SPS – serie

Grasping the rhythm and flow of boxing's defiance and contradictions Professional boxers practice their trade within an ostensibly apolitical arena. In reality, however, the fighters work inside a capitalistic and neoliberal sports culture that they both challenge and uphold. This collection delves into professional boxing's capacity for brilliance, contradiction, resistance, and complicity. Scholars, activists, and artists explore the boxing ring as a site for understanding original and diverse ideas about the performance of race, citizenship, gender, power, and dissent. Essays and interviews draw attention to the cultural politics and performances of marginalized boxers while revealing the structures of power and practices of agency at work around Black, Brown, and queer bodies. As the contributors establish boxing's central place in communities of color, they open exciting new avenues for studying race, immigration, gender, and capital. Multifaceted and innovative, Rings of Dissent uncovers fascinating corners of the boxing world as it illuminates what the sport tells us about America. Contributors: José M. Alamillo, Roberto José Andrade Franco, Gaye Theresa Johnson, Javon Johnson, Priscilla Leiva, David J. Leonard, Kyle T. Mays, Rudy Mondragón, Louis Moore, Mark Anthony Neal, Lucia Trimbur, and Dave Zirin.

The game's surprising influence on Christianity in the United States From the game's early days, college football and a strain of muscular Christianity built a mutually reinforcing culture that taught lessons in America's dominant religious, gendered, and racial belief systems. Christians of many denominations embraced the game to shape and reshape their faith to meet the changing social demands of the twentieth century. Hunter M. Hampton analyzes the impact of football on Christian college campuses. Baptists and Latter-day Saints, Evangelicals and Roman Catholics sought spiritual and personal meaning on the gridiron. Fans watched the action to find God's lessons for them. Wins and losses expressed the divine will while the game's popularity offered a potent way to evangelize non-believers. Hampton also investigates the sport's place in providing a stage for fostering Christian manhood, male community, gender dominance, and on-the-field displays of heroic savagery that served a higher purpose. Provocative and engaging, The Gridiron Gospel looks at the All-American fusion of physical and spiritual muscle.