighting self. Within the context of the broader cultural anxieties about womenʼs boxing, not only does this confirm an attitude of helplessness toward disability, it also encour- ages a dangerous attitude toward female boxers and indeed any woman who steps outside of her proscribed gendered boundaries in sport. Rick Kulis, founder of the International Female Boxers Association in 1998, commented that he did not think the storyʼs ending was damaging to the sportʼs image, given that seri- ous injury in womenʼs boxing is extremely rare and regulation has become more rigorous in recent years (Lyman, 2005). Yet in the context of the filmʼs narrative, where womenʼs boxing is rendered problematic, the "disabling" of Maggie at the height of her career does damage the image of female boxing and reinforce sexist notions about womenʼs fitness for full-contact sports. It has been suggested that the screenwriter relied heavily on the real-life story of Katie Dallam, a former boxer from Kansas City who lost substantial brain function in a boxing match against a much more experienced fighter (Lyman, 2005). Her experience supports Kulisʼ view that when serious injuries do occur, they are almost always a result of poorly managed fights between mismatched boxers. (For example, there is no evidence to support the notion that boxing poses greater risk to female reproductive organs than male.) Yet in spite of this, MDB trades on moral panic about the potentially harmful outcome of womenʼs participation in boxing to create and sustain its dramatic effects. Indeed, after her accident, Frankie hisses angrily at Eddie that he never should have trained a "girl." McRuer (2003) points out that by eliminating the disabled body, a body that is inextricably tied to other pathologized dimensions of identity such as gender and race, its threat to an able-bodied, patriarchal, and heterosexist world is minimized in the filmʼs narrative. By reducing Maggie to the state of a quadriplegic at the hands of another female boxer, the film preys on the deeper fears of the audience about the dangers of boxing to women and sustains more troubling attitudes about female athleticism and female masculinity (i.e., that womenʼs pursuit of traditionally male athletics tranforms them into gender-bending freaks and results in injuries that justify their exclusion from sports). We suggest that the "disabling" and death of her character has the ideological effect not simply of containing her transgres- sions but, more seriously, eliminating her threat to the masculine hegemony over boxing. Moreover, her removal from the plot enables the narrative to re-center Frankie which, according to Gabbard (2004), is a recurring narrative strategy in Eastwoodʼs films, in which the "other" (i.e., a woman or black sidekick) is killed off or dismissed, leaving Eastwoodʼs character alone and at the center of the narra- tive. Maggieʼs disablement and death refocus the remaining narrative on Frankie, whose own guilt and anguish subsumes Maggieʼs painful struggle. Moreover, the expressions of undying love for her boxing "daddy" that saturate the dialogue during her decline, generate audience sympathy for Frankieʼs predicament as well as supporting his redemption as a "good" father—in relation both to Maggie and, by extension, to his biological daughter. His redemption is completed in Eddieʼs final voiceover, through which we discover that throughout the film, he has been writing a letter to Frankieʼs estranged daughter, thus channeling his own energies and interests into the centering and redemption of his white "daddy." By the end of the film, the re-centering of the white patriarch is thus complete, metaphorically patching the holes that a female boxer once punched through the mythology of male-exclusive aptitude for the sport. *********conclusion: We are drawn to conclude, then, that MDB is not about Maggie or even about womenʼs boxing, nor is it about disability and the right to die. Like mainstream celebrations of boxing, MDB is about men. To the extent that the film celebrates female pugilists, it subscribes to fairly neo-liberal notions of gender equality that demean feminism and gloss over (and perhaps heighten) deeper inequalities of gender, class, and race. Furthermore, its sensationalist and demeaning use of dis- ability adds to this effect. While aspects of Maggieʼs character are transgressive of typical depictions of female athletes in the media, our close textual analysis reveals that she functions more as a support for Eastwoodʼs character, whose own story and struggles are foregrounded in the narrative. We deployed hooksʼ terminology, "doing it for daddy," to describe how both Maggie and Eddie are in many ways subordinated to Frankie as the coach/benefactor and surrogate father- figure. Frankieʼs insistence that Maggie suspend her femininity and conform to his exclusive masculine standards, and the recurrent theme of ownership that char- acterizes multiple dimensions of the relationship between Frankie, Maggie, and Eddie, function to re-center the white male patriarch, or "daddy," within the film. While we are not suggesting that the film sabotages Maggie in a patriarchal plot to re-center whiteness and masculinity, we do argue that its contradictory discourses that both undermine and reinstate patriarchal gender and racial hierarchies produce this ideological effect. Perhaps one of the major findings of our analysis is best presented as a warning. While it is easy to be seduced by seemingly positive representations of strong and unconventional women whose struggles appear to reflect womenʼs real experiences, it is important to maintain a critical watch for the deeper and often problematic discourses smuggled by the popular media. More often than not, potentially radical depictions of women in mainstream cinema thinly disguise harmful assumptions about class, race, sexuality, and gender that reinforce barriers against which women and minorities continue to struggle for legitimacy and recognition in a variety of sports, not least the "sweet science" of boxing.

module 8- social class Baker Chapter 4: A Left/Right Combination: Class and American Boxing Films

Confidence, Ruben Luna believed, was the indispensable ingredient of success, and he had it in abundance as much faith in his destiny as in the athletes he trained. In his own years of battling he had doubts which at times became periods of terror. With a broken jaw wired into silence, he had sucked liquid meals through a tube, wondering if he were even sane. After a severe body beating and bloody urination in the dressing room, he had wondered if the big fights and large sums he had thought would be coming but never came could be worth all that he endured. - Leonard Gardner Feature films about prizefighting speak more directly about capitalism and class than most other sports movies because they present both forceful representations of self-reliance and the drive for wealth, but they also mediate the material forces in the history of the fight game that have complicated such utopian optimism. In many boxing films the force of that material reality first manifests itself in the protagonist's decision to enter the ring. The conditions motivating this choice offer one of the least obfuscated representations of working-class life in American movies: a young man (or in a few recent films, a young woman) chooses to fight because it appears to be the best and sometimes only way to escape a life of hard work with little to show for it—what Stanley Aronowitz calls "the mode of surplus extraction" that operates in the ghetto or barrio. Professional boxing in the United States has always attracted youth from subordinate groups with limited opportunity for self-determination. As immigrants from Europe, African Americans, and Latinos settled in U.S. cities, young men from these communities would often learn to fight in order to protect their neighborhoods against incursions by other racial and ethnic groups. Because of the limited work opportunities available in urban slums, boys who showed special aptitude in street fighting, and were willing to undergo intense training and physical punishment, would perfect their pugilistic skills in the hope of becoming professionals. From 1870 to 1920, the Irish dominated professional prizefighting, producing nine world champions during the 1890s and more title holders and contenders than any other group up until World War I. As their opportunities in other areas of the national economy improved, however, Irish dominance over the sport declined, and other ethnic groups gradually moved into professional prizefighting. After the turn of the century, Jewish fighters began to win titles; they were second only to the Irish in the number of champions they produced during the 1910s. Boxing also provided men of Italian and Eastern European extraction with their first major successes in professional sports during the same decade. Italian Americans retained their major role in prize fighting through the end of World War II; by that time the Jews had followed the Irish out of the innercity neighborhoods, replaced as boxers by African Americans and Chicanos. While boxers of Jewish, Italian, and Eastern European backgrounds who fought before World War II were generally smaller, and therefore in lower weight classes, promoters could still generate a high degree of interest and draw large crowds by setting up fights between opponents from these ethnic groups and by billing the contests as struggles for national or religious pride Only a select few who have entered the ring have attained wealth and fame, and even fewer have succeeded in overcoming the effects of crooked management. Steven Riess states that, given their tendency to overspend as a way of compensating for their poor background, their lack of any other marketable skills, and the often devastating effects of the punishment they took, boxers usually have had a bleak future. "Many retired fighters, especially the club boxers who didn't have any substantial fame, ended up about where they had started out," he concludes. Joyce Carol Oates concisely describes the pyramidal structure of prizefighting when she says that it has "a limitless supply of losers, but ... very few stars. While most prizefight films show the circumstances that motivate the choice to enter the ring, only a brave few trace the connection between the reification and exploitation of working-class labor common to prizefighting as a business and similar practices in the larger economy. Instead, the unfair remuneration and lack of guidance given to the young boxer often gets blamed on a criminal antagonist: the dishonest manager, gambler, or promoter whose charismatic characterization of evil and greed suggests that he alone is to blame for the difficulty the fighter has escaping the constraints of proletarian labor. In this way movies about boxing fit the tendency in the American social problem film whereby conflicts are individualized, therefore more easily overcome, and "never appear systemic. The most common narrative for the prizefight film involves the boxer's quick rise from disadvantage to the title, followed by a fall from grace, usually due to the seduction of wealth and fame, and some form of redemption in the third act. The heroic triumph over long odds implied in that bare-bones plot summary explains in part why so many boxing films have been made and also probably why some of the biggest male stars in the movies have played boxers, including Jimmy Cagney, John Garfield, Errol Flynn, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman, Tony Curtis, Elvis Presley, James Earl Jones, Robert De Niro, Tom Cruise, Antonio Banderas, Denzel Washington, and the biggest box office boxer of all time, Sylvester Stallone, whose move onto the A list started with Rocky (1976). Yet even the Hollywood fighter who overcomes the barriers of intense competition and criminal exploitation usually finds that, rather than escape the boundaries of class difference, his initial success in the ring simply makes him a better consumer, an identity consistent with the logic of a business in which he is as much a product as what he buys with his cut of the winnings. The clothes, cars, and nightlife that follow the fighter's initial success represent what Fredric Jameson calls the "embourgeoisment of the worker, or better still, the transformation of both bourgeois and worker into ... the consumer" that has been an important part of liberalism's rejection of class difference in American society.? Because he makes his living with his body, rather than through education and the upward mobility of professionalization, the movie prizefighter often lacks the knowledge of how to use his victories to gain greater self-determination. Leger Grindon refers to this fight film topos when he notes that the boxer embodies the physical in an environment in which power equals money, strategy, and social position that are controlled by the manager, promoter, or gambler. Recognizing this, several of the more politically aware boxing films such as Golden Boy (1939), City for Conquest (1940), and Body and Soul (1947) present education and culture as preferable modes of social mobility. The Price of Glory (2000) recalls an even more prominent response to the disadvantage of class in boxing films when it endorses, not individual empowerment through formal education, but the protection and support of family and community as the young fighter's best defense. The Price of Glory contrasts the self-interest represented by the investment advice of an accountant brother-in-law to a young boxer, Sonny Ortega (Jon Seda), with the instruction in class and racial self-defense offered by his ex-fighter father Arturo (Jimmy Smits)—himself a graduate from the school of hard knocks. The Price of Glory therefore shows how the unity of family and community in Chicano culture provides an effective response to the problems of class exploitation and racial discrimination for Sonny, as well as for his two younger brothers, who also want careers in prizefighting. Probably to appeal to a adolescent demographic, the film camouflages the father's cultural and class politics within a story of generational conflict in which two of the three sons resist Arturo's guidance because of their desire to act on their own in a way the larger society values (and exploits). To really make its point, The Price of Glory shows the youngest son, Johnny (Ernesto Hernández), who believes most strongly in the working-class and Chicano identity his father teaches him, dying as a result of his one attempt to go it alone against the predators who feed off young fighters. Common to the redemption of the fighter in films as different as Winner Take All (1932), Kid Galahad (1937), Spirit of Youth (1938), Keep Punching (1939), Golden Boy, Body and Soul, The Harder They Fall (1956), Girlfight (2000), Play It to the Bone (2000), and The Hurricane (2000) is the realization that the individualized success of victory in the ring by itself doesn't allow the fighter to transcend the constraints of class, race, or gender. The Price of Glory is typical of these films in that it shows how the additional support the fighter needs takes the form of a family or familylike group. Moreover, these family structures often bring with them the baggage of racist and sexist ideas of white or male superiority. As Michael Rogin points out, even a politically aware film like Body and Soul "conditions Jewish/black solidarity on Jew knocking out black." The Price of Glory, perhaps because it is so intent on celebrating the strength of the Ortega family, exaggerates the problematic, if standard, portrayal of the main female character as supportive and loyal by giving her four men to worry about. In other words, boxing films that avoid a simplistic utopian response to economic disadvantage often achieve only partial success in showing the relations with other forms of social identity that define class. To the degree that these films represent effective collectivity, they establish class identity in both senses described by Raymond Williams: as "including all who are objectively in that economic situation," and as "a formation in which, for historical reasons, consciousness of this situation and the organization to deal with it have developed."10 In many of these films, however, class identitylike the boxer-tries unsuccessfully to stand alone. *******Class and history: Terry Eagleton has written that the study of ideologies analyzes "the ideas, values and feelings by which (people] experience their societies at various times."ll The historical variability of class identities implied in this statement is salient in boxing films, which from the 1930s to the present have responded to the influences of the Depression; changes in the Hollywood film industry and national and international politics after World War II; and the need to rethink ideas of class in relationship to other aspects of social identity that became apparent with the rise of the civil rights and women's movements. Since this chapter emphasizes those boxing films that foreground work ing-class identity and its historical determinants in tension with the utopian self-determination that has characterized Hollywood cinema, it will focus on three groups of boxing movies. The first, made during the Depression years, serves as a metaphor for the society at large, attempting to resolve a contradiction between the values of rugged individualism and the values of community. Most boxing films of the 1930s celebrate a working-class hero who tries to beat the odds to escape the urban jungle and the exploitation of the fight game. In the spirit of the New Deal, however, these pictures also stress the importance of group support to help the protagonist succeed. The second cycle analyzed here includes seven films released between 1947 and 1956. Three of these, Body and Soul, The Set-Up (1949), and Champion (1949), use a combination of noir and neorealist styles to criticize the exploitation of working-class fighters and capitalist culture in general. In reaction to the political repression of the blacklists and the increasingly nonwhite makeup of prizefighting, films from the 1950s such as The Ring (1952), The Joe Louis Story (1953), The Harder They Fall, and Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) shift their focus to race and liberal models of assimilation as the best response to class and racial disadvantage. Befitting its postmodern moment, the third cycle, which starts in 1976 and is ongoing, is the most diverse. Rocky and Raging Bull (1980) feature protagonists who believe passionately in their ability to single-handedly transcend social categories such as class and race. Stallone's film endorses that goal, while Scorsese's presents Jake LaMotta as achieving a kind of Christian transcendence for finally accepting its impossibility. I analyze also how several of these most recent films, including Rocky, When We Were Kings (1996), and Don King: Only in America (1997) represent Muhammad Ali, either to support his politics of anticolonialism and black unity, or to discredit his critique of whiteness to support the mythology of a self-reliant individualism. Finally, this chapter examines several of the most recent boxing films, including The Great White Hype (1996), The Hurricane, Girlfight, and Play It to the Bone for how they illustrate that issues of class, race, and gender are best understood by recognizing their tensions and interdependence. ***The populist prizefighter as new deal hero: By pitting one fighter against another with only their hands to do battle, and by roping the combatants off from the rest of the world, boxing presents a dramatic metaphor for the rugged individualism that has traditionally been a central element of Hollywood's mythology. But while fight films celebrate the ideal of self-sufficiency, those made during the Depression era also question the sport's underlying myth of omnipotent individualism. Responding to the concerns that many in the United States felt about the country's future during the 1930s, these Depression-era boxing films endorsed a populist ideology, mythologizing the often ethnic or black fighter whose success depended upon group support and whose actions promoted traditional agrarian notions of the common good. During the 1930s, jobless rates of 25 percent and higher for young people prompted an especially large number of working-class young men to try their hand at prizefighting. 12 Around eight thousand boxers entered the ring as professionals in the United States during that decade, although only a small percentage of those achieved title contender status.13 The popularity of boxing as one of the few avenues to the American dream in those lean years may explain the large number of Hollywood films about prizefighting made during the 1930s. Such Depression-era films depict boxing as a means of advancement for disenfranchised urban youth and at the same time use the sport as a metaphor for the economic hard times. Warner Brothers dominated the Depression cycle of boxing films, presenting them in the form of the aesthetically spare, "socially conscious" melodramas that were the hallmark of the studio in the 1930s. Not that other Hollywood studios left the making of boxing pictures entirely to Warner Brothers. MGM, Warner Brothers' political and stylistic opposite, made one of the most commercially successful boxing films of the decade, The Champ (1931). Unlike most of the later Depression-era films about boxing, The Champ makes a lastditch effort to endorse the myth of individual self-reliance, essentially discounting any notion that social or economic forces might put limits on the rise to success. Wallace Beery stars as Andy, a punch-drunk ex-heavyweight champion who lives a roller-coaster life in Tijuana with his young son Dink (Jackie Cooper). The ex-champ has occasional hot streaks at the craps table, but much of the time he is drunk and broke. Dink's mother, Linda (Irene Rich), and her wealthy second husband, Tony (Hale Hamilton), offer to take custody of the boy so as to give him a stabler home life and a chance to go to school, but Dink prefers to stay with his father, who loves him intensely. Anxious to better provide for Dink, Andy steers clear of the casinos and bars long enough to get a fight with the heavyweight champ of Mexico. For most of the bout the Mexican fighter punishes the out-of-shape American, but Andy somehow knocks out his opponent with a desperation punch. Despite his victory, the strain and punishment of the fight prove too much for Andy, and he dies of a heart attack in his dressing room. The film ends with Dink crying uncontrollably at the loss of his father and running into his mother's arms. The Champ responds to concerns about the Depression through the class opposition between Andy and Tony as potential fathers for Dink. Meanwhile, the hard times that befall the Wallace Beery character are shown as resulting not from the general economy but from his weakness and lack of discipline. The film never acknowledges that Andy's problems with gambling and alcohol could be linked to his lack of marketable job skills, and it suggests that he is simply punchy from too many blows to the head. Because The Champ gives no institutional or social explanation for this vocational injury, it makes Andy seem like a big child—lovable, but physically and intellectually inferior to the successful Tony. In his discussion of Hollywood's thematic paradigm, Robert Ray describes how American films often avoid taking sides in ideological debates, preferring instead to assert that an unlimited potential for new achievement and wealth in America can overcome contradictions or conflict.14 According to Ray, classic Hollywood's avoidance of choice between conflicting value systems usually results in a narrative structure that splits the film's "moral center" from its "interest center." The Champ sets up this split by endorsing Tony as representative of family, traditional morality, and the work ethic (even though by his own account his status and wealth derive from inherited privilege), while casting Andy as an underdog for whom the audience roots despite his weaknesses. Sneak previews of The Champ confirmed Andy as the center of viewer interest. An initial version of the film in which he loses to the Mexican champion before dying received such a poor response from test audiences that MGM head of production Irving Thalberg ordered the last scene reshot so that the American wins the fight. At a second preview of the revised version in which Andy wins, the audience cheered the final scene. The Champ also avoids the need for choice by displacing the class conflict between Andy and Tony into frontier imagery of conquest presented in the defeat of the Mexican champion. 16 Jameson points to ideas of the frontier and its promise of new wealth as another of the arguments that liberalism has used to deny the existence of class." Richard Slotkin describes how, as early as the 1870s, the newly developed mass-circulation press sought to effect a similar displacement of the class warfare that had erupted between workers and the corporate order. Even if the cause of the workers represented the "values of self-government and freedom of opportunity" on which the country was founded, such demands for political and economic self-determination threatened to undermine the profits of big business.18 To avoid this obvious contradiction between corporate interests and egalitarian ideals, the press used the imagery of race war taken from the mythology of the frontier to describe the class conflict between workers and management. Working-class people were often likened to "redskin savages" as a way of undermining their ability to use democratic institutions in battles against landlords and employers. Such comparison recast class conflict in terms of "a choice ... between 'savageism' and civilization. More than fifty years later, The Champ still employs this strategy by shifting its focus from the class conflict between Andy and Tony to the fight between the white American boxer and the Mexican champ. In making this shift, the film also counts on audience antagonism toward Mexico left over from a recent conflict with the United States. In 1927, after the Mexican Congress passed legislation claiming a bigger share of the profits from oil that American companies were pumping in Mexico, Washington had threatened military intervention.20 The defeat of Mexico's heavyweight champion provides a convenient means by which domestic class anger, fueled in American society by the Depression, can be projected outward onto the racial other. As the two fighters represent their respective countries, the United States can also symbolically reassert its claim to new frontiers and natural resources that make class warfare unnecessary at home.21 The Champ not only succeeds in performing this displacement but knocks out two of the inconvenient "lower" characters with one punch-defeating the Mexican and at the same time enabling Andy to die heroically. The film's last image of Dink in his mother's arms becomes a social Darwinist affirmation of "progress and right order" achieved through the removal of "inferior" peoples in favor of those better fit to survive the Depression. Another early 1930s film about prizefighting, Warner Brothers' Winner Take All, depicts a similar prizefight between a Mexican and a U.S. boxer, but with somewhat different implications. Winner Take All tells the story of an Irish fighter from New York, Jimmy Kane (Jimmy Cagney), who has ruined his health by fighting too often and therefore goes to a dude ranch in New Mexico for a rest cure. At the desert resort, he meets a young widow named Peggy (Marian Nixon), whose little boy Dickie (Dickie Moore) is also ill. Soon after meeting Jimmy, Peggy receives a letter from her insurance company stating that it will not honor her late husband's life insurance policy because he had missed several premium payments just before his death. To cover Peggy's and Dickie's expenses at the spa, Jimmy decides to go to Tijuana and win the money in a prizefight. Jimmy's victory over a Mexican boxer functions like the climactic fight in The Champ, displacing any stand the film might take against the insurance company with race war imagery of European American conquest of the West. By showing the greed and indifference of the insurance company, Winner Take All seems to be a relatively left-wing film; nevertheless, like most socially engaged Hollywood stories, it avoids an in-depth examination of class conflict, allowing the exploiters of the working class, in the words of Charles Eckert, "to recede like ghosts as quickly as they are glimpsed." This political waffling might be best explained by Winner Take All's use of a populist ideology. Populism had a strong influence on Depression-era Hollywood-as it had during periods of economic crisis dating back to the nineteenth century because it flattered the audience and at the same time preserved the essential values of capitalism. It had developed originally to articulate the support of middle-class rural Americans for the rights of the individual in the face of industrial revolution and growing corporate control of the economy. In all its later incarnations, populism nostalgically longed for a return to the land from big, immigrant-filled cities, and it sympathized with farmers or small-town mercantile capitalists rather than with the corporate executives, advocating local rather than federal government. The combination of progressive idealism and sentimental conservatism in populism made it appealing to both sides of the political debate. Its attacks on monopoly capital and its defense of the "common man" appealed to the Left, but the solutions it offered-free enterprise, the work ethic, return to the landalso fit the conservative agenda. Hollywood liked this broad appeal, its "safe patriotic cure-all which demanded change in the form of past achievement," because it combined "Depression cynicism with the American Dream. Winner Take All embodies this hybrid ideology. On the one hand, the insurance company's refusal to pay off on the policy of Peggy's late husband represents the type of corporate greed and indifference that from the left populist viewpoint was largely responsible for the economic hardship of the 1930s. On the other hand, Jimmy's solution to Peggy's financial problem also portrays a conservative response to this crisis: through the heroics of the small capitalist, the rugged individualist, who works not only for his own success but also for that of the community, the country will be saved.26 His cure finished, Jimmy returns to New York to resume his boxing career, promising to send for Peggy and her son as soon as Dickie has finished his treatment. Jimmy, however, soon meets and becomes infatuated with an attractive young society woman, Joan Gibson (Virginia Bruce). As Joan and her friends make their rounds from ringside to nightclub table to her Park Avenue apartment, they embody another of the favorite populist villains, "the degenerate children of the wealthy class, spoiled and lazy wastrels who carelessly permit business affairs to deteriorate."27 Joan interferes with Jimmy's business as a boxer by leading him on romantically. Although at first mildly excited by Jim my's "primitive energy, she never takes the boxer seriously as a lover. Jimmy, on the other hand, is obsessed with winning Joan, even going so far as to have plastic surgery to repair his broken nose and a cauliflower ear after she comments that he would be handsome without those battle scars. Despite warnings from his manager about Joan's insincerity, to protect his new face Jimmy abandons the aggressiveness in the ring that had earned him a shot at the lightweight title. When he learns, however, that she has skipped his title fight to go on a cruise to Cuba, Jimmy returns to his former style of all-out attack to finish off his opponent and win the championship just in time to board the ocean liner before it sails. Jimmy finds Joan with a blue-blood beau and exacts his revenge, knocking down the boyfriend and then Joan herself. His break with Joan not only removes her as the distraction that almost ruined his boxing career but also lets him be a hero whose title victory serves the film's populist "community"-in this case Jimmy's hardworking trainer, his honest manager, and Peggy, who agrees to marry him after all. In other words, individual assertiveness succeeds because of, and has value for, a supportive group-an idea consistent with the collectivist ideology of the New Deal, which provided Hollywood with still another way to attract a large audience by not aligning itself against capitalism. Differences between city and country life in several of these 1930s boxing films also functioned as a displacement for more troubling class conflicts. Populism depicted the city as the home of shysters and sharpies, the monopolists, and rich society snobs who have caused the Depression, a place where "the success ethic has given way to the jungle ethic. " Rural areas, on the other hand, recalled the country's agricultural past, its traditional values of selfhelp, its rugged individualism, yet also its good-neighborliness. Even though prizefighters in the 1930s came largely from ethnic and racial groups who lived in large urban centers, several Depression-period films depict boxers who escape the city to find a better life in the country. Jimmy Key in Winner Take All finds his future family in the New Mexico desert. Ward Guisenberry (Wayne Morris), the boxer in Kid Galahad, is himself a farm boy who wins the heavyweight title with the help of his city-wise manager, Nick Donati (Edward G. Robinson), but finds true happiness by marrying Donati's sister Maria, who lives in the country with her mother. In They Made Me a Criminal (1939), the manager of city-bred boxer Johnny Bradfield (John Garfield) kills a reporter and then frames the fighter for the crime. To avoid the police, Johnny goes on the lam, winding upon a date farm in Arizona. The farm is a kind of reform school for a group of juvenile delinquents (the Dead End Kids) and for Johnny as well, as he soon becomes a positive role model for the boys and falls in love. Whether or not the prizefighters in these films succeed in escaping to the country, their ability to survive the dangers of the city and the fight racket depends on the help of others. Although the boxers have plenty of rugged individualism, each of them also finds that he cannot make it to the top or deal with the dangers and tragedies of the fight game-alone. For example,Ward Guisenberry in Kid Galahad relies on his manager Nick and Nick's girlfriend Louise (Bette Davis), to keep gangster Turkey Morgan (Humphrey Bogart) at bay and help him win the title. In Knockout (1941) the wife and trainer of Johnny Rocket (Arthur Kennedy) save him from killing himself in the ring. And after he is blinded in the ring, Danny Kenny (Jimmy Cagney) in City for Conquest relies on his trainer and manager to set him up with a newsstand business. As is evident from these examples, however, the people who help the boxer tend to be family members or friends. By such qualification of the individualism of the prizefighter, Hollywood carefully avoids endorsing collectivism of a more dangerous political stripe. One hundred years earlier, de Tocqueville had described this ideological compromise when he noted how "the circle of family and friends" fits well into the American mythology of individualism: "with this little society formed to his taste, [the individual] gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself." The critique of self-interest in these 1930s boxing films is generally limited to the figure of the gangster or the crooked manager who seeks to exploit the prizefighter. These films avoided the idea that the rugged individualism celebrated by populism "had actually helped create the monopoly capitalism the populists resented," and that "laissez-faire had been more a cause of the Depression than its solution."31 Therefore, in Kid Galahad and Golden Boy, gangsters try to take over control of the boxer's career for their own gain; in They Made Me a Criminal, a dishonest manager frames his fighter for murder; and in City for Conquest and Knockout, crooked managers use foreign substances to cause the fighter/protagonist to lose. The infiltration of organized crime into boxing during the 1930s resulted in part from economic forces set in motion by corporate interests and the free market. The temperance movement, which had succeeded in installing Prohibition in 1920, drew its support not only from rural Americans threatened by the growing number of immigrants settling in urban areas but also from industrialists concerned about the effects of alcohol on worker productivity. The enormous profits that Prohibition made available for bootleggers provided the capital with which organized crime infiltrated the fight game, displacing the professional politicians who had largely controlled prizefighting up to that time.32 Once on the inside, mobsters such as Frankie Carbo, a.k.a. Mr. Big, who was the prime mover in prizefighting from the mid-1930s until the late 1950s, made enormous profits from betting on fixed fights. After mob control of prizefighting was established, its gambling operations continued to function very much in accordance with the practices of capitalist entrepreneurship that had spawned it. As James Smith points out, "betting a known stake against the possibility of improving on it amid sometimes dangerous uncertainties" describes not only gambling but the mythology of "the whole American experience," from the opening of the West to European American settlement to the contemporary promise of economic opportunity through investment in business that forms an integral part of the American dream.33 Realization of this similarity demonstrates, as Smith also notes, that while "gamblers are usually assumed to be alienated from traditional values," in fact "gambling is preeminently social, and goes so far as to echo prevailing cultural values. "34 Even though, as the 1930s boxing films show, the gamblers who controlled professional prizefighting used extreme measures-including intimidation and violence-to reduce the "uncertainties" threatening their investment, one need look no farther than the previously mentioned U.S. government threats to invade Mexico or the violent strikebreaking tactics of various industries in the early 1930s to see that such practices were common in American capitalism. By adopting a populist view of the causes and solutions for the economic problems of the Depression, Hollywood boxing films could appear socially conscious while avoiding deep analysis of the real economic issues. Nonetheless, with the possible exception of The Champ, these films at least attempted to represent the problems of ethnic working-class youth, who saw boxing as a possible means of escape from the mean streets of America's urban slums. Moreover, while these films celebrate individuals of extraordinary physical strength, self-confidence, and tenacity, they also demonstrate that from the maze of forces at work in the business of professional boxing, no one makes it out on his own. ******Race Films and "The Blues Hero": The world that the prizefighter comes from is one that understands the hypocrisy surrounding the commercialization of the body in a bourgeois, Calvinisttinged culture. -Gerald Early Like their Hollywood counterparts, the two prizefight pictures of the 1930s that featured African American boxers, Spirit of Youth (Grand National) and Keep Punching (M.C. Pictures), tell the stories of young fighters saved from the dangers of the big city through the guidance of friends and family who return them to rural populist values of hard work, self-discipline, and community. Following this narrative formula allowed the white producers of these "race" films to appeal to African American audiences without contradicting the bourgeois values endorsed by the Hollywood pictures that were shown most of the time in black theaters. Moreover, Spirit of Youth and Keep Punching starred real champions, Joe Louis and Henry Armstrong respectively, giving them a veneer of biographical realism that authenticated their populist stories as a historically valid response to the skepticism caused by the Depression. Of course, for most African Americans, the limited economic opportunity of the 1930s was nothing new; Louis's management team was well aware that for a black man even to get a shot at the heavyweight title, he would have to reassure whites that he presented no threat to the racial status quo. That meant a change from the surly "jungle killer" image that white sportswriters had constructed for Louis to the "mother-loving, clean-living, humble young man" that is Joe Thomas, the lead character in Spirit of Youth.35 Armstrong, because he fought in lighter weight classes, was affected less by the racial symbolism of beating white opponents. But, like Louis, he still had to overcome racist resistance to black champions as well as the general "pugilistic depression" of the 1930s resulting from a "rash of 'foul fights' and criminal dealings. The country/city opposition that structures both these films displaces racial conflict rather than the class difference avoided by the Hollywood boxing movies. As Daniel Leab notes, the majority of theaters for black audiences were located in the South, where on the screen, as in the ring, overt interracial conflict was taboo because of whites' fear that, in the words of James H. Stevenson, it "might upset the theory of (their) social superiority or imply social equality."37 Furthermore, Hollywood operated under the assumption that the response of southern audiences to racial themes was a bellwether for audiences in the North.38 Even a film made a decade later in 1947, Body and Soul, risked direct conflict between an African American boxer and his white promoter only when it was motivated by the black character's loyalty to a white friend. Instead, both Spirit of Youth and Keep Punching present segregated worlds and narrative conflicts that pit black against black: the young boxer and his supporters against the gambler and the sexualized woman who hope to lead him astray and then bet on his opponent. While they ostensibly conform to dominant discourses of self-formation and segregation, both films also reverse the race film convention of casting dark-skinned blacks as the criminal heavies.39 The gambler villains, as well as the women who plot with them, instead suggest "whiteness" through appearance, mannerisms, and speech patterns and therefore invoke the racial barriers that were a historical reality for both Louis and Armstrong. As a result, Spirit of Youth and Keep Punching make room for what Manthia Diawara has called the "resisting spectatorship" aware of "the impossibility of an uncritical acceptance" of Hollywood films and the influence they had on race films. Spirit of Youth and Keep Punching not only subvert their segregated worlds and black-on-black conflict by characterizing the villains in white cultural terms, they also reject the populist demonization of urban life altogether. While the young protagonists may return to the down-home values of hard work, self-discipline, and community, both films also concede that the city is a place of greater opportunity. Like the young blacks in Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1991), who are reminded to take their African culture north with them, these two fighters survive because they retain their racial identity, yet they also know that the economic possibility of northern cities did not exist in the South. The Henry Armstrong character's fictional middle-class southern family functions, then, more as part of the film's attempt to relieve white anxiety about a black champion than to dismiss the need for northern migration. In fact, Keep Punching pokes fun at black middle-class distaste for prizefighters as representatives of the race. When the Armstrong character's father complains to his wife that their son's prizefighting in the northern city "isn't respectable," she reminds him that he has not turned his nose up at the checks Henry has sent home. After Henry wins the title, the film's last scene refers again to the material base for middle-class morals as Fanny, Henry's hometown sweetheart, who also opposed his chosen career, concedes, "Maybe I was a little too fussy about what you ought to do. Both Louis and Armstrong understood the contradiction between the need for bourgeois respectability to overcome racial prejudice and the realities of the prizefighting business in particular and life for a black male in white America in general. Before launching his career, Louis's two African American managers, Julian Black and John Roxborough, had earned their living as gamblers. Although he eventually became one of the best fighters of the decade and the only boxer ever to hold three titles simultaneously, Armstrong had started out on the club circuit in Los Angeles "winning, losing, or boxing to a draw' according to instructions." Spirit of Youth and Keep Punching acknowledge the importance of what Gerald Early means when he describes Joe Louis as a "blues hero" whose success should be measured less by the middle-class standards of respectability than by the simple fact that he "got over." Early calls such success a type of "underground victory," "used by both Black preachers and Black hustlers, the autobiographical summing up of both the sacred life and the profane life." Henry Armstrong's success as a fighter, combined with his work as a minister after he left boxing, suggests that this description applies equally well to him. While Early admits that such an idea of success may result in a "complex meshing of two distinct cultural attitudes, a meshing that is not always balanced and does not always work well," its ultimate defense must be that it produces something more than the "stereotypical put-upon and distressed Black American male."43 Along these lines, Spirit of Youth and Keep Punching portray the trainers and managers who help the young protagonists succeed as by necessity just as skilled in the urban culture of nightclubs and gambling as those who seek to exploit them. The films avoid the simplistic message that "crime doesn't pay," which, as Thomas Cripps notes, often elicited laughter from black audiences. Even the femme fatale character in both stories returns the fighter to his hometown girlfriend and thereby saves him from ruin, showing the interest both movies have in demonstrating the necessary coexistence of middle-class morality and a blues aesthetic for living. Put simply, these films balance the abstraction of middle-class values with the economic reality of selling the black body. Rather than reveal middle-class hypocrisy about money, Spirit of Youth stays closer to the biographical truth of Louis's working-class background and never even raises bourgeois concerns about the respectability of prizefighting. The ring scenes in both films, along with narrative digressions for dance numbers and comic turns by Mantan Moreland or Hamtree Harrington, might have been misinterpreted to reinforce stereotypes of blacks as "rhythmic," "fun-loving, and an essentially physical rather than intellectual people. They are instead both a way of expressing individual and racial identity and a means of moving up. ******Knockouts and nightmares: In 1949 Manny Farber reviewed two noir boxing films, The Set-Up and Champion, for The Nation. Farber saw them as inspired by the success two years earlier of another boxing film, Body and Soul, replicating its contradictory formula of a carefully arranged visual style "in which every effect is the $64 one, perfectly executed and dehumanized," and a "newsreel realism" of bouncing cameras and discontinuity editing, combined to tell what he calls "tightly humorless" stories "supersaturated with worn-out morality. The attributes Farber lists in his short but insightful review put these three films in the branch of noir, especially common in the years just after World War II, that James Naremore describes as characterized by "humanism and political engagement," as opposed to the "cynicism and misanthropy" of Alfred Hitchcock or Billy Wilder. Since John Garfield's independent and ironically named Enterprise Productions made Body and Soul before the political repression of the HUAC investigations and the drop-off in box office in 1947, it could afford to present a critique of capitalism.48 Screenwriter Abraham Polonsky's working-class poetry and historical narrative, as well as the film's visual style, encourage viewers to question the values of middle-class American culture. Thom Andersen has remarked that the novelist and former English professor Polonsky "brought the street poetry Odets had synthesized in his plays of the thirties into the American cinema for the first time," and Robert Sklar places Body and Soul "as close to a work of the left as any produced to that time in Hollywood. Andersen is right about Polonsky's debt to Odets, for Body and Soul bears a strong resemblance in setting, narrative conflict, and resolution to Golden Boy. In fact, all three prizefight films in Farber's review typify what Naremore calls the "proletarian concerns" of the Left during this period in movies "about middle-European or Mediterranean immigrants ...dealing with the failure of the American dream in the big industrial centers. Body and Soul begins with prizefighter Charley Davis (John Garfield) waking from a nightmare the evening before a title fight. Davis has had a long and lucrative reign as middleweight champ, but he's haunted now by shame and guilt from his complicity with Roberts (Lloyd Goff), an exploitative promoter and gambler. Roberts has not only taken more than a fair share of the profits, he has also persuaded Charley to throw the upcoming fight and worst of all been responsible for the deaths of two of the champ's friends: his first manager, Shorty, and Ben, the former titleholder and later Charley's sparring partner, when they dared protest the dirty deals. After waking from his nightmare, Charley drives frantically to see his mother (Anna Revere) and fiancée Peg (Lilli Palmer), both of whom are estranged from the fighter because of his selfish choices. The ensuing scene in the mother's cramped Lower East Side apartment uses shadow to represent the exploitation and violence that still cling to Charley. The mother's kitchen appears lit by a single bulb over the table at the center of the room, allowing darkness around the edges of the image to encroach on them as Charley tells her of his torment. Peg arrives from shopping, sees Charley, and runs into an adjoining small bedroom, turning off the light there so that when he enters and tries to embrace her, we see them surrounded by shadow and framed by a window separating the two rooms as the mother tells her son wearily, "Go away, Charley." In addition to such noir compositions that allegorize the greed and violence that encroach on Charley and his family, Body and Soul also relies on Polonsky's dialogue. In a 1962 interview, Polonsky commented that when he wrote for the movies, his intention was to create a language that could "play an equal role with the actor and the visual image."52 He succeeds in Body and Soul when, after the unsuccessful reconciliation with his mother and Peg, we next see Charley in his dressing room before the fight. Roberts enters, hears the champ angrily boast that he plans to win the fight, and responds: "What's wrong, Charley? The books are all balanced. The bets are in. You bet your purse against yourself. You gotta be business-like, Charley. ... Everything is addition or subtraction, the rest is conversation." With lines like these, Body and Soul makes the point that "criminality can be businesslike," offering us "a critique of capitalism in the guise of an expose of crime." The Roberts character combines criminality and traits of a successful businessman, as if to suggest the potential for the two to overlap. His lock on access to title fights allows Roberts to demand half Charley's earnings (the traditional manager's share is onethird), and like a company store, he consolidates his control over the fighter's services by advancing money that he calls "a little on account." Roberts's name, conservative suits, and public avoidance of alcohol and sex also make him look and act less like a gangster than the stereotype of a WASP businessman. Moreover, consistent with Polonsky's literary aspirations, Roberts's colloquial directness articulates the motives behind his "legitimate" exterior, making clear his intention to manipulate fighters to maximize his profits and strongarm anyone who gets in the way. Roberts's colloquial language not only communicates directly his motives, it also reveals his own proletarian origins. Like Charley for much of the film, the gambler exemplifies a hardboiled response to disadvantage that pursues success by any means possible, even the ruthless destruction of those like him. Such a self-interested response to class disadvantage has been endemic to prizefighting throughout its history. Joyce Carol Oates describes this working-class cannibalism when she writes that "boxers fight one another because the legitimate objects of their anger are not accessible to them. ... You fight what's nearest, what's available, what's ready to fight you. And, if you can, you do it for money." Body and Soul uses Roberts's betrayal of his working-class origins and his influence on Charley to illuminate the ultimate goal in prizefighting and in the narrative of success frequently offered to those at the bottom: do what you gotta do to move up, and leave your people behind. That's exactly the notion of success that Charley's mother objects to when she first hears of his choice to fight: "Did you hurt the other boy good, Champion?" she asks her son. Along with its colloquial dialogue and allegorical use of shadow, Body and Soul employs a realistic style. The film's cinematographer, James Wong Howe, had commented in a 1944 American Cinematographer article that during the war jerky hand-held motion photography had become equated in the minds of audiences with realism and made Hollywood films seem "artificial and therefore unbelievable" in comparison.55 Guided by such thinking, Howe in the film's climactic fight scene used a subjective camera to convey the brutality of Charley's experience and its impact on his moral choice. Having been a boxer himself, Howe felt that the conventional way of shooting prizefights with a camera on a "big bulky dolly in the ring which can't move around and can only go up and down and sideways," couldn't convey the experience of a fighter. He therefore rented two lightweight Eyemo cameras and put on roller skates to shoot the fight. Using a handheld camera allowed him to move in closer to Charley when he gets hit and then quickly turn to show what the fighter saw—"nothing but hot light flashing down"_before cutting back to the boxer's face. Howe told the grip pushing him around in the ring not to worry about distance because he wanted the image to be out of focus at times to suggest the grogginess of a fighter who has been hit. Howe didn't let the fighter's glove actually hit the camera, however, because he wanted the audience to identify with the experience of being in the ring but not think about the fact that they were seeing a movie of it. The flashback used to narrate most of Body and Soul begins when Charley falls asleep in his dressing room before his title fight and ends when he wakes to enter the ring. It functions in part to explain the guilt and shame that plague Charley, but also to locate his moral corruption in the lack of economic opportunity that influenced his youth during the Depression. Robert Ray has described the historicizing function of the flashback in post-World War II noir: "The noir protagonists' relentless search for the moment where things had begun to go bad was an image of the American post-war mood-vaguely disillusioned, convinced that somewhere along the line the wrong turn had been taken, intuitively aware of the power of historical determinism for perhaps the first time in the nation's history."57 During the flashback we see that a bomb thrown at a speakeasy inadvertently kills Charley's father in the family candy store next door. This tragedy forces Charley into the ring to provide for himself and his mother, and he becomes middleweight champ and a hero, especially to the working-class Jews of his neighborhood like the grocer Shimin, who tells Charley before the film's final fight that the whole neighborhood's counting on him: "Over in Europe the Nazis are killing people like us, just because of our religion. But here, Charley Davis is champeen. So you'll win, ...and we are proud." Putting the flashback within Charley's dressing room nap allows Body and Soul to sum up the story contained within it as more noir nightmare than American dream. As he falls into sleep, we hear Charley mumbling about "All these years, everything down the drain." Fighters nap just before a fight to display their composure and self-confidence, as well as to get that little extra reservoir of energy needed to prevail in the grueling battle they're about to enter. The scene in which Charley wakes up refers to that optimistic approach to fighting and suggests that the upcoming fight will reverse his past as it was shown in the flashback. Just after he has gotten up, his new corner man, Ben's replacement, enters the dressing room and tells the fighter that he has bragged to reporters that the champ is sound asleep. Charley's response, "Yeah, dreaming," refers to his desire to break with the nightmare of his boxing career and follow the advice of his family and friends to stand up to Roberts rather than to embody the mythology of individualism with which the gambler has led him along. The realistic style that Body and Soul uses in the big fight contributes to our understanding and identification with Charley's decision to reject the fix and hold on to his title and pride. Roberts had promised him a fifteen-round decision with the challenger Marlowe winning on points. In return for holding back, Charley would have had a big payday and avoided the physical and emotional pain of being knocked out. Yet after seeing how Roberts welshed on the same promise to Ben when Charley took the title and almost killed the African American champ, it's no surprise in the thirteenth round when Roberts gives the signal for Marlowe to go for the knockout. Howe's hand-held camera falls to the mat with Charley when Marlowe knocks him down, and we see in close-up the moral confusion on Garfield's face. Along with the bumpy, out-of-focus shots, this close-up conveys in a visceral way Charley's pain and confusion so that it makes sense when he decides to throw away the money and risk his life by winning the fight. The combination of Howe's newsreel style and the fight announcer's subdued description encourage viewer identification with Charley's situation, especially in the final round when the diegetic crowd goes nearly silent, transfixed by Charley's urgency to overcome his deficit in points and knock Marlowe out in the short time left. We see no reaction shots of Roberts during these last two rounds; Charley and the film have given up on what the gambler represents. But as Charley heads to his dressing room after knocking Marlowe out, Roberts stops him. For once at a loss for words, the gambler angrily asks Charley how he thinks he'll get away with what he's done. Aware of the danger he's in but committed to his decision, Charley defiantly responds with his own question: "What are you going to do, kill me?" and then quickly answers with Roberts's callous maxim: "Everybody dies." The "individual redemption" of Charley Davis represented a victory for Polonsky, who disagreed with director Robert Rossen about how Body and Soul should end. Rossen favored having Davis killed by Roberts for not throwing the climactic fight, but Polonsky's version prevailed. Robert Sklar argues that the screenwriter's choice of a more upbeat ending undercuts the social critique of the film by linking it with "the hundreds, if not thousands, of Hollywood movies [that] depict society's problems being solved by individuals triumphing over evil men." In Sklar's view, Rossen's ending might have been "truer to life" in that it would have illustrated that "protagonists caught in the nexus of capitalist forces find it less easy to escape them. While the ending of Body and Soul does depend on Charley's heroic choice, it by no means suggests that what he has done will solve the problem of exploitation of the working class by men like Roberts. Even though we don't see Charley die, the last shot after the conversation with Roberts shows him and Peg walking to his mother's apartment, choosing the unity of community, but still surrounded by the same dark shadows that have threatened them throughout the film. Moreover, Body and Soul is quite clear about the risks of getting in the way of gangsters: Charley's father, Shorty, and Ben all died for doing so. Charley's choice at the end of Body and Soul represents instead Polonsky's idea of the best option possible. Better for Charley to retain his selfrespect and a feeling of pride knowing he offers an inspirational example to working-class people and Jews in particular. As Charley's mother told him when she first found out he wanted to be a fighter: "Fight for something, not for money." Although Polonsky didn't put his life on the line like his protagonist, the decision to hold onto his political convictions and be blacklisted in 1951 was a similar difficult but principled choice. Because of the repressive political and economic climate in 1949 Hollywood, the makers of Champion and The Set-Up were more careful in how they presented their prizefight stories as critiques of American society, relying on stylized lighting, camera work, and other formal devices rather than the urban poetry and popular-front history in Body and Soul. Both later films avoid the big events (the Depression, the Holocaust) and ideological issues (racism, the choice of assimilation and quick money or cultural identity and community values) that structure Body and Soul. Champion's director Mark Robson and the director of The Set-Up, Robert Wise, had trained together as editors under Val Lewton at RKO, so they were experienced in a noir style, but neither came out of the kind of literary and political culture that influenced Polonsky. By 1949 Wise and Robson had each invested almost two decades of hard work making their way up the Hollywood ladder-Champion in fact was Robson's first assignment as a director—and their films display a desire to protect those careers. Champion and The Set-Up therefore tell—if without much conviction-fairly conventional Hollywood stories focused on individuals. Midge Kelly, the selfish prizefighter played by Kirk Douglas in Champion, dies of a stroke in the film's last scene, conforming to the Production Code admonition that "No plot or theme should definitely side with evil and against good."60 Screenwriter Carl Foreman's script includes a few lines about lack of opportunity, but, following the Ring Lardner story from which the film is adapted, it generally isolates the film's portrayal of greed and exploitation in its main character. Champion also neatly removes Midge in the last scene so as to confirm David Thompson's appraisal of Foreman: that he did "problem pictures for complacent audiences, films that voiced commitment but offered easy answers." Just as incomplete is the characterization of Midge's brother, Connie (Arthur Kennedy), who has traveled the same rough road and has a lame leg to show for it, yet displays no hardheartedness and devotes himself to the fighter's wife, Grace (Ruth Roman), whom Midge abuses psychologically and physically. The story in The Set-Up likewise focuses on the resolve and self-determination of its main character, Stoker Thompson (Robert Ryan), a veteran boxer at the end of a not-very-successful career. Thompson's wife, Julie (Audrey Totter), fearing that her husband may be severely injured or even killed if he continues to fight, tries to convince him to quit boxing before a bout with a younger and stronger opponent in a town ironically called Paradise City. On that particular night, however, the strength and energy of his youth return to Stoker and for four rounds he endures tremendous punishment before knocking out the other fighter, Tiger Nelson (Hal Feberling). The problem with Stoker's surprising victory is that unknowingly he has spoiled a fix on the fight arranged by his dishonest manager Tiny (George Tobias). Nelson's gambler backers do not take kindly to this broken agreement, and they take out their displeasure on Stoker in an alley outside the arena. Julie sees Stoker stumble out of the alley after the beating and runs to his aid. His right hand broken, he tells her that he cannot fight anymore, to which she responds, "You won't have to.... We'll get that cigar stand you were telling me about, or maybe a piece of that fighter. It's going to be alright, you wait and see.... We both won tonight." Despite the moral order established by Midge's death and the resolve for a better future shown in the last scene of The Set-Up, both films qualify these endings through their oppressive shadows, decaying settings, claustrophobic compositions, and "prowling" camera movements. Such formal devices suggest a feeling of menace and entrapment that the optimistic resolution of the events in the plot fails to offset.62 In The Set-Up the main instance of such stylistic subversion occurs after Julie's encouraging words to her injured husband. From a closeup of the couple, the film cuts to a more objective long shot of Stoker and Julie amidst a small crowd that has gathered on the sidewalk. Above them and to their right a large neon sign in front of a nightclub flashes "Dreamland," dominating the composition and offering an ironic commentary on Julie's unjustified optimism. The camera then slowly pulls back further, in the process obscuring the Dreamland sign with a clock that reads 10:16 P.M., indicating that exactly one hour and twelve minutes of screen time have elapsed since a similar shot of the clock that opened the film. In a condensed version of the flashback in Body and Soul, The Set-Up's exposition had shown how Stoker's world conspires against him while he naps before the fight, making clear that his life is also more noir nightmare than dreamland. The clock's final reference to the real time in which The Set-Up unfolds also culminates a series of reminders of the tyranny of time in working-class life: an alarm clock jars Stoker from his prefight nap, and once in the dressing room at the arena we see the other fighters prepare quickly and hustle into the ring like workers on shifts. Stoker, made to wait because the main event has been moved up for radio coverage, recalls his twenty-one years as a fighter with little to show for it. He has no present means to escape this brutal routine except the future hope of the one big win, about which Julie says: "Stoker, you'll always be one big win away." Even though on this night Stoker does get that big win, the noir mise-enscène and cinematography of The Set-Up show how such modest success does little more than sustain his dream. We see the deep shadows of the streets and tawdry businesses of Paradise City, the run-down arena with its cramped dressing room and garbage strewn in the corridors, the ring itself enclosed by attack on the selfish reality behind Midge's façade of sports stardom. Moreover, Connie's tacked-on happy ending allows the film to parody the role of other movies in such false promotion. This self-reflexive commentary works most effectively, however, in Champion's last shot, showing Connie and Grace as they walk away from Midge's dressing room down a long corridor, dark except for intermittent patches of light emitted by single bulbs suspended from the ceiling. The darkness on the margins of this metaphoric image of the filmic apparatus suggests what the story with its illumination of individualized evil leaves unexplored. By punishing Midge for his greed and violence, Champion exemplifies how even many social problem films made in Hollywood conclude with the naive assumption that America is a place where any injustice can be fixed with only minor reform, offering the "pretense that the problems the film has raised are now resolved." The parallels between the work of Robson and Wise continued into the 1950s as they each directed a second boxing film released in 1956 (The Harder They Fall and Somebody Up There Likes Me respectively). Both films retained the shadow and tough existential choices of noir, combined with an imitation of Italian neorealism that dramatized social problems using the journalistic aura of black and white and some real settings, but with Hollywood production values in acting and narrative construction. Somebody Up There Likes Me add darkness once the round starts and the crowd lights go down, the fighters surrounded by the compensatory sadism of alienated spectators shown in repeated reaction shots. Joan Mellen describes how the careful depiction of environment in The Set Up debunks the "keep on punching" mythology implied by the film's upbeat ending: "The Set-Up bears the same relation to fight films as does its main character to the typical screen male. Ryan is not even a main-eventer. He is the average boxer fighting for peanuts under appalling conditions and suffering entirely unromantic damage in each encounter. The film shows how ninety-nine percent of fighters really live, debunking the myth of glamour, fortune, and fame that attaches to the very few. Robson's Champion also uses careful formal composition in its final scene-creating the $64 effects Farber mentioned-to make up for a story that stops short of identifying any structural causes for the individualist values the Douglas character represents. Early in the last scene Connie enters Midge's dressing room before a title fight to confront his brother about his mistreatment of Grace. Midge knocks Connie to the floor before leaving to enter the ring, where a radio announcer proclaims him "a popular champion." A lowangle shot of Midge belies that statement, its menace buttressed by a brass and percussion-heavy flourish from composer Dimitri Tiomkin's score that sounds more appropriate for King Kong entering Manhattan than the introduction of a sports hero. After winning a tough fight in which he takes a great deal of punishment from his opponent, Midge returns to his dressing room and proclaims to his trainer Haley (Paul Stewart): "No fat bellies with big cigars are going to make a monkey out of me. I can beat 'em." In a story in which Midge has done most of the man

module 6- femininity pdfs: - Boyle, Millington, & Vertin - Daniels films: - million dollar baby (2002) - bend it like Beckham (1992) - girlfight (2000) - league of their own (1992) - she's the man (2006)

Patriarchy - systematic and historical legacy of male domination or privileging of masculinity and maleness in Western Society/USA. Hierarchical logic - in this lecture, this notion refers to the ways in which many social groupings privilege maleness and masculinity over femininity. In film, we will look at where patterns emerge, and where to be a woman in a sport film often means to be relegated to a space of subordination and to be a man means to be occupying a space of power. Historical Norms of Femininity and Masculinity: There are a number of dominant cultural "framings" of what it means to be feminine in U.S. society. ***Many of these frames depict women as: • Excluded from sports • Devalued and not encouraged to participate in sports like men • Emphasized aesthetics and bodily conduct defined as becoming of women • Passive, docile, slender • Dressed in specific attire - soft, • Sports played were cycling, gymnasium, yachting and tennis ***By contrast men are often located within these dominant frames of masculinity: • Hard physical masculinity • Active, aggressive bodies • Capacity for violence and strength Over time, U.S. sport practitioners have adopted a muscular Christianity approach, whereby through sport American men developed physical skills and team-work, essentially based on ideas of how men can contribute to a better society. Non-white participants and women were often excluded. Gender Binary - Sports was used to promote certain visions of how men and women are fundamentally oppositional. This binary logic was often used to promote masculinity and deny women from participating in sport and in ways that would allow them to excel in sports and embody some of the physical attributes of male **Gendering through Contemporary Sport: Today, often still plays a significant role in defining gender norms (and binary oppositionalities. Through sport: • The gendered body is given meaning and authority within certain spaces. • Multiple or pluralistic femininities emerging within western societies. • Preferred femininity (soft subtle yet slender) opposite to dominant maleness (muscularity, capacity for violence, strength) Gendered Identity - The athlete's body is the key site for promoting gender. Gender is expressed through their physical performance, how they dress and how they conduct themselves through their body. ******Effects of the Passage of Title IX in 1972: • Increased rates of participation in the US for girls and young women in school sports and competitive sports • Upsurge of success of women athletes • Access to sports which, translates to success in the international field ********Sports that Challenge Norms of Preferred Femininity: Soccer - the most popular sport in terms of participation. It often challenges, yet perhaps simultaneously reinforces, gender norms of what it means to be a woman. Femininity is emphasized yet there is an increased element of physicality. Wrestling - The number of women is increasing. Women participate in coed wrestling. In so doing, the girls and young women are challenging basic assumptions about which gendered bodies 'belong' in that sporting space. Weightlifting and Throwing - women athletes in these sports, and in other sporting contexts, are not necessarily concerned with shape, size, form or aesthetics but are concerned with effectiveness and execution of the skill. This is referred to as Instrumental sporting femininity—that is, the body is primarily a site of results-oriented elite sport performance. Contemporary Flat Track Roller Derby - Organized by and for women. Some elements of traditional femininity are coopted and transformed by athletes. There are a number of interesting films about this sport! Synchronized Swimming - Paradox as it is a reinforcement and accentuation of traditional feminine norms of style, grace and make up. Yet these athletes have the capacity for endurance, physical agility, which, are perceived as masculine traits in the sporting realm. Mixed Martial Arts - Reemergence or return to certain emphasized norms in terms of how society locates women within those norms. This sport has the capacity for violence and physicality. ***Sexploitation - The reassertion of sporting emphasized femininity by way of the reaffirmation of a compulsory heterosexuality. In sports, a successful woman athlete tends to have her sexuality questioned and can be typecast as gay or lesbian. One way the media (and filmmakers) relocate the women's gendered identity, and her preferred femininity, is by re-establishing her heterosexuality. This serves two functions: 1) reinforces traditional gender norms and 2) allows the media entity to capitalize upon the celebrity through the commodification of her athletic body. Many critics argue that the woman athlete is thus made into a sex object first and an athlete second by media and women athletes (e.g. Gabrielle Reece). ***Emerging or instrumental femininity - The way in which women have been portrayed by media as objects ancillary to sport. ***Residual Femininity - Increasingly popular forms of women sports, for example, roller derby, football that challenge gendered norms of objectification and commodification. *****Gendered Identity in Film: There are a number of roles Hollywood casts women into in sport films. Here are a few of the recurring roles we tend to see more often than others in sport films: *****Women athlete as empowered through sport - Through sport we can transgress gendered norms, but usually this message is woven into other dominant messages like race, ability, or paternalistic messages. Example: Hell on Wheels ***Woman as sexualized and objectified -- stripped of athletic prowess and re-inscribed in a sexualized way. Example: Blue Crush ****Paternalism towards the woman athlete - male figure as the coach or leading figure, who guides the female athlete. Without the male figure the woman would be lost. Example: A League of Their Own ***Distraction - male athlete is trying to get on with serious sports business but the woman is there to distract him from his role as an athlete. Example: Rocky I, Rocky II *****Temptress -using sexuality to leverage it against a male athlete. The woman is the object of sexual desire and the male is the protagonist. Woman is a nuisance. Example: Bull Durham ***Nepotist - inherits her position within the sporting realm, has no place in sport but because the woman is a part of the family that is connected to sport she unwittingly interjects herself in the position. Example: Any Given Sunday *****The woman as the opposite of man - a point of reference though which we can define masculinity. Example: Million Dollar Baby

module 8: social class Zirin: Crass Slipper Fits Cinderella Man

"When our country was on it's knees, he brought America to his feet (cinderellamanmovie.com). So is the tagline for Ron Howard's Depression Era boxing film Cinderella Man starring Russell Crowe. Cinderella Man (2003), the story of 1930s heavyweight champion James J. Braddock, has been compared to the 2003 film Seabiscuit, both stories of plucky sports underdogs that triumphed during the Great Depression. The comparison is apt, and not just because Crowe mopes around Cinderella Man with the same blank, hangdog expresion as that damn horse. Like the insipid Seabiscuit, this entire big budget biopic comes off as yet another Hollywood effort to sweeten the story of the 1930s. And like Seabiscuit (2003), Cinderella Man portrays the Depression as a time, in the words of film reviewer Jamie Bernard, "that was really good for teaching values" (Bernard 2005). Beyond that, all one would learn from Cinderella Man is that shantytowns make for great cinematography. There is no question that the film is unsparing in bringing to life the dirt and despair of what it meant to live in those times. The scenes of the shantytowns, known as Hoovervilles, in Central Park are especially riveting. This is also the case with smaller moments. The film pulls no punches as it shows Mae Braddock mixing water with milk so that it will last longer. But in the end, all we really learn is that the Great Depression was really depressing. This strongly reflects the worldview of the film's director Ron Howard. Howard is a political liberal, who clearly recoils at the poverty on display. In an article on the making of the film that appeared in the May 8, 2005 New York Times, we learn that Ron Howard has a strong affinity for the period. He said, "I've always been fascinated by the Depression." His father Rance Howard had told him stories about the family's subsistence farm in Oklahoma, and their struggles. In high school, Howard made a 30-minute documentary about the Depression, interviewing his father and others and using old photos. He told the New York Times (Halbfinger, 2005): What was really shocking to me were the images of poverty in big cities. Whenever you'd see poor straggling kids with the New York City skyline in the background, or you'd see these men, still dressed in their business suits but standing in a breadline, it was as least as devastating as the Okies with all their stuff packed on a Model T. I wanted to remind people that the working poor existed then, and we have it today. While the economy is mostly up and then sometimes down-the Internet bubble bursting felt a little bit like '29, where people had overextended and fallen into that trap again-we're anxious. Our population is anxious. We're not in a depression, thank God, but I think it's crossing our minds that something could happen, things could change, and not for the better, for the worse. But for all of Howard's fears of Hoovervilles on Rodeo Drive, he also has nothing but contempt for the working people who populate this world. This is probably not surprising from someone whose most difficult working situation involved being referred to as "Opie." This was seen in his earlier film Gung Ho, where American Auto Workers were portrayed as spoiled, fattened babies who need a good lesson in the redeeming value of wage cuts and labor discipline from their Japanese Overseers. But in Cinderella Man, Howard's petty class fears really get to shine. He writes, "I've always been interested in the Depression as this very dramatic pivotal period in American history. My dad grew up on a farm in Oklahoma and remembers playing with his toy tractor under the table while the local farmers talked with his grandfather about forming a local militia to protect the crops because they were afraid unemployed people from the town would come in and grab the crops" (Montange, 2005). Howard's mother told him stories about the grocer next door to her father's butcher shop who set up a machine gun on the roof of his store to stave people foraging for food. This is the 1930s with "That Ron Howard Feeling": hate the poverty, hate the poor. This is especially clear, in perhaps the most noxious scene in the movie. This is when Braddock, who received relief payments from the government, returns triumphantly to the welfare office, dragging his kid behind him and pays back every cent he received. In including this scene, Howard explained its importance to the New York Times: "As much as it [receiving government assistance] ate at him, it saved his family. It's this kind of harmony, in a way, between a governmental system that would offer support, and a population that wouldn't exploit it". This is liberalism at its worst: we will give scraps to the starving as long as they have the moral fortitude to pay it back. Thanks, Ron. In reality, the 1930s was an era of not only poverty but also mass resistance, as strikes swept the south and shut down the cities of San Francisco, Toledo, and Minneapolis (Smith 2002). It was a time when many of the reforms on the chopping block today, like Social Security were won through the struggles of the labor movement. It was a time when "sit down strikes" ripped out across the nation. This critical part of the 1930s does not even register in Howard's world. There is nothing about those 44 brutally cold days when General Motors workers in Flint Michigan sat down and demanded union recognition. Nothing about their pitched battles with police. They hurled nuts and bolts and pop bottles and sprayed powerful jets of water from the plants' fire hoses at the squads of local police and company guards who fired buckshot and tear gas canisters into the plants in attempts to oust the strikers. As Albert Cline, a retired assembly-line worker who took part in the strikes, recalled, It was an atmosphere where you got two cups outside the plant each morning-one for coffee and the other to urinate in. There were no cooling fans, no gloves, no relief men. You could see 150 people lined up at the front door, all wanting your job. ... Our backs were so bent we'd lie on the grass after work until we could straighten out and walk. ... We were ready to do anything we could to get dignity on the job. Suddenly, workers everywhere were sitting-down. There were 477 down strikes by the end of 1937, involving more than 500,000 workers, mainly in industrial plants but also in mines, in hotels, and restaurants, even in five-and-ten-cent stores. Butchers, saleswomen, milliners, laundry workers, garbage collectors, sailors, glass blowers, movie projectionists, and many others followed the factory workers' lead. Most won at least partial victories, including, above all, the right to bargain with their employers. Two years later, the Supreme Court declared sit-down strikes an unlawful seizure of property. By then, however, workers in virtually all private employment outside agriculture had won a firm legal right to collective bargaining and so could turn to other tactics and other demands. The sit-down strikes fed on an atmosphere of growing confidence in work places and homes around the country. Revolution in the United States seemed to be on the table as hundreds of thousands of people attempted to offer an alternative to the barbarisms of capitalism. As Depression era sports writer Lester Rodney put it, "In the 1930s if you weren't some kind of radical, Communist, socialist, or Trotskyist, you were considered brain-dead, and you probably were!" (Zirin 2005). Just about everyone in Cinderella Man wears their brain deadness like a medal of honor, passively enduring poverty as if they had just received red, white, and blue lobotomies. As George Edwards, who was one of the GM strikers' rank-and-file leaders remembered, "Before, the sit-down strikes foremen never called us by name, just by number." "But they damn well knew our names after that strike. We became people". The only hint of the other side of the Depression in Cinderella Man is Braddock's (fictional) dockworker buddy Mike Wilson (played by Patty Consodine.) Mike believes in the power of protest, but he's also clearly doomed from the opening frame, portrayed as a drunk whose anger at the Depression contains absolutely nothing just or redeemable. This is held in sharp contrast to Crowe's Braddock. Braddock makes his way out of the Depression through gumption, grit, and his fists. Mike tries to make his way through collective struggle and is crushed for trying. In one scene, Wilson and Braddock are talking at a bar. The embittered Wilson tells Braddock that he doesn't trust FDR or the Republicans and sees union struggle as the only way out. Braddock tells Wilson that the only fighting he wants to engage in is in the ring. Later Wilson's wife Sara [Rosemarie DeWitt) snaps at him, "You can save the world, but not your family!" Renee Zellweger, as Crowe's spouse Mae mirrors Mike's wife, as the typically sexist sports-movie female character, fretting with every fight and forced to say lines like, "You are the champion of my heart, James J. Braddock!" The film is also shamefully simplistic and even slanderous in its portrayal of the heavyweight champion at the time Max Baer. Baer was a hulking, brutal fighter, who had two opponents die in the ring. But Cinderella Man reduces Baer to a one-dimensional stock villain, a perfect counterpart for Crowe's paper-thin stock hero. As played by Craig Bierko, Baer struts around with a psychotic gleam in his eye, as if he would enjoy nothing more than killing Braddock and spitting on his grave. He repeatedly threatens Braddock's wife and even tells him how much he will enjoy sleeping with Mae after Braddock is dead. In one scene, he looks at Mae and says, "Nice! Too bad she'll be a widow." In reality, Baer was devastated and nearly destroyed by the ring deaths that occurred at his hands, as any non-sociopath would be. As Louis Proyect (2005) writes, "After [boxer] Frankie Campbell died from the beating administered by Baer in 1930, a traumatized Baer cried and had nightmares long afterwards. Baer was charged with manslaughter, but was cleared of all charges. He gave purses from succeeding bouts to Campbell's family, but lost four of his next six fights. Indeed, by the time that Baer met up with Braddock, he had lost his edge." Also, Baer was a complex figure who fought against Nazi favorite Max Schmeling with a Star of David embroidered on his trunks and Italian fascist favorite Primo Carnera with the same symbol. Baer did this despite the fact he was at most half Jewish. It was an act of solidarity, not the act of a sociopath. To see Howard's movie, one would think that the only symbol Baer favored was a pentagram. But the real tragedy of the film is its treatment of Braddock. Crowe does what he can with a terrible script, but it says everything about the film that the final credits roll before the actual ending of Braddock's fight career, a 1937 8th round knockout at the hands of Joe Louis. Louis, the first African American heavyweight champ since Jack Johnson, was a symbol of hope for both African Americans and the left wing of the radicalizing working class. To have portrayed his fight with Braddock would have meant dealing with complex issues of how boxing, in a violent society, has acted as a deeply symbolic morality play about the ability of people-especially people of colorto succeed and stand triumphant. It would have meant trying to understand why some people would have rooted for Braddock against Baer, but then bitterly opposed him against Louis. Louis himself was a very complex figure. He was handled very carefully by a management team that had a set of rules Louis had to follow including, "never be photographed with a white woman, never go to a club by yourself and never speak unless spoken to" (Remnick 1998, p. 225). But he was devastating in the ring, scoring 69 victories in 72 professional fights-55 of them knockouts. Despite having an image where his handlers had him scrape and shuffle, Joe Louis-and his dominance in the ring-represented much more to poor Blacks, and also to the radicalizing working class in the 1930s. This played out most famously during Louis's two fights against Schmeling in 1936 and 1938. Schmeling was heavily promoted by German Nazi leader Adolph Hitler as proof of "Aryan greatness." In the first bout, Schmeling knocked out Louis. Not only did Hitler and Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels have a field day, but the southern press in the United States laughed it up. One column in the New Orleans Picayune wrote, "I guess this proves who really is the master race". The Louis-Schmeling rematch in 1938 was a political brouhaha-a physical referendum on Hitler, the Jim Crow South and anti-racism. The U.S. Communist Party organized radio listenings of the fight from Harlem to Birmingham that became mass meetings. Hitler closed down movie houses so people would be compelled to listen. Louis devastated Schmeling in one round. In a notorious move, Hitler quickly cut the radio power in all of Germany when it was clear the knockout was coming. "The Brown Bomber" held the heavyweight title for 12 years, the longest reign in history. He beat all comers, the overwhelming majority of them white-successfully defending his heavyweight title a record 25 times. As poet Maya Angelou wrote about Louis, "the one invincible Negro, the one who stood up to the white man and beat him down with his fists. He in a sense carried so many of our hopes, and maybe even our dreams of vengeance." Thirty years after the fight, Martin Luther King Jr. (1964) wrote in Why We Can't Wait. In a society so violently racist, boxing became an outlet for people's anger-a morality play about the thwarted ability, the unrecognized talents and the relentless fighting spirit that shaped the Black experience in the United States. But the filmmakers could care less about these complicated dimensions of either the period or the sport. Their job in Cinderella Man is to take complex characters and turn them into stick figures, easily consumed and easily forgotten. At that task, they have succeeded admirably. At best this film works as a cheap Capra-esque patriotic love fest. Hollywood.com film reviewer Kit Bowen wrote with humor but without irony, "Honestly, how can you not root for a movie about a Depression-era underdog prizefighter who beats the odds and wins it big? It seems anti-American or something." At worst, it vandalizes history, making safe a period filled with danger and daring: which is exactly the opposite of what art should accomplish.

module 9: sports guide PDF: Kusz: Dogtown and Z-boys- White particularity and the new, new cultural racism

According to the advertising rhetoric which adorns its video cover, Dogtown and Z-Boys is a documentary which tells the story of the Z- Boys "a gang of discarded kids who virtually revolutionized skateboarding with an aggressive style, awe-inspiring moves and street smarts, and, in the process, transformed youth culture forever" (Dogtown and Z-Boys 2002). Directed and co-written by Stacy Peralta, a former Z-Boy and skateboarding world champion himself, the film, at face value, provides viewers with a specific history of skateboarding centered upon the athletic achievements and rebellious antics of the Zephyr skating team who came of age in Venice, California during the 1970s. Combining present day interviews with an impressive soundtrack and collection of images and videos of the Z-Boys in action during their hey-day, the film presents the Z-Boys not only as the ultra-cool, rebellious, radical innovators of skateboarding, but as the ones chiefly responsible for the contemporary popularity of extreme sports. In this chapter, I explain how the documentary, Dogtown and Z-Boys, is constitutive of, and constituted by, the representational strategies and discursive logics of a new variant of contemporary cultural racism. More specifically, I make visible some of the recurrent strategies used to represent white identities (particularly white men) through this new, new cultural racism at the turn of twenty-first century America: whites as economically unprivileged and disadvantaged and whites as authentically coming from or existing in the margins. Yet, these particular unconventional depictions of whites are coupled with more conventional representations of whiteness as dominant, unmarked, and securely re-centered in an American mainstream seemingly enamoured by virtually everything "extreme." Together, these two, seemingly paradoxical images of whiteness-as initially and authentically economically unprivileged and socially marginalized and, in the final instance, as unmarked, centered, and dominant- effectively enable whiteness, and the systemic social, economic, political, and psychological privileges it covers upon those considered to be 'white", to be subtly disavowed just as it is strategically reproduced through the film's narrative. Although race is rarely mentioned in these recurring stories about seemingly unprivileged and marginalized whites within new millennium America, they should be understood as a form cultural racism. Such stories not only serve to mask and deny the existence of systemic white privilege, but they simultaneously erect racial hierarchies and commit symbolic violence on people of color which serve to reproduce whiteness as the invisible normative center of American culture and society. *******Critical studies of Whiteness and Dogtown and Z-boys: Before interrogating the specific aspects of the racial politics of Dogtown and Z-boys, I want to position my analysis of the film within the field of whiteness studies to show how it is informed by many of its key assumptions and insights. My analysis follows 3 of the basic tenets of the work of whiteness studies: 1) interrogating whiteness from a social constructionist view of race 2) a critical awareness of how whiteness as a social system is constitutive of and constituted by discourses, individual and institutional practices, which produce and reproduce racial violates (both material and symbolic) and asymmetries of power between those considered "white" and "people of color" 3) an impulse to contest monolithic and essentialist views of whiteness as always already privileged and occupying the position of "the normal" or "the universal", in order to better understand the complexity of white identities and their relation to white privilege. More specifically, my chapter follows the work of scholars who take as their analytic starting point the resiliency and elasticity of whiteness as a social system which confers a host of privileges to those considered to be "white" (and disadvantages to people of color) in a given historical moment by highlighting how it has the capacity for "a number of sometimes conflicting ideologies used differently and differentially depending upon the historical needs of white control. Whiteness is not a totalizing force, but one which changes and shifts in response to historical conditions. Davy's point clearly emphasizes how those involved in the project of reproducing the normativity and supremacy of whiteness in the U.S. will appropriate virtually any representational strategies that within various specific historical and social contexts, can work to reproduce asymmetrical relations of power for those considered "white". As a consequence, Davy stresses the need for critical analyses of whiteness to interrogate various white identities and white racial projects in their specific historical and local contexts, always remaining vigilantly critical of the complicated, contradictory, and not so easily apparent or straightforward ways in which various representations of whites or white racial projects, even those which appear to criticize, challenge, expose, or be disaffiliated from white privilege or white supremacy on the face, can still facilitate the reproduction of white control, privilege, and normativity. emptying such a critical analytic optic toward whiteness means recognizing that the power of whiteness is not only reproduced, maintains, and extended by the ability of whiteness to go unmarked or to occupy the position of "the universal" in cultural texts. Rather, the power of whiteness is also complexly reproduced by marking, making visible, "othering", and differences within those considered to be "white" when doing so serves the interests of perpetuating the sociocultural normativity and dominance of whiteness. Using these theoretical optics on whiteness, I want to discuss the historically specific racial context in which the documentary, Dogtown and Z-boys, was produced and released in order to read it not only as a symptom of this ears, but as an instrument and effect of this new cultural racism. ********New Millennium America, and the new, new cultural racism On one hand, new millennium America has been described as a time where many whites attempted to "disaffiliate" from whiteness as it became increasingly visible as a racial identity and criticized as a social system which affords a "knapsack" of unearned privilege to "whites". This public critique of white privilege and the invisible and normative position of whiteness in American culture and society was fostered by a specific constellation of political, cultural, social, and economic forces and conditions such as" the pervasiveness of identity politics; the increasing institutionalization of multicultural and cultural diversity programs in the United States during the past 15 years; the increased visibility of people of color in American public culture since the 1980s; the rise of discourses projecting that by the middle of the 21st centaur white people would no longer represent the racial majority in the United States; and the impact of globalization. together, these forces created a crisis of legitimizing white privilege and an invisible position of normalcy for whiteness in American culture and society. this crisis of legitimizing white privilege and normative led to various cultural responses to bring about "the recovery of white supremacy". It is these cultural narratives whose implicit goal is to recuperate a central, normative, and dominant position for whiteness that I call the new, new cultural racism. Unlike more unsophisticated ideas of biological inferiority which accompanied earlier popular forms of scientific or biological racism, this new, new cultural racism is usually cleverly expressed subtextually though racially coded rhetoric that "can produce a racist effect while denying that this effect is the result of racism". *****This new, new cultural racism is shaped by the conjecturally pervasive login of colorblindness and the idea the race consciousness is no longer preferred or needed because racial inequalities and hierarchies are imagined as being dismantled as a consequence of the activism of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. ******the goal of this new, new cultural racism is "to re-articulate and re-legitimize white supremacy", but to do so in such a way that such a goal is difficult to discern and easily disavowed. As a racial project that seeks "to resist the challenge to white supremacy posed by movements of the 60s and their contemporary inheritors" . this new, new cultural racism ironically often appropriates the logics and representational strategies of identity politics first popularized by the social movements of the 60s to make its challenge. ********Another important feature of this new, new cultural racism is that its characterized by cultural narratives where not only are people of color usually not represented as central figures, but they often do not appear at all in these texts. in this way, this variant on the "new cultural racism" is unique, more complex and insidious because, unlike other racisms that are centered upon people of color, this form does not seem to be what Winant would call a "racial project" or commentary on race at all (especially from the vantage point of white). *********More specifically, this new, new cultural racism involves the production and dissemination of a number of affectively appealing stories of white people who authentically come from, and exist within, the social margins; or whites portrayed as victims (of affirmative action, black athletic superiority, or white groups or individuals who appear to be disaffiliated from white privilege.* **** Several scholars have shown the prominent role which popular culture- particularly films like Falling Down, Forrest Gump, Dangerous Minds, Jerry Maguire, and Fight Club- have played in disseminating and naturalizing what I want to call the new, new cultural racism central to contemporary efforts to recover the centrality, normativity, and dominance of whiteness in American culture and social life. Sports illustrated cover story titled, "what ever happened to the white athlete?"which represents perhaps the clearest expression in the sporting press of Ferber;s insight about the alarming similarities between the racial logics and desires constitutive of mainstream discourses (as long as these similarities are disguised of can be effectively denied_ and those of white supremacist groups in the 1990s. Sports Illustated's cover story produced a panic-driven narrative- ***yet one considered by many who identify as "whitest be completely reasonable and justified- which lamented the decline in the number of whites on the most popular and visible stages of American professional sports ***(baseball, basketball, and football), even going as far as stating that whites have become "second-class citizens in contemporary sports". Although the author explicitly attempted to deny that the article's thesis was motivated by white anxieties about the loss of white supremacy in sport, one is hard-processed to imagine why else would such a cover story be written. Just as sports illustrated's story bemoaned the disappearance of white (male) athletes in the ranks of American professional athletes, it simultaneously **paid little attention to the continued stronghold of white men in positions of power and authority within the institution of sport- in the coaching ranks, front offices, and league offices; an admission- which would have contradicted its thesis. Finally, the sports illustrated article is germane to the present discussion for the manner in which it skillfully and strategically renders whites visible ****both as unprivileged subjects (in relation to the implied unfair and undeserved "natural" athletic superiority of African Americans", and as vulnerable, innocent victims of a sporting version of supposed reverse racism where the success of African American male athletes was portrayed as coming at the expense of white athletes. In short, sports illustrated's cover story offered a picture of United States race relations where whites could be imagined as marginalized and unprivileged outsiders, while African Americans were positioned as dominant, exclusionary, and privileged subjects. *** *********Using class difference to disaffiliate the Z-boys from whiteness: This portrayal of Dogtown as economically depressed is reinforced through an origin story of Venice, California that traces the cityy back to the early 1900s. It strategically enables the Z-boys; story to avoid seemingly obvious critiques of the racial and gender exclusivity of this alternative sport fraternity being glorified through this documentary.

module 7: masculinity PDF: Giroux- Private Satisfactions and Public Disorders: Fight Club, Patriarchy, and the Politics of Masculine Violence

The "public" has been emptied of its own separate contents; it has been left with no agenda of its own-it is now but an agglomeration of private troubles, worries and problems. -Zygmunt Bauman In the epigraph above, Zygmunt Bauman gives voice to a troubling feature of American society. Amid the growing privatization of everyday life, the greatest danger to human freedom and democracy no longer appears to come from the power of the over-zealous state eager to stamp out individual freedom and critical inquiry in the interest of loyalty and patriotism. Totalitarianism no longer breeds a contempt for the virtues of individualism, all things private, and the dynamics of self-interest. On the contrary, totalitarianism now resides in a thorough dislike for all things social, public, and collective. Under the growing influence of the politics, ideology, and culture of neoliberalism, Bauman argues, the individual has been "set free to construe her or his own fears, to baptize them with privately chosen names and to cope with them on her or his own". Agency has now been privatized and personal liberty atomized and removed from broader considerations about the ethical and political responsibility of citizens to defend those vital institutions that expand the rights and services central to a meaningful democracy. Stripped of its political possibilities and social underpinnings, freedom finds few opportunities for translating private worries into public concerns or individual discontent into collective struggle. Utopia is now conjured up as the privatized space of the shopping mall, intellectual effort is reduced to an instrument of the entrepreneurial self, and social visions are dismissed as hopelessly out of date. Public space is portrayed exclusively as an investment opportunity, and the public good increasingly becomes a metaphor for public disorder. As the public sphere is consistently removed from social consideration and notions of the public good are replaced by an utterly privatized model of citizenship and the good life, the collapse of public imagination and a vibrant political culture is celebrated by neoliberal warriors rather than perceived as a dangerous state of affairs that Americans should be both contemptuous of and ashamed to support. Within the discourse of neoliberalism, issues regarding persistent poverty, inadequate health care, racial apartheid in the inner cities, and the growing inequalities between rich and poor have been either removed from the inventory of public discourse and public policy or factored into talk show spectacles that highlight private woes bearing little relationship either to public life orto potential remedies that demand collective action. Within this growing marketization and privatization of everyday life, democratic principles are either scorned as holdovers of an outmoded sixties radicalism or equated entirely with the imperatives of capitalism. As Robert McChesney argues, Milton Friedman, the reigning guru of neoliberalism, perfectly captures and legitimizes this sentiment in Capitalism and Freedom, where he argues unabashedly that "because profit-making is the essence of democracy, any government that pursues antimarket policies is being antidemocratic, no matter how much informed popular support they might enjoy. Therefore it is best to restrict governments to the job of protecting private property and enforcing contracts, and to limit political debate to minor issues". In neoliberal discourse, freedom is negatively reduced to the freedom from government restraint and the rights of individual citizens to consume as they choose. The state becomes a threat to freedom-particularly the freedom of the market-as its role as guardian of the public interest is actively disassembled, though its powers are still invoked by dominant interests to ensure their own privileges (that is, free trade agreements, government subsidies for business; and strike "negotiations"). However, as Pierre Bourdieu points out, while neoliberals highlight the threat that the state poses to the freedom of the market, the real threat comes from a state that, under the control of neoliberal ideology, is increasingly transformed into a repressive apparatus aimed at those individuals and groups who get caught in its ever-expanding policing interventions. Bourdieu explains, In the United States, the state is splitting into two, with on the one hand a state which provides social guarantees, but only for the privileged, who are sufficiently well off to provide themselves with insurance, with guarantees, and a repressive, policing state, for the populace. In California, one of the richest states of the U.S...and also one of the most conservative, and which has perhaps the most prestigious university in the world, since 1994 the prison budget has been greater than the budget of all the universities together. The blacks in the Chicago ghetto only know the state through the police officer, the judge, the prison warder and the parole officer. We see there a kind of realization of the dream of the dominant class, a state which, as Lore Wacquant has shown, is increasingly reduced to its policing function. As the laws of the market take precedence over the laws of the state as guardians of the public good, the state increasingly offers little help in mediating the interface between the advance of capital and its rapacious commercial interests, on the one hand, and, on the other, those noncommodified interests and nonmarket spheres that create the political, economic, and social conditions vital for critical citizenship and democratic public life. As the state is hollowed out, forced to abandon its social functions, its dominant interest is to support the exercise of police power concerned primarily with surveillance, containment, repression, and control as it increasingly criminalizes social antagonisms. Humanitarian concerns are largely impotent against the driving interests of capital and its voracious search for new markets and greater profits. As the welfare state is dismantled, social agencies aimed at providing crucial social provisions and a safety net for society's most vulnerable are replaced by institutions designed to train rather than educate, punish rather than nurture, and contain rather than serve the public interest. Rationalized self-interest goes hand in hand with growing incidents of racial injustice, class injustice, economic downsizing, and the growth of a criminal justice system that incarcerates youth of color at a rate that exceeds the apartheid regime of South Africa. As the public good is subordinated to private gain, public services such as health care, social housing, schools, hospitals, and transportation are transformed from social investments into profit options for the powerful and wealthy. As the novelist Walter Mosley reminds us, "Capitalism has no humanity. All that exists in the capitalist bible is the margin of profit , the market share, and those quirks of individualism that must be dealt with in much the same manner as a mechanic must deal with a faulty element: removal and replacement". The ascendancy of neoliberalism and corporate culture into every aspect of American life not only consolidates economic power in the hands of the few, it also aggressively attempts to break the power of unions, decouple income from productivity, subordinate the needs of society to the market, and reinterpret public services and amenities as unconscionable luxuries. But it does more. It thrives on a culture of cynicism, boredom, and despair. Americans are now convinced that they have little to hope for-and gain from-the government, nonprofit public spheres, democratic associations, or other nongovernmental social forces. With few exceptions, the project of democratic transformation has fallen into disrepute in the popular imagination as the logic of the market undermines the most basic social solidarities. The consequences include not only a weakened state, but a growing sense of insecurity, cynicism, and political retreat on the part of the general public. As Bauman insightfully argues, the call for self-reliance betrays a weakened state that neither provides adequate safety nets for its populace (especially those who are young, poor, or marginalized) nor gives any indication that it needs or is willing to care for its citizens. In this scenario, private interests trump social needs, and profit becomes more important than social justice. In Bauman's words, The more legless is the state, the more its spokesmen spell out the need for, the duty of, its self-reliance, of counting on one's own resources alone, of making one's own balances of gains and losses-in short, of standing of [sic] one's own, individual, legs.... [The result is] the brutal tearing up of social solidarities ... [as] individuals have been left to lick their wounds and exorcize their fears in solitude and seclusion. The "brutal tearing up of social solidarities" is mediated through the force of corporate structural power and commercial values that both dominate and weaken those competing public spheres and value systems that are critical to a just society and to democracy itself. The liberal democratic vocabulary of rights, entitlements, social provisions, community, social responsibility, living wage, job security, equality, and justice seems oddly out of place in a country in which the promise of democracy has been replaced by the lure of the lottery and the Dow Jones industrial average, reinforced by a pervasive fear and insecurity about the present, and a deep-seated skepticism in the public mind that the future holds nothing beyond a watered-down version of the present. Within the prevailing discourse of neoliberalism that has taken hold of the public imagination, there is no vocabulary for political or social transformation; there is no collective vision; there is no social agency to challenge the ruthless downsizing of jobs or to resist the ongoing liquidation of job security; there are no spaces from which to struggle against the elimination of benefits for people now hired on a strictly part-time basis. Moreover, against the reality of low-wage jobs, the erosion of social provisions for a growing number of people, and the expanding war against young people of color, the market-driven consumer juggernaut continues to mobilize desires in the interest of producing market identities and market relationships that, as Theodor Adorno once put it, ultimately appear as nothing less than "a prohibition on thinking" itself. It is against this ongoing assault on the public, and the growing preponderance of a free market economy and corporate culture that turns everything it touches into an object of consumption that David Fincher's 1999 film, Fight Club, must be critically engaged. Ostensibly, Fight Club appears to offer a critique of late capitalist society and the misfortunes it generates out of its obsessive concern with profits, consumption, and the commercial values that underlie its market driven ethos. However, Fight Club is less interested in attacking the broader material relations of power and strategies of domination and exploitation associated with neoliberal capitalism than it is in rebelling against a consumerist culture that dissolves the bonds of male sociality and puts into place an enervating notion of male identity and agency. Contrary to the reviews accompanying the film's premiere that celebrated it as a daring social critique, Fight Club has nothing to say about the structural violence of unemployment, job insecurity, cuts in public spending, or the destruction of institutions capable of defending social provisions and the public good. On the contrary, the film defines the violence of capitalism almost exclusively in terms of an attack on traditional (if not to say regressive) notions of masculinity, and in doing so reinscribes white heterosexuality within a dominant logic of stylized brutality and male bonding that appears to be predicated on the need to denigrate, and to wage war against, all that is feminine. In this instance, the crisis of capitalism is reduced to the crisis of masculinity, and the nature of the crisis lies less in the economic, political, and social conditions of capital- ism itself than in the rise of a culture of consumption in which men are allegedly domesticated, rendered passive, soft, and emasculated. Fight Club-along with films such as American Beauty, Rogue Trader, Boiler Room, and American Psycho-inaugurates a new subgenre of cult film that combines a fascination with the spectacle of violence, enlivened through tired narratives about the crisis of mascuIinity, along with a superficial gesture toward social critique designed to offer the tease of a serious independent or art film. While appearing to address important social issues, these films end up reproducing the very problems they attempt to address. Rather than turning a critical light on crucial social problems, such films often trivialize them through a stylized aesthetics that revels in irony, cynicism, and excessive violence. Violence in these films is reduced to acts of senseless brutality and pathology and an indifference to human suffering. Reproducing such hackneyed representations of violence ("senseless," "random"), they conclude where engaged political commentary should begin. Yet, I am less interested in moralizing about the politics of Fincher's film than I am in reading it as a form of public pedagogy that offers an opportunity to engage and understand its politics of representation as part of broader commentary on the intersection of consumerism, masculinity, violence, politics, and gender relations. Moreover, Fight Club points to the role that Hollywood films playas teaching machines. A far cry from simple entertainment, such films function as public pedagogies by articulating knowledge to effects, purposely attempting to influence how and what knowledge and identities can be produced within a limited range of social relations. At the same time, I recognize that, as Eleanor Bryne and Martin McQuillan suggest in a different context, such texts are "radically indeterminate with respect to their meaning, [and] any reading of a text must be determined by factors not prescribed by the text itself' As public pedagogies, texts such as Fight Club attempt to bridge the gap between private and public discourses, while simultaneously putting into play particular ideologies and values that resonate with broader public conversations regarding how a society views itself and the world of power, events, and politics. Reading a film such as Fight Club suggests, in more specific terms, that we must consider how it offers up particular notions of agency in which white working-class and middle class men are allowed to see themselves as oppressed and inadequate because their masculinity has been compromised by and subordinated to those social and economic spheres and needs that constitute the realm of the feminine. In taking up these issues, I first analyze the narrative structure of the film, addressing its simultaneous critique of consumerism and its celebration of masculinity. In doing so, I address the representational politics that structure Fight Club- especially its deeply conventional views of violence, gender relations, and masculinity-and I examine how such representations work in conjunction with a deeply entrenched culture of cynicism. Finally, I argue that this cynicism, far from being innocent, works in tandem with broader public discourses to undermine the faith of individuals and groups in their ability to engage in the possibility of a politics designed to struggle against the rising tide of antidemocratic forces and movements that threaten the already weakened fabric of democracy. Obviously, I am not arguing that Hollywood films such as Fight Club are a cause of these problems; rather, they are symptomatic of a wider symbolic and institutional culture of cynicism and senseless violence that exerts a powerful pedagogical influence on shaping the public imagination. In treating Fight Club as a pedagogical and political text, my aim is to reveal its socially constructed premises, to demystify its contradictions, and to challenge its reactionary views. In part, I want to ask questions about Fight Club that have not been generally asked in the popular press and to engage how dominant public pedagogies prevent us from asking such questions in the first place. In addition, I consider the role that Fight Club and other cultural texts might playas public pedagogies that can be read against themselves; that is, I discuss how such texts can be deconstructed and reworked theoretically within a wider set of associations and meanings that can be both challenged and rearticulated in order to strengthen rather than weaken a public politics and further the promise of democratic transformation. ******fight club and the crisis of everyday life: In [commercial cinema's] seeming transformation of violence into entertainment, choreography, and macho ebullience, one could say that the reality of violence has been infantilised. One cannot take it too seriously. And yet, one is compelled to ask if any idiom of violence can be regarded as "innocent," distanced from reality through its apparent autonomy of signs. -Rustom Bharucha White heterosexual men in America did not fare well in the 1990s. Not only were they attacked by feminists, gays, lesbians, and various subal- tern groups for a variety of ideological and material offenses, they also had to endure a rewriting of the very meaning of masculinity." As Homi Bhabha has recently stated, the manifest destiny of masculinity with its hard-boiled, tough image of manliness has been disturbed, and its blocked reflexivity has been harshly unsettled. Moreover, the shift from an industrial to an information economy-from the production of goods to the production of knowledge- has offered men, at least according to Susan Faludi, fewer and fewer meaningful occupations (Stiffed). Consequently, the male body has been transformed from an agent of production to a receptacle for consumption. A rampant culture of consumption, coupled with a loss of manufacturing and middle-management jobs produces in white males an identity crisis of unparalleled proportions. The male hero of the modem-day work force is no longer defined by the image of the tightly hewn worker using his body and labor to create the necessities for everyday life. The new work force hero is now modeled on the image of the young, computer-whiz yuppie who defines his life and goals around hot start-up e-commerce companies, day trading, and other get-rich-before-I'm-twenty-one schemes, as well as the conspicuous consumption of expensive products. Moreover, as white, heterosexual, working-class and middle-class men face a life of increasing uncertainty and insecurity, they no longer have easy access to those communities in which they can inhabit a form of masculinity that defines itself in opposition to femininity. In simple terms, the new millennium offers white, heterosexual men nothing less than a life in which ennui and domestication define their everyday existence. Fight Club, which is based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, attempts to engage critically the boredom, shallowness, and emptiness of a stifling consumer culture, redefine what it might mean for men to resist compromising their masculinity for the sofa or cappuccino maker that "speaks them," and explore the possibilities for creating a sense of community in which men can reclaim their virility and power. The film opens with an inside shot of Jack's brain, tracking a surge of adrenaline that quickly finds an opening in Jack's mouth and then exits up the barrel of a gun. Jack (played by Edward Norton) then proceeds to lead the audience into the nature of his predicament and in doing so narrates his journey out of corporate America and his evolving relationship with Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt), who functions as Jack's alter ego and significant other. The first section of the film functions primarily as a critique of contemporary consumerism and how corporate culture positions men in jobs and lifestyles that are an affront to their manhood and male sociality, leaving them to seek refuge in communities of self-help portrayed as the dreaded cult of victim hood-that only accentuate the contemporary crisis of masculinity. As the film unfolds, Jack is portrayed as a neoliberal Everyman: an emasculated, repressed corporate drone whose life is simply an extension of a reified and commodified culture. As a recall coordinator, Jack travels around the country investigating accidents for a major auto company in order to decide whether it's cheaper for the corporation to assign recalls or make payment on a likely number of lawsuits. Alienated from his job, utterly lacking any sense of drive or future, Jack's principal relief comes from an insatiable urge for flipping through and shopping from consumer catalogues. A slave to the "IKEA nesting instinct," Jack self-consciously offers up rhetorical questions such as "What kind of dining set defines me as a person?" But Jack's IKEA-designed apartment appears to offer him no respite from the emptiness in his life, and his consumerist urges only seem to reinforce his lack of enthusiasm for packaging himself as a corporate puppet and presenting himself as what Tom Peters calls an up-and-coming "brand name."?Tormented by the emptiness of his daily life and suffering from near terminal insomnia, Jack visits his doctor, claiming he is in real pain. His thirty-something doctor refuses to give him drugs and tells him that if he really wants to see pain he should visit a local group for men surviving testicular cancer. Jack not only attends the self-help meeting; he also discovers that the group offers him a sense of comfort and community, and in an ironic twist he becomes a support-group junkie. At his first meeting of the Remaining Men Together survival group, Jack meets Bob (played by Meat Loaf A day), a former weightlifter who has enormous breasts (described as "bitch tits") as a result of hormonal treatments. The group allows Jack to participate in a form of male bonding that offers him an opportunity to release his pent-up emotions and provides a cure for his insomnia. Bob becomes a not-too-subtle symbol in the film, personifying how masculinity is both degraded (he has breasts like a woman) and used in a culture that relies on so called feminine qualities of support and empathy to bring men together rather than on so-called masculine attributes of strength and virility. When Bob hugs Jack and tells him "You can cry now," Fight Club does more than mock New Age therapy for men; it also satirizes and condemns the "weepy" process of femininization that such therapies arguably sanction and put into place. Jack eventually meets Marla (played by Helena Bonham Carter), a disheveled, chain-smoking, slinky street urchin who also slums in the same group-therapy sessions as Jack. He views Marla as a tourist addicted only to the spectacle of the meetings. Marla reminds him of his own phoniness and so upsets him that his insomnia returns and his asylum is shattered. Jack can't find emotional release with another phony in the same session. In the voice-over, Jack claims that "if [he] had a tumor [he] would name it Marla." Once again, repressed white masculinity is thrown into a crisis by the eruption of an ultra-conservative version of post-1960s femininity that signifies the antithesis of domestic security, comfort, and sexual passivity, offering only neurosis and blame in their place. We now begin to understand Jack's comment (which occurs at the beginning of the film after the gun is pulled from his mouth) that "Marla is at the root of it." On the heels of this loss, Jack meets Tyler Durden on an airplane. Tyler is the antithesis of Jack-a bruising, cocky, brash soap salesman, part-time waiter, and movie projectionist with a whiff of anarchism shoring up his speech, dress, and body language. If Jack is a model of packaged conformity and yuppie depthlessness, Tyler is a no-holds- barred charismatic rebel who, as a part-time movie projectionist, offers his own attack on family values by splicing frames of pornography into kiddie films. When working as a banquet waiter in a luxurious hotel, he urinates into the soup to be served to high-paying yuppie customers. Tyler also creatively affirms his disgust for women by making high-priced soaps from liposuctioned human fat, proudly telling Jack that he is "selling rich ladies their own fat asses back to them at twenty dollars a bar." Jack is immediately taken with Tyler, who taunts him with the appellation "IKEA boy," and offers him his personal guide to the pitfalls of consumer culture. Mesmerized by Tyler's high-octane talk and sense of subversion, Jack exchanges phone numbers with him. When Jack returns home, he finds that his apartment has been mysteriously blown to bits. He calls Tyler who meets him at a local bar and tells him that things could be worse: "a woman could cut off your penis while you are sleeping and toss it out the window of a moving car." Tyler then launches into a five minute cliche ridden tirade against the pitfalls of bourgeois life, mixing critique with elements of his own philosophical ramblings about the fall of masculinity. He tells Jack that issues such as crime and poverty don't trouble him. According to Tyler, the real problems men like him confront are "celebrity magazines, television with five hundred channels, some guy's name on my under- wear, Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra." And as for the IKEA consumer hype of an idyllic domesticated existence, Tyler indignantly tells Jack, "Things you own end up owning you .... **** Martha Stewart .... **** off with your sofa units .... Stop being perfect. Let's evolve." And evolve they do. As they leave the bar, Tyler offers Jack the opportunity to move in with him in what turns out to be a dilapidated, abandoned house near a toxic dump. Then the magic happens. Before they go back to Tyler's place, Tyler asks Jack to hit him, which Jack does, and then Tyler returns the favor. Pain leads to exhilaration and they sit exhausted, bloodied, and blissful after their brute encounter. Soon Tyler and Jack start fighting repeatedly in a bar parking lot, eventually drawing a crowd of men who want to participate in brutally pummeling each other. Hence, Fight Club, a new religion and secret society open only to males, is born. Groups of men soon afterwards start meeting in the cellar of a local nightclub in order to beat each other's heads into a bloody mess so as to reclaim their instincts as hunters within a society that has turned them into repressed losers and empty consumers. While Tyler enumerates several rules for the members of Fight Club ("The first rule of Fight Club is that you don't talk about Fight Club"), the one that actually captures the driving sentiment of his philosophy is the exhortation, "Self-improvement is masturbation; self-destruction is the answer." For Tyler, physical violence becomes the necessary foundation for masculinity and collective terrorism the basis for politics itself. In other words, the only way Tyler's followers can become agents in a society that has deadened them is to get in touch with primal instincts for competition and violence; the only way their masculine identity can be reclaimed is through the literal destruction of their present selves (that is, beating each other senseless); and their only recourse to community is to collectively engage in acts of militia-inspired terrorism aimed at corporate strongholds. Eventually, Jack has second thoughts about his homoerotic attraction to Tyler as a self-styled anti-hero when Tyler's narcissism and bravado mutates into an unbridled megalomania that appears more psychotic than anarchistic. Before long, Tyler is spending more and more time with Marla, who appears, to Jack's chagrin, to be having sex with him on an almost hourly basis. And Tyler increases the stakes of Fight Club by turning it into Project Mayhem, a nationwide organization of terrorist thugs whose aim is to wage war against the rich and powerful by defacing corporate-subsidized artandyuppiecoffeebarsandbyblowingupcredit card companies. Here, the line is blurred between giving pain and risking death as part of the redeeming power of "masculine recovery" and the performance of barbaric fantasies worthy of the most ruthless right-wing militia movements. Before long, one ofProj ect Mayhem's terrorist forays is botched and one of their members is killed by the police. The victim is Bob, the large-breasted testicular cancer survivor who has recently reaffirmed his own manliness by joining Fight Club. Jack is shocked by the killing, which in tum enables him to recognize that Tyler has become a demagogue and that Fight Club has evolved into a fascist paramilitary group that is more dangerous than the social order it has set out to destroy. In a long overdue psychic meltdown, Jack realizes that he and Tyler are the same person, signaling a shift in the drama from the realm of the sociological to the psychological. Jack discovers that Tyler has planned a series of bombings around the unnamed city and goes to the police to tum himself in. But the cops are members of Project Mayhem and attempt to cut off his testicles because of his betrayal. Once more Jack rescues his manhood by escaping and eventually confronting Tyler in a building that has been targeted for demolition by Project Mayhem. Jack fares badly in his fight with Tyler and ends up at the top of the building with a gun in his mouth. Jack finally realizes that he has the power to take control of the gun and that he has to shoot himself in order to kill Tyler. He puts the gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. Tyler dies on the spot, but Jack mysteri- ously survives. Marla is brought to the scene by some Project Mayhem members. Jack orders them to leave, and he and Marla hold hands and watch as office buildings explode all around them. In an apparent repudiation of all that he (Tyler) has been about, Jack turns to Marla and tells her not to worry. He says, "You met me at a weird time in my life," which suggests that life will get better for both of them in the future. ***********consumerism, cynicism, and Hollywood Resistance Consumerism ... is less of an ideological falsification of well- being than a mark that no benefit exterior to the system can be imagined. -Bill Readings As I have attempted to demonstrate, central to Fight Club is the interre- lated critique of late capitalism and the politics of masculinity. The central protagonists, Jack and Tyler, represent two opposing registers that link consumerism and masculinity. Jack represents a generation of men condemned to corporate peonage whose emotional lives and investments are mediated through the allure of commodities and goods. No longer a producer of goods, Jack exemplifies a form of domesticated masculinity passive, alienated, and without ambition. In contrast, Tyler exemplifies an embodied masculinity that refuses the seductions of consumerism while fetishizing forms of production (ranging from soaps to explosives), the ultimate expression of which is chaos and destruction. Tyler represents the magnetism of the isolated, dauntless anti-hero whose public appeal is based on the attractions of the cult of personality rather than on the strengths of an articulated, democratic notion of political reform. Politics for Tyler is about doing, not thinking. As the embodiment of authoritarian masculinity and hyper-individualism, Tyler cannot imagine a politics that connects to democratic movements, and is less a symbol of vision and leadership for the next millennium than a holdover of early twentieth-century fascism. As the founding father of Project Mayhem-a vanguardist political movement that is hierarchically organized through rigid social relations-Tyler is a charismatic cult leader who, not insignificantly, is played by the Hollywood superstar Brad Pitt (a contradiction that cannot be overlooked). Project Mayhem is the only enabling force to contest the very capitalism of which it is an outgrowth. If Jack represents the crisis of capitalism repackaged as the crisis of a domesticated masculinity, Tyler represents the redemption of masculinity repackaged as the promise of violence in the interests of social and political anarchy. While Fight Club registers a form of resistance to the rampant commodification and alienation of contemporary neoliberal society, it ultimately has little to say about those diverse and related aspects of consumer culture and contemporary capitalism structured in iniquitous power relations, material wealth, or hierarchical social formations. Fight Club largely ignores issues surrounding the break up of labor unions, the slashing of the U.S. work force, extensive plant closings, downsizing, outsourcing, the elimination of the welfare state, the attack on people of color, and the growing disparities between rich and poor. All of these issues get factored out of Fight Club's analysis of consumerism and capitalist exploitation. Hence, it comes as no surprise that class does not operate as a critical category in this film. When working-class people do appear, they are represented primarily as brown-shirts, part of the nonthinking herd looking for an opportunity to release their tensions and repressed masculine rage through forms of terrorist violence and self- abuse. Or, they appear as people who willingly take up unskilled jobs that are dehumanizing and alienating. One particularly revealing scene in Fight Club brings this message home while simultaneously signaling a crucial element of the film's politics. At one point in the story, Tyler takes Jack into a convenience store. He pulls out a gun and forces the young Indian clerk to get on his knees. Putting the gun to the clerk's head, Tyler tells him he is going to die. As a kind of parting gesture, he asks the clerk, whose name is Raymond, what he really wants to be in life. A veterinarian, Raymond replies, but, he explains, he had to drop out of school due to lack of money. Tyler tells him that if he isn't on his way to becoming a veterinarian in six weeks he is going to come back and kill him. He then lets Raymond go and tells Jack that the next morning will be the most important day in Raymond's life because he will have to address what it means to do something about his future. Choice, for Tyler, appears to be an exclusively individual act, a simple matter of personal will that functions outside of existing relations of power, resources, and social formations. As Bhabha points out in a different context, this notion of agency "suggests that 'free choice' is inherent in the individual [and] ... is based on an unquestioned 'egalitarianism' and a utopian notion of individualism that bears no relation to the history of the marginalized, the minoritized, the oppressed". This privatized version of agency and politics is central to understanding Tyler's character as emblematic of the very market forces he denounces. For Tyler, success is simply a matter of getting off one's back and forging ahead; individual initiative and the sheer force of will magically cancel out institutional constraints, and critiques of the gravity of dominant relations of oppression are dismissed as either an act of bad faith or the unacceptable whine of victimization. Tyler hates consumerism, but he values a "Just Do It" ideology appropriated from the marketing strategists of the Nike corporation and the ideology of the Reagan era. It is not surprising that in linking freedom to the dynamics of individual choice, Fight Club offers up a notion of politics in which oppression breeds contempt rather than compassion and social change is fueled by totalitarian visions rather than democratic struggles. By defining agency through such a limited (and, curiously Republican) notion of choice, Fight Club reinscribes freedom as an individual desire rather than as the "testing of boundaries and limits as part of a communal, collective process". In the end, Fight Club obscures the sense in which choice is, as Bhabha puts it in another context, a "public demand and duty," and in doing so restricts the public spaces people are allowed to inhabit as well as the range of subject positions they are allowed to occupy. Hence, it is no wonder that Fight Club is marked by an absence of working men and women who embody a sense of agency and empowerment. Instead, the film focuses on largely middle-class, heterosexual, white men who are suffering from a blocked hyper-masculinity. Consumerism in Fight Club is criticized primarily as an ideological force and existential experience that weakens and domesticates men, robbing them of their primary role as producers whose bodies affirm and legitimize their sense of agency and control. The importance of agency is not lost on director David Fincher, but it is restricted to a narrowly defined notion of masculinity that is as self-absorbed as it is patriarchal (see Connell; Berger, Wallis, and Watson; P. Smith). Fincher is less interested in fighting oppressive forms of power than he is in exploring the ways in which men yield to it. Fight Club is not simply preoccupied with the depoliticized self; it also lacks a language for translating private troubles into public rage, and as such succumbs to the cult of immediate sensations in which freedom degenerates into collective impotence. Given Fincher's suggestion that men have no enduring qualities outside of their physicality, resistance and affirmation are primarily taken up as part of a politics of embodiment that has little concern for critical consciousness, social critique, or democratic social relations. In Fight Club, the body is no longer the privileged space of social citizenship or political agency but becomes, as Paul Gilroy suggests in a different context, "the location of violence, crime, and [aggression]". What changes in Fight Club is the context enabling men to assault each other, but the outside world remains the same, unaffected by the celebration of hyper-masculinity and violence that provides the only basis for solidarity. Fight Club's critique of consumerism fails to address a number of issues. *****First, the film depicts capitalism and the ideology of consumerism as sutured, impenetrable, and totalizing, offering few if any possibilities for resistance or struggle- except by the heroic few. There is no sense of how people critically mediate the power of capitalism and the logic of consumerism, tum it against itself, and in doing so offer up daily possibilities for resistance, survival, and democratic struggles.' No space exists within the film for appropriations that might offer critical engagements, political understanding, and enlightened forms of social change. Moreover, the film suggests that consumerism can only function within the libidinal economy of repression, particularly as the film moves the male body away from the visceral experiences of pain, coercion, and violence and identifies it with the so-called feminized notions of empathy, compassion, and trust. Hence, the film defines masculinity in opposition to both femininity and consumerism while simultaneously refusing to take up either in a dialectical and critical way. ****Second, Fight Club functions less as a critique of capitalism than as a defense of authoritarian masculinity wedded to the immediacy of pleasure sustained through violence and abuse. Once again, the film is complicitous with the very system of commodification it denounces since both rely on a notion of agency largely constructed within the immediacy of pleasure, the cult of hyper-competitiveness, and the market-driven desire of winning and exercising power over others. Third, Fight Club resurrects a notion of freedom tied to a Hobbesian world in which cynicism replaces hope, and the survival of the fittest becomes the clarion call for legitimizing dehumanizing forms of violence as a source of pleasure and sociality. Pleasure in this context has less to do with justice, equality, and freedom than with modes of hyper-competition mediated through the fantasy of violence. More specifically, this particular render- ing of pleasure is predicated on legitimizing the relationship between oppression and misogyny, and masculinity gains its force through a celebration of both brutality and the denigration of the feminine. Hence, Fight Club appears to have no understanding of its own articulation with the very forces of capitalism it appears to be attacking. This is most evident in the way it links violence, masculinity, and gender. In other words, Fight Club's vision of liberation and politics relies on gendered and sexist hierarchies that flow directly from the consumer culture that the film claims to be criticizing. ****************Violence and the Politics of Masculinity: Unlike a number of Hollywood films in which violence is largely formulaic and superficially visceral, designed primarily to shock, titillate, and celebrate the sensational, Fight Club uses violence as both a form of voyeuristic identification and a pedagogical tool. Although the film offers up a gruesome and relentless spectacle of bare-knuckled brutality, blood- curdling, and stylized gore, violence becomes more than ritualistic kitsch, it also provides audiences with an ideologically loaded context and mode of articulation for legitimizing a particular understanding of masculinity and its relationship to important issues regarding moral and civic agency, gender, and politics. Violence in Fight Club is treated as a sport, a crucial component that lets men connect with each other by overcoming fear, pain, and fatigue, while revelling in the illusions of a paramilitary culture. For example, in one vivid scene, Tyler initiates Jack into the higher reaches of homoerotically charged sadism by kissing Jack's hand and then pouring corrosive lye on it, watching as the skin bubbles and curls. Violence in this instance signals its crucial function in both affirming the natural "fierceness" of men and providing them with a concrete experi- ence that allows them to connect at some primal level.8 As grotesque as this act appears, Fincher does not engage it-or similar representations in the film-as an expression ofpathology.? On the contrary, such senseless brutality is made crucial to a form of male bonding, glorified for its cathartic and cleansing properties. to By maximizing the pleasures of bodies, pain, and violence, Fight Club comes dangerously close to giving violence a glamorous and fascist edge (see Theweleit). In many respects, the film mimics fascism's militarization and masculinization of the public sphere with, as Gilroy puts it in another context, its exultation ofviolence "as a space in which men can know themselves better and love one another legitimately in the absence of the feminine" (Against 146). As a packaged representation of masculine crisis, Fight Club reduces the body to a receptacle for pain parading as pleasure, and in doing so fails to show how the very society it attempts to critique uses an affirmative notion of the body and its pleasures to create consuming subjects. Terry Eagleton captures this sentiment in a discussion of Nazi death camps: But the violence portrayed in Fight Club is not only reductive in its affirmation of physical aggression as a crucial element of male bonding; it also fails to make problematic those forms of violence that individuals, dissidents, and various marginalized groups experience as sheer acts of oppression deployed by the state and by racist and homophobic individuals as well as by a multitude of other oppressive social forces. What are the limits of romanticizing violence in the face of those repeated instances of abuse and violence that people involuntarily experience every day because of their sexual orientation, the color of their skin, their gender, or their class status?" There is no sense in the film of the complex connection among the operations of power, agency, and violence, or how some forms of violence function to oppress, infantalize, and demean human life. 12Nor is there any incentive-given the way violence is sutured to primal masculinity-to consider how violence can be resisted, alleviated, and challenged through alternative institutional forms and social practices. This lack of discrimination among diverse forms of violence and the conditions for their emergence, use, and consequences-coupled with a moral indifference to how violence produces human suffering-makes Fight Club a morally bankrupt and politically reactionary film (see also Keane). Representations of violence, masculinity, and gender in the film seem to mirror the pathology of individual and institutional violence that informs the American landscape, extending from all manner of hate crimes to the far Right's celebration of paramilitary and protofascist subcultures. Fight Club does not rupture conventional ways of thinking about violence in a world in which casual violence and hip nihilism increasingly pose a threat to human life and democracy itself. Violence in this film functions largely through a politics of denial, insulation, and disinterest. As a consequence, the film is unable to consciously criticize the very violence that it gleefully represents and celebrates. Fight Club portrays a society in which public space collapses and is filled by middle-class white men-disoriented in the pandemonium of conflicting social forces who end up with a lot of opportunities for violence and with few opportunities (perhaps even none at all) for argument and social engagement. Macho ebullience in the film is directly linked to the foreclosure of dialogue and critical analysis and moves all too quickly into an absolutist rhetoric that easily lends itself to a geography of violence in which there are no ethical discriminations that matter, no collective forces to engage or stop the numbing brutality and rising tide of aggression. While Jack renounces Tyler's militia-like terrorism at the end of the film, it appears as a meaningless gesture of resistance, as all he can do is stand by and watch as various buildings explode all around him. The message here is entirely consistent with the cynical politics that inform the film: violence is the ultimate language, referent, and state of affairs through which to understand all human events, and there is no way of stopping it. This ideology becomes even more disheartening given the film's attempt to homogenize violence under the mutually determining forces of plea- sure and masculine identity formation. It strategically restricts our understanding of the complexity of violence, and, as Susan Sontag suggests in another context, "dissolves politics into pathology". The pathology at issue-and one that is central to Fight Club-is its intensely misogynist representation of women, and its intimation that violence is the only means through which men can be cleansed of the disastrous effect that women have on shaping their identities. From the first scene of the film to the last, women are cast as the binary opposite of masculinity. Women are both the Other and a form of pathology. Jack begins his narrative by claiming that Marla is the cause of all of his problems. Tyler consistently tells Jack that men have lost their manhood because they have been feminized; they are a generation raised by women. And the critical commentary on consumerism presented throughout the film is really not a serious critique of capitalism as much as it is a criticism of the feminization and domestication of men in a society driven by relations of buying and selling. Consumerism is criticized because it is womanish stuff. Moreover, the only primary female character, Marla, appears to exist both to make men unhappy and to service their sexual needs. Marla has no identity outside of the needs of the warrior mentality, the chest-beating impulses of men who revel in patriarchy and enact all of the violence associated with such traditional, hyper-masculine stereo- types." But representations of masculinity in Fight Club do more than reinscribe forms of male identity within a warrior mentality and in the space of patriarchical relations. They also work to legitimize unequal relations of power and oppression while condoning a view of masculinity predicated on the need to wage violence against all that is feminine both within and outside of their lives." Masculinity in this film is directly linked to male violence against women by virtue of the way in which the film ignores and thus sanctions hierarchical, gendered divisions and a masculinist psychic economy. By constructing masculinity on an imaginary terrain in which women are foregrounded as the Other, the flight from the feminine becomes synonymous with sanctioning violence against women as it works simultaneously to eliminate different and opposing definitions of masculinity. Male violence offers men a performative basis on which to construct masculine identity, and it provides the basis for abusing and battering an increasing number of women. According to the National Center for Victims of Crime Web site, an estimated six million women are assaulted by a male partner each year and of these almost two million are severely assaulted (see "Domestic Violence"). Affirming stereotypical notions of male violence while remaining silent about how such violence works to serve male power in subordinating and abusing women creates and legitimizes the pedagogical conditions for such violence to occur. Fight Club provides no understanding of how gendered hierarchies, mediated by a misogynist psychic economy, encourage male violence against women. In short, male violence in this film appears directly linked to fostering those ideological conditions that justify abuse towards women. It links masculinity exclusively to expressions of violence and defines male identity against everything that is feminine. *********Fight Club as Public Pedagogy: Terrible things, by continuing to be shown, begin to appear matter-of-fact, a natural rather than man-made catastrophe. Zygmunt Bauman has labeled this the "production of moral indifference. "There is a link between epistemology and morality: between how we get to know what we know (through various, including electronic media) and the moral life we aspire to lead. -Geoffrey Hartman While Fight Club generated a number of critical commentaries, few reviewers addressed the misogynist nature of the film or the warrior mythology of the 1980s that it so closely resembles ideologically and politically (see Gibson). For example, Janet Maslin not only defended the film as a serious attempt to examine the "lure of violence" in a "dangerously regimented, dehumanized culture," she also condemned as mind- less those critics who might view the film as a nihilistic "all-out assault on society." Oddly enough, Twentieth Century Fox, the studio that produced Fight Club, viewed such criticism as dangerous rather than simply mindless, and proceeded to withdraw all of its movie advertising in the trade paper The Hollywood Reporter because it had published two critical reviews of the film. While such politics are not new to Hollywood, the overt attempts by a major studio to censor the voices of dissent because some critical reviews speak to the willing use of political power by corporate institutions in the cultural sphere to close down democratic relationships, denigrate women, and celebrate mindless violence-should nevertheless elicit public outrage. Certainly, Twentieth Century Fox has little to fear from "progressive" critics who largely praised the film. For example, Amy Taubin extolled the film for "screwing around with your bio-rhythms" and for expressing some "right-an-the zeitgeist ideas about masculinity". Taubin, it seems, was also bowled over with BradPitt's new-found masculinity, claiming Pitt has never been "as exquisite as he is with a broken nose and blood streaming down his cut body". Faludi made the remarkable statement that Fight Club is a "quasi-feminist tale". It seems that the connection between Fight Club's underlying misogynist premises and its similarity to a number of recent Hollywood films that offer denigrating images of women has been lost on critics such as Maslin, Taubin, and Faludi. It gets worse. The online journal Slate argued that veteran rock video director Fincher had transformed cinema with his hip digital editing style and that the "most thrilling thing about Fight Club isn't what it says but how ... Fincher pulls you into its narrator's head and simulates his adrenaline rushes". Fight Club's overall success with a large number of critics was also buoyed by an ongoing series of interviews with its stars as well as a number of well-placed interviews with Fincher. Edward Norton, for example, argued that the film is about young men having a problem defining their manhood and that it has little to do with fighting: "The fight club is not about fighting; it is a manifestation of a desire to strip away everything and rediscover yourself'. Norton goes so far as to claim that the film is really a comedy similar to the classic coming of age film The Graduate. One of the more incredible, if not entirely inane, comments came from Helena Bonham Carter, who defended the film by claiming that Fincher is a feminist. In describing why she took on the role of Marla, she said, "The script was awfully dark, and in bad hands it could have been immature or possibly even irresponsible. But after meeting him, I could tell that it wasn't going to be a concern. He's not just an all-out testost package. He's got a healthy feminist streak". Fincher appeared at times to be caught on the defensive in having to provide some theoretical explanation and ethical justification for the film. Claiming that Fight Club is a film "that's downloaded in front of you. It doesn't wait for you," he seemed to suggest that many critics were tripping over themselves trying to understand the film. He has also argued that while the film is a coming of age narrative, he doesn't "purport for a second to know what a film should be, what entertainment should be, how much it should teach, how much it should titillate." (And, of course, the implication is that neither should his audience.) He said, "I'm just trying to make a good, funny movie". Fincher's comments are more than disingenuous; they represent, at the very least, an apologetic discourse for the increasing merger of over-the-top violence, hyper-masculinity, and sexist representations of women in Hollywood films. All of these comments exhibit a cavalier indifference to the ways in which films operate as public pedagogies within a broader set of articulations. That is, they ignore how such films function as public discourses that address or at least resonate with broader issues in the historical and socio-political context in which they are situated. There is no sense of how Fight Club or films in general-bridges the gap between public and private discourses, and plays an important role in placing particular ideologies and values into public conversation while offering a pedagogical space for addressing specific views of how everyday lives are intertwined with politics, social relations, and existing institutional formations. For instance, Fincher seems completely unaware of how his portrayal of violence and hyper-masculinity resonates with the reactionary mythology of warrior culture that reached its heyday during Ronald Reagan's presidency and found its cultural embodiment in figures such as John Wayne and Oliver North as well as in a host of Hollywood movies celebrating rogue warriors such as Lethal Weapon, Missing in Action, Robocop, and Rambo. Given the enormous violence, misogyny, aggression, and political indifference that permeates contemporary daily life, it is crucial to understand how representations of male violence, scorn for everything that is feminine, and a protofascist politics in a film such as Fight Club resonate with a broader assemblage of historical and contemporary forces to reproduce rather than challenge some of the more oppressive forces in American society. Clearly, the film's director, actors, and many critics appear completely indifferent to the kind of ideological work that this film performs in linking masculinity, violence, and politics at a historical moment when public politics is collapsing into privatized discourses and pleasures, and when the crisis of masculinity is widely perceived as the most important manifestation of changing economic conditions. While it would be easy to dismiss the comments made by Fincher, Norton, and Bonham Carter as nothing more than self-serving publicity-or simply as idiotic in light of the representational politics of the film-such comments exemplify a period in which, as Hannah Arendt has pointed out in another context, violence might best be understood less by connecting it to people who are "cold-blooded enough to 'think the unthinkable,' than to the fact that they do not think". Against the emergence of films such as Fight Club and the refusal on the part of critics and others to link the violence in the film to the violence directed against women, public life, and democracy itself, progressives and others must question not only the conditions for the production of such films, but also how they work to construct particular definitions of agency. Such questions are crucial if progressives are going to explore what tools are needed to resist romanticized notions of violence and masculinity. In opposition to films such as Fight Club, progressives must consider developing pedagogies of disruption that unsettle the commonsensical assumptions and ways of thinking that inform films and other cultural texts, particularly those that construct and legitimize certain subject positions, identities, values, and social relations that both celebrate a pathologizing of violence and render hyper-masculinity as a space in which to reinscribe the hierarchies of gender, race, sexuality, and politics. As James Snead argues, mass culture in America today consists of an entirely new set of artifacts mass visual productions. These new artifacts require new ways of seeing and new ways of thinking about what we are seeing....We have to be ready, as film-goers, not only to see films, but also to see through them; we have to be willing to figure out what the film is claiming to portray, and also to scrutinize what the film is actually showing. Finally, we need to ask from whose social vantage point any film becomes credible or comforting, and ask why. But this should not suggest that educators, progressives, and others simply must teach students the skills of critical literacy in order to demythologize representations of violence or to engage gendered representations, for instance, in radically new ways. This strategy is important but inadequate. We must go beyond questions of literacy and critique to issues of politics, power, and social transformation. At the very least, the production of films such as Fight Club suggests that progressives need a new civic language and vocabulary to address the relevance of culture, politics, and pedagogy in order to understand not just how to read texts critically, but also how to comprehend how knowledge circulates through various circuits of power in order to put into place images, experiences, representations, and discourses that objectify others and create the ideological conditions for individuals to become indifferent to how violence in its diverse expressions promotes human suffering. This project involves developing forms of public pedagogy that critically engage how language, images, sounds, codes, and representations work to structure basic assumptions about freedom, citizenship, public memory, and history. Progressives must also become attentive to how the material relations of power that produce and circulate forms of common sense can be challenged and transformed on both a national and transnational level. In this instance, public pedagogy links knowledge to power in an effort to understand how to effect social change. At stake here is both recognizing and developing a new vision of what we want the future to be, and struggling to acknowledge that the fundamental nature of cultural politics and knowledge production has not only changed dramatically in the last fifty years but that the culture industries and visual culture have become the primary pedagogical and political forces (and spaces) in shaping consciousness and legitimating dominating social practices. This is not meant to suggest that culture exists in opposition to what some have called a material politics as much as it points to the necessity of recognizing the pedagogical nature of any attempt to both unlearn and to relearn what it might mean to challenge those commonsense assumptions and institutional forms that shape oppressive relations, regardless of how and where they manifest themselves. Films such as Fight Club become important as public pedagogies because they playa powerful role in mobilizing meaning, pleasures, and identifications. They produce and reflect important considerations of how human beings should live, engage with others, define themselves, and address how a society should take up questions fundamental to its survival. At the same time, if we are to read films such as Fight Club as social and political allegories articulating deeply rooted fears, desires, and visions, then these films must be understood within a broader network of cultural spheres and institutional formations rather than as isolated texts. The pedagogical and political character of such films resides in the ways in which they align with broader social, sexual, economic, class, and institutional configurations. Needless to say, Fight Club (as well as any other cultural text) can be read differently by different audiences, and this fact suggests the necessity of interpreting .suchtexts in the specificity of the contexts in which they are received. But, at the same time, educators and social critics can shed critical light on how such texts work pedagogically to legitimize some meanings, invite particular desires, and exclude others. Acknowledging the educational role of such films requires that educators find ways to make the political more pedagogical. One approach would be to develop a pedagogy of disruption that would attempt to make students more attentive to visual and popular culture as important sites of political and pedagogical struggle. Such a pedagogy would raise questions regarding how certain meanings under particular historical conditions become more legitimate than others as representations of the real, or how certain meanings take on the force of commonsense assumptions and go relatively unchallenged in shaping a broader set of discourses and social configurations. Such a pedagogy would raise questions about how Fight Club, for instance, resonates with the social locations and conditions of fear, uncertainty, sexism, and political despair in which many people now live their lives. More specifically, a pedagogy of disruption would engage a film's attempts to shift the discourse of politics away from issues of justice and equality to a focus on violence and individual freedom as part of a broader neoliberal backlash against equity, social citizenship, and human rights. Such an approach would not only critically engage the dominant ideologies of masculinity, violence, and sexism that give Fight Club so much power in the public imagination, but also work to expose the ideological contradictions and political absences that characterize the film by challenging it as symptomatic of the growing reaction against feminism, the right-wing assault on the welfare state, and the increasing use of violence to keep in check marginalized groups such as young black males, who are now viewed as a threat to order and stability. Any attempt to critically address Fight Club and its implications for the changing nature of representational politics must also acknowledge that power is never totalizing and that even within an increasingly corporatized social landscape there are always cracks, openings, and spaces for resistance. *****Fight Club reminds us of the need to reclaim the discourses of ethics, politics, and critical agency as important categories in the struggle against the rising tide of violence, human suffering, and the specter of fasci