Lacing up the gloves: Women, boxing and modernity

Cultural and Social History

Volumn 9, Issue 3, 2012, Pages 369-389

  Gammel, Irene ^a  

^a RYERSON UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

Boxing; Gender; Modernity; Self representation; Women

Indexed keywords

EID: 84865076751     PISSN: 14780038     EISSN: 14780046     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2752/147800412X13347542916620     Document Type: Article

References (85)

1. Quoted in Erik N. Jensen, Body byWeimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity (New York, 2010), p. 51.
2. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN, 1994), p. 165.
3. William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams ([1948] New York, 1967), p. 169.
4. For more details, see Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 262-85.
5. Vanessa Toulmin, A Fair Fight: An Illustrated Review of Boxing on British Fairgrounds (Southcombe Farm, 1999), pp. 33, 38.
6. Jennifer Hargreaves, 'Women's Boxing and Related Activities: Introducing Images and Meanings', Body and Society, 3(4) (1997), p. 37.
7. See also René Denfeld, Kill the Body, the Head Will Fall: A Closer Look at Women, Violence, and Aggression (London, 1997).
8. Jensen, Body by Weimar, pp. 58-9, 65.
9. Joyce Carol Oates, 'On Boxing' (first published in 1985), in David Chandler, John Gill, Tanis Guha and Gilane Tawadros (eds), Boxer: An Anthology of Writings on Boxing and Visual Culture (Cambridge, 1996), p. 33.
10. David Scott, The Art and Aesthetics of Boxing (Lincoln, 2008), p. 41.
11. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 65-6. For a different approach, and a deconstruction of Poggioli's agonistic principles.
12. See Stephen Voyce, '"Make the World Your Salon": Poetry and Community at the Arensberg Apartment', Modernism/Modernity, 15(4) (2008), pp. 633-4.
13. David Bathrick, 'Max Schmeling on the Canvas: Boxing as an Icon of Weimar Culture', New German Critique, 51 (1990), p. 122.
14. See also Bertolt Brecht, 'Die Todfeinde des Sportes' and 'Sport und geistiges Schaffen', Gesammelte Werke, vol. 20 (Frankfurt, 1967), pp. 28-9, 29-31.
15. Jack Dempsey, 'Mein Kampf mit Tommy Gibbons', Der Querschnitt, 4(4) (1924), p. 224, author's translation.
16. Georges Carpentier, 'Die Psychologie des Boxens: Geistige Konzentration', Der Querschnitt, 6(5) (1926), p. 383, author's translation.
17. 'Many a "Powder Puff "', advertisement, Everlast Boxing Record, 1926
18. reproduced in Kasia Boddy, Boxing: A Cultural History (London, 2008), p. 223.
19. For an exploration of the early twentieth-century avant-garde's fascination with boxing, including a discussion of Bertolt Brecht and Arthur Cravan, see Lev Kreft, 'Hook to the Chin', Physical Culture and Sport Studies and Research, 46 (2009), pp. 70-8.
20. Boddy, Boxing, p. 218.
21. Vicki Baum, It Was All Quite Different (New York, 1964), pp. 281-2.
22. For more on Vicki Baum, see Nicole Nottelmann, Die Karrieren der Vicki Baum (Cologne, 2007).
23. Baum, ItWas All Quite Different, p. 73.
24. Baum, ItWas All Quite Different, p. 73.
25. Baum, ItWas All Quite Different, p. 73.
26. Baum, ItWas All Quite Different, p. 73.
27. Baum, ItWas All Quite Different, p. 73.
28. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, pp. ix, xi.
29. Scott, Art and Aesthetics of Boxing, p. 123.
30. Photograph insert in Baum, ItWas All Quite Different, following p. 180.
31. Suzanne Zelazo, 'Sport as Living Language: bp Nichol and the Bodily Poetics of the Elite Triathlete', Canadian Literature, 202 (2009), p. 33.
32. Scott, Art and Aesthetics of Boxing, pp. 42-3.
33. F.O., 'Ist der Boxsport roh?' (Is boxing rough?), Der Querschnitt, 1(6) (1921), p. 222, author's translation.
34. 'Von den Anfängen des weiblichen Sports', photograph by Atlantic. Der Querschnitt, 13 (1933), p. 341.
35. Jensen, Body byWeimar, p. 79.
36. Baum, ItWas All Quite Different, p. 282.
37. Katharina von Ankum, Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Germany (Berkeley, CA, 1997), pp. 2-3.
38. Djuna Barnes, 'My Sisters and I at a New York Prizefight', New York World Magazine, 23 August 1914, reprinted in Alyce Barry (ed.), New York (Los Angeles, CA, 1989), pp. 169, 170. Records indicate that the fight between Bloom and Gradwell took place on 24 July 1914, at Brown's Gym, in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York: Phil Bloom, http://boxrec.com/list_bouts.php?human_id=11847&cat=boxer&pageID=2, accessed 28 February 2012.
39. Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 127-8. Armstrong offers a rare consideration of modernist women's interest in boxing in a subsection entitled 'ModernistWomen and the Boxer: Loy and Barnes', yet he does not consider Loy's 'Colossus', which is my focus below.
40. Boddy, Boxing, p. 220.
41. Barnes, 'My Sisters and I', pp. 173, 172.
42. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN, 1987), p. 151.
43. Barnes, 'My Sisters and I', p. 172.
44. Barnes, 'Jess Willard Says Girls Will Be Boxing for a Living Soon', Vanity Fair, 25 April 1915: Djuna Barnes Papers, University of Maryland Library, Reel 27, Frame 110-11. On 5 April 1915, less than three weeks before Barnes' published interview, Jess Willard had won a historic fight in Cuba against African-American world heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson, which earned Willard the nickname 'Great White Hope', reflecting the racism of the era. After Jess Willard was defeated in 1919 by the new heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, Barnes interviewed Dempsey in 1921, as well as drawing his caricatured portrait, in which his hair is bristling and his chin is lowered in defensive posture.
45. Amelia Jones, Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (Cambridge, 2004), p. 40.
46. Scott, Art and Aesthetics of Boxing, p. 136.
47. Ernest Hemingway to Isabel Simmons, 24 June 1923, Carlos Baker (ed.), Hemingway: Selected Letters (New York, 1981), p. 158.
48. Jane Heap to Florence Reynolds, 22 January 1924, in Holly A. Baggett (ed.), Dear Tiny Heart: The Letters of Jane Heap and Florence Reynolds (New York, 2000), p. 92.
49. For details on the 'short-haired fraternity' of boxers and the boxer's 'legible body', see Scott, Art and Aesthetics of Boxing, p. 21.
50. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1983), p. 13.
51. Mina Loy, 'Colossus', excerpted in Roger L. Conover, 'Mina Loy's "Colossus": Arthur Cravan Undressed', in Rudolf E. Kuenzli (ed.), New York Dada (New York, 1986), p. 113.
52. Loy, 'Colossus', p. 104.
53. For the dates, see the detailed chronology provided in Jay Bochner, An American Lens: Scenes from Alfred Stieglitz's New York Secession (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 182-3.
54. Loy, 'Colossus', p. 104.
55. Loy, 'Colossus', p. 104.
56. Loy, 'Colossus', p. 104.
57. Roger L. Conover, 'Foreword', in Scott, Art and Aesthetics of Boxing, p. xx
58. Loy, 'Colossus', p. 106.
59. Loy, 'Colossus', p. 107.
60. Loy, 'Colossus', p. 107.
61. Conover, 'Foreword', p. xix.
62. Loy, 'Colossus', pp. 107, 108.
63. Loy, 'Colossus', pp. 107, 108.
64. Loy, 'Colossus', pp. 107, 108.
65. Oates, 'On Boxing', p. 27.
66. Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, 'Arthur Cravan and American Dada', in Roger Conover, Terry Hale and Paul Lenti (eds), 4 Dada Suicides: Selected Texts of Arthur Cravan, Jacques Rigaut, Julien Torma and Jacques Vaché (London, 1995), p. 75
67. she writes that she met Cravan at her New York apartment but calls his boxing 'but amateur's play', while noting dismissively about his boxing match with Jack Johnson: 'He was knocked out all the more swiftly as, in anticipation of the inevitable result, he had arrived in the ring reeling drunk.' Still, Conover has documented that Cravan actually held out until round six. For Buffet-Picabia, boxing suggests a world of order, technique and social responsibility (providing an income), an order which Cravan consistently disrupts with his Dada antics.
68. Loy, 'Colossus', p. 113.
69. Loy, 'Colossus', p. 113.
70. Loy, 'Colossus', p. 113.
71. Dan Streible, Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema (Berkeley, CA, 2008), p. 7.
72. See also Toulmin, A Fair Fight, pp. 31-3, for a discussion of other early boxing movies involving Belle Gordon and others.
73. Klara Heydt, 'Reine Körperformen', Der Querschnitt, 6(5) (1926), p. 377, author's translation.
74. Jensen, Body byWeimar, p. 95.
75. Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (New York, 1961), p. 6.
76. Scott, Art and Aesthetics of Boxing, p. 124.
77. Quoted in Christina Ball, 'The Silencing of Clara Bow', March/April 2001, http://www.gadflyonline.com/archive/MarchApril01/archive-clarabow.html, accessed 15 May 2010.
78. Clara Bow, 'My Life Story', as told to Adela Rogers St. Johns, Part III, Photoplay (April 1928): http://theclarabowpage.tripod.com/clarabowlifestory/clarabowlifestory3.html, accessed 15 May 2010.
79. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990), p. 137, italics in original.
80. Scott, Art and Aesthetics of Boxing, pp. 102, 103.
81. Oates, 'On Boxing', p. 27.
82. Robert Fitzsimmons, Physical Culture and Self-Defense (London, 1901), pp. 47, 49.
83. Jensen, Body byWeimar, pp. 94-5.
84. Scott, Art and Aesthetics of Boxing, p. 136.
85. Scott, Art and Aesthetics of Boxing, p. 136.