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Sports of Spectatorship:Boxing Women of Color in Girlfight and Beyond Camilla Fojas (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Santiago Douglas and Michelle Rodriguez in Karyn Kusama's Girlfight (Sony/Screen Gems, 2000). Boxing offers a unique visual experience that, for its voyeurism, is readily cinematic. The fight may elicit various conflicting emotions and responses in the spectator—fear, anger, disgust, pleasure—all of which heighten the emotional mood of the scene and intensify the fascination of looking at bodies on display and in performance. Recently, the dynamics of the boxing scene have shifted with women's entry into the mediated world of the ring. The boxing film genre—Requiem for a Heavyweight (Ralph Nelson, 1962), Fat City ( John Huston, 1972), Rocky ( John G. Avildesen, 1976) and the Rocky franchise, Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980), and Cinderella Man (Ron Howard, 2005)—is now joined by films that chronicle the story of women in boxing—Blonde Fist (Frank Clarkey, 1991), Shadow Boxers (Katya Bankowski, 1999), Girlfight (Karyn Kusama, 2000), Knockout (Lorenzo Doumani, 2000), Honeybee (Melvin James, 2001), and Million Dollar Baby [End Page 103] (Clint Eastwood, 2003). The cinematic boxing scene has changed irrevocably, upsetting a whole history of looking, desire, and identification. Even more troubling than the incursion of female bodies into this masculine domain is the entry of women of color into the mediascapes surrounding boxing. Within Hollywood film and media culture, we have little practice in watching women of color exerting physical and symbolic power, and little idea of how to look at these same women sporting powerful bodies and an assertive gaze, most especially if they are placed right in the middle of our zones of identification. Girlfight offers a cinematic reflection on the dynamics of identification, spectatorship, and the processes of subject formation for women of color. The film emerges from and tacitly cites two thematically linked but mutually exclusive contexts: boxing film history and the recent visibility of women in the ring. Yet it combines these two contexts to forge a new way of looking at brown women's bodies and to present an innovative combination of sexuality and gender (Figure 1). Girlfight also presents the unpunished gaze of the woman of color, who, in the history of cinema, has been less likely to look with aggression, desire, and power. Instead, women of color have long been the colonized bodies of the imperial gaze of Hollywood. The characterization of Diana (Michelle Rodriguez) in Girlfight set a precedent for Hollywood. In fact, a reprisal of Rodriguez's powerful gaze is refracted through mixed-race boxer Lucia Rijker as Billie "The Blue Bear" in Million Dollar Baby. It should be noted, though, that Hollywood still has a long way to go: Rijker as Billie is in a secondary role and her gaze registers as sinister and dangerous rather than confident and liberatory. Nonetheless, the media presence of women of color in the boxing world in the late 1990s, from Lucia Rijker to Laila Ali, Freeda Foreman, and Jacqui Frazier, established an enabling cultural context for the success of films like Girlfight and Million Dollar Baby. The mediascapes of the boxing world and cinematic stories about pugilists conspire to produce a new visual dynamic, one that finds its language in cinema but carries its legacy beyond it. Girlfight condenses these two worlds by grafting the symbolic contest of the boxing dyad onto the cinematic dynamic attendant to normative gendered roles. Girlfight provides an avenue for the reconstruction of the female gaze through the unique spectator dynamics of boxing. The unique one-on-one quality of boxing, of two people fighting with their gazes fixed upon each other as an audience watches, provides the perfect scenario for exploring issues of spectatorship. This scenario is couched in a story about Diana, a senior in high school, who seeks an outlet for her energies, anger, and abilities by training to be a boxer. Unlike most Hollywood sports narratives centered on the failure or success of male athletes, Diana's boxing success registers as a social and gendered problem: where for heterosexual women, winning in male-defined domains means risking the loss of male sexual and romantic attention...
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