Full Description
Fighting Sports, Gender and the Commodification of Violence: Heavy Bag Heroines offers a glimpse into the cultural terrain of women's boxing as it manifests in everyday gyms for novice boxers. Taking an ethnographic approach, Victoria E. Collins examines broad understandings of gender, violence, self-defense, commodification, and health and fitness from the point of view of women who engage the sport. Collins unpacks dominant assumptions about gender and the sport through her participants' understandings of gender norms, social assumptions about physicality, sexuality, as well as challenges to masculine and feminine performativity. Central to this study is the appropriation and marketing of the boxers' work out in cardio-boxing gym spaces (i.e., fitness boxing), where the sport has increasingly been packaged, commodified, and sold to predominantly middle class, white female consumers as a means to not only improve their health and fitness, but also to defend themselves against a would-be attacker. The body project for women in the sport of boxing, therefore, should not only be framed as a form of resistance, but one of physical feminism.
Contents
Chapter One: Finding Boxing in a Strip-Mall
Chapter Two: From Amazonians to Cardio Classes: Women, Consumerism, and Combat
Sports
Chapter Three: Commodifying and the Woman Boxer: Popular Culture, Media, and the
Sexualized Fighter
Chapter Four: Fighting Tough...but Not Too Tough
Chapter Five: There are Only Three Rules of Fight Club, "No Spectators, No Social Media
and No Boob Shots!"
Chapter Six: Sparring Like Men? Gender Maneuvering and the Emotional Work of Getting in
the Ring
Chapter Seven: Violence, Safety, and Self-defense: Unpacking the Narrative that Boxing is
Self-Defense
Chapter Eight: The Female Fight: Sport and the spectacle
