Boxing Ring Redefined Catholic Men

NEWSLETTER The Center for the Humanities A member of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes AUTZEN HOUSE OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY SPRING 2014 Wild West hero tied to Nine 2014-15 Fellowships German censorship Awarded t is a bit of a stretcher—but only he Center Advisory Board a bit—to blame the Wild West’s Thas named nine new Research IBuffalo Bill for German cultural Fellows for 2014-15, all from censorship early in the last century. OSU’s College of Liberal Arts. In 1905, a fictional version of the Fellows are awarded one term of release from teaching, though they Western hero became a quick hit in Germany through an illustrated may keep their offices in Autzen pamphlet series called Buffalo Bill. House for the full academic year. It was so popular that other such The Center also provides computers serialized tales soon appeared, and general office support services. triggering official condemnation of the Applications for 2015-16 Fellowships will be invited in the new “trash” publications. It was the beginning of decades of fall of 2014. Also, please check the censorship that lasted through three Center website for information. political regimes—Imperial Germany, http://oregonstate.edu/dept/humanities/ the Weimar Republic, and the Third Kara Ritzheimer Reich—a tale that will be told in Fellows and their projects: Kara Ritzheimer’s book Buffalo Bill: Ritzheimer’s analysis challenges a Commercial Culture, Censorship, and propensity among historians to view Peter Betjemann National Identity in Early 20th-Century pre-1933 censorship laws through School of Writing, Literature, and Film Germany. the lens of Nazi suppression, in Revolutionary Readers: Early The censorship, Ritzheimer argues, many cases diagnosing Germany as American Literary Painters and the began with local protests against the plagued by a predisposition toward Transnational Imagination cheap publications as well as the authoritarianism or a limp embrace blooming film industry. of democracy. Nabil Boudraa “Regional activists campaigned Germans first encounteredBuffalo School of Language, Culture, and Society against the ‘trash’ and lobbied first Bill stories in stationery stores and Re-Visioning History in North state and then federal authorities watched films in neighborhood African Francophone Literature to create censorship laws targeting cinemas that were often renovated and Film these media,” said Ritzheimer, a shop fronts. Early consumers Center Research Fellow and faculty found the new entertainments to Nicole von Germeten member in OSU’s School of History, be “transformative, particularly School of History, Philosophy, and Religon Philosophy, and Religion. “By the when retailers displayed colorful ‘La que peca por la paga’: Female 1920s, they had achieved their goal and graphically illustrated pamphlet Sexual Agency and Selling Sex in when the Reichstag adopted both a stories in their front window cases the Mexican Viceregal Court film law and a publications law.” (Continued on page 5 (Continued on page 5 Boxing ring redefined Catholic Men he sport of boxing made managed to rise to his feet.” “American men” out of While the ethnic origins of TCatholic males and opened champion boxers tended to their way to social whiteness and correlate closely with patterns of middle-class respectability, all ethnic succession in the church, while affirming their connection to connections between the sport the church. and Catholic identity were rarely In short, pugilism was a powerful this simple, said Koehlinger. force within the American Catholic “Whereas boxing sharpened ethnic community from 1880 through components of identity inside much of the twentieth century. Catholic enclaves, in the larger In her book Rosaries and Rope culture the sport served as the Burns: Boxing and Manhood vehicle for Catholic aspirations for in American Catholicism, Amy economic and social assimilation.” Koehlinger will argue that boxing By mid-century, the importance of reinforced Catholic ideas about Amy Koehlinger boxing to Catholics plummeted, in the redemptive value of physical part because the sport was tarnished suffering while offering an effective in church boxing clubs, fundraisers, by organized crime but also in means of assimilation to male sermons, education programs, and response to changing aspirations Catholic immigrants. A Center Catholic periodicals. toward American assimilation. Research Fellow and faculty member Catholics took pride in devout “Catholic writing and sermons at in the OSU School of History, titleholders like Rocky Marciano and the turn of the century touted the Philosophy, and Religion, Koehlinger Floyd Patterson, while priests served sport’s capacity to instill public is the author of The New Nuns: Racial as trainers at all levels, some working virtues like masculine vigor and Justice and Religious Reform in the with such legendary champions as ethical discipline in practitioners. 1960s (Harvard UP, 2007). Sonny Liston and Joe Louis. As boxing’s status declined, and as Boxing was long among the Catholics rapidly joined the ranks most popular sports in the United uite apart from its social of the middle class in the 1960s, States, right up there with baseball Qpotency, the sport’s appeal an increasingly strong voice in drawing crowds and media had deep roots within Catholic emerged in the American Church attention. “Though the American devotional culture. challenging the compatibility of obsession with boxing was present “For Catholics formed within the sport with Catholic principles in most classes and immigrant a religious economy that equated of peace and the Christian groups,” said Koehlinger, “it physical suffering with spiritual prohibition against murder.” was especially popular among redemption, a boxing match enacted immigrant Catholics.” the central spiritual mysteries of In contrast with longstanding the faith. The ‘imitatio Christi’ anti-Catholic stigmas that personified in a boxer’s willingness The sport instilled associated Catholic manhood to endure suffering for a greater with feminization, passivity, and cause. The Stations of the Cross in public virtues like deviance, the sport of boxing his perseverance through round after masculine vigor and offered Catholic men opportunities round of punishment. The stigmata to participate in a form of manhood in the gashes and abrasions that ethical discipline that was not only culturally collected on his body. Christological sanctioned but omnipresent in the death and resurrection recreated each church. Parishioners encountered it time a boxer was knocked down and 2 When literary animals ‘refuse’ to follow the plot idalgo County, New nonhuman point of view? How can Mexico, 1941. Young Billy writers lend animals a full-blown HParham traps a pregnant subjective agency when writing wolf that has crossed the border into from a human perspective?” this country after the last resident For answers, Malewitz looks gray wolf has been killed. Rather outside Animal Studies to “thing than shooting the wolf, which has theory,” a complex way of trying attacked his family’s cattle, Billy to understand human-object heads for the border to return the interactions. Stated simply, objects— animal to the wild. Things do not go including animals—become most well on this mission. clearly evident when they break free The setup is from Cormac from their expected position or role, McCarthy’s The Crossing, a novel at or “stop working for us.” the center of Raymond Malewitz’s A broader form of this view, investigation of the nature of animal Malewitz suggests, employs the literary agency. notion of “misuse” or repurposing. In Ray Malewitz “I address a central question in other words, “an animal might gain the new interdisciplinary field of a temporary agency and legibility campaign to eradicate the gray wolf. animal studies,” said Malewitz, a at the moment when it has ceased After trapping the pregnant wolf, Center Research Fellow and faculty to function as a useful entity. by Billy Parham “misuses” it through member in the OSU School of refusing to participate in productive his ill-fated attempt to return it to the Writing, Literature, and Film. “How human work or, in the case of wild, thereby causing the shift in the might humanists view, understand, literature, by refusing to advance wolf’s expected role. and engage with the animal world in some anthropocentric plot.” “For the father, the wolf ways that break from conventional Animal subjects in literature represents an economic problem. anthropocentric perspectives?” often begin by exhibiting an For Billy, the wolf symbolizes In a movement spurred by such anthropomorphized character that wildness. As for the wolf, it becomes prominent thinkers as Donna then changes during the narrative increasingly domesticated despite Haraway and Jacques Derrida, some to take on some other—but still Billy’s determination to keep it contemporary cultural theorists have anthropocentric—value. The wild.” begun to step away from traditional crucial moment, said Malewitz, The “energy” in this quandary, humanities perspectives that see is the point of change in the story Malewitz argues, comes from the absolute division between human when the animal is in as-yet- narrative’s failure to resolve the and non-human subjects. For these undefined transition between the two conflicting values ascribed to the scholars, said Malewitz, the division anthropomorphic states. wolf. The disjunction between “obscures both the biotic continuities how Billy perceives the world between animals

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