Full Description
Boxing, Narrative and Culture: Critical Perspectives is the first interdisciplinary response to the dominant boxing narratives that are produced, performed, and circulated in commercial boxing culture.
This collection includes global perspectives on boxing. It highlights the diverse range of bodies and communities that engage with boxing practices but are oftentimes overlooked and overwritten by popular narrative tropes and misconceptions of the sport. These interdisciplinary and global perspectives engage with boxing's shared narrative resources, offering new readings and insights on how and what boxing performs and for whom. The contributors to this collection are academics, artists, amateur boxers, and/or coaches who provide a culture critique of boxing. The work shows how boxing practices are performed and channelled by individuals and communities who access and utilise boxing culture as a means of physical enquiry, political statement, and community building. These contributions challenge the notion that boxing is a sport reserved for masculine bodies adorned as heroes, warriors, or victims of the sport.
Exploring key themes in socio-cultural studies including gender, race, community, media, and performance, this book is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in physical culture, sport studies, cultural studies, gender studies, cultural geography, critical race theory, labour studies, performance studies, or media studies.
Contents
Introduction
PART 1
Serious Athletes and the Politics of Community
1 Increasing Visibility and the (Re)presentation of Female Boxers in Print Media
PAIGE SCHNEIDER
2 Influencer Boxing: Authenticity and the Quest for Redemption
P. SOLOMON LENNOX
3 Ducking and Diving: Why Boxing Clubs Hit the Targets Other Sports Cannot Reach in Deprived Communities
DAVID BARRETT, LEE EDMONDSON, ROBBIE MILLAR, AND P. SOLOMON LENNOX
4 Narratives of Struggle: Boxing, Gender, and Community
SUPRIYA CHAUDHURI
5 Practicing Otherwise: Feminist Boxing Challenges Mainstream Narratives of Combat Sports
ELISA VIRGILI
6 Reflections on the Empowerment of Women in Boxing from Athletes and Coaches in Norway Female Box
ANNE TJØNNDAL
PART 2
(De)constructing Self, to Be Somebody
7 Trans Boxing: A Boxing Club, an Art Project
NOLAN HANSON AND ZAC EASTERLING
8 Katie Taylor: Complicating a Boxing Identity
EMMA CALOW
9 Letting Down the Team? Individualism, Selfishness, and Kinship in Women's Boxing
SARAH CREWS
10 Alfonso 'Mosquito' Zvenyika and the Dominant Narratives on Boxing in Post-Colonial Zimbabwe
MANASE KUDZAI CHIWESHE AND GERALD DANDAH
11 Political Symbolism of Mary Kom from the Manipuri
Autobiography to the Indian Blockbuster
MYRIAM MELLOULI
12 Turn the Volume Up! Boxing Hearts and Beats
KRISTÍNA ORSZÁGHOVÁ
13 Gender Transgression in the (Trans)National Domain: Laura Serrano and Women's Boxing in Mexico
MARJOLEIN VAN BAVEL
Afterword: Boxing and Cultural Value
