Boxing, Masculinity and Identity

The 'I' of the Tiger

Kath Woodward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781136804908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Boxing is infused with ideas about masculinity, power, race and social class, and as such is an ideal lens through which social scientists can examine key modern themes. In addition, its inherent contradictions of extreme violence and beauty and of discipline and excess have long been a source of inspiration for writers and film makers.

Essential reading for anyone interested in the sociology of sport and cultural representations of gender, Boxing, Masculinity and Identity brings together ethnographic research with material from film, literature and journalism. Through this combination of theoretical insight and cultural awareness, Woodward explores the social constructs around boxing and our experience and understanding of central issues including:

• masculinity
• mind, body and the construction of identity
• spectacle and performance: tensions between the public and private person
• boxing on film: the role of cultural representations in building identities
• methodologies: issues of authenticity and 'truth' in social science.

Chapter 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780203020180-1

There is a moment in Ron Howard’s 2005 film of the life of the boxer James Braddock, Cinderella Man, which stars Russell Crowe as Braddock when

Crowe walks into the ring for the final climactic fight, and the entire arena, packed with extras – thousands of them – falls silent. This total silence, in such a place and at such a time, is eerie, almost dream-like. And you realise that the dreams of every single person at that moment are riding on this man. That’s the power of film and the performance and, ultimately the power of the game.

(Horowitz, 2005: 3)

This is a moment of identification with a boxing hero. Boxing still has the power to draw in its audiences as well its participants, because the sport and its stories feed dreams and aspirations of success. This moment is about more than the ‘thrill of the fight’ as the Rocky II theme song, ‘The Eye of the Tiger’, goes. It is also about the ‘will to survive’. The audience is bound up with the fortunes of Braddock: the white, working-class hero who is taking his chance in the ring, pursuing a path of honour in order to provide for his family. This statement points not only to the power of film, but also to the power of boxing and in particular boxing heroes, especially male heroes. Fantasy and reality are entwined in the construction of such heroic figures. The audience is implicated in the film’s narrative structure framed around the justice of Braddock’s plight and moral course which his actions represent. Whatever the economic and social constraints, this boxing hero seeks to shape his own identity. Those watching buy into this assumed agency and desperately want him to fulfil his dreams. This is a moment in which multiple aspects of identification are condensed. The draw of the fight and the projection of the audience’s desires onto the central character combine the psychic investments that people make with the social and cultural meanings about identity that are produced by texts such as films. Of course, this moment is cinematic and not an actual fight. Real fights are not the sanitized drama of Hollywood. Boxing aficionados are keen to argue that boxing is ‘real’, it is not a drama (Oates, 1987), but it is a major argument of this book that fantasy and reality are inextricably combined. Public stories, symbolic representations, unconscious desires and anxieties and embodied experience and iterative practices are all constitutive of identity. The mechanisms in play at such moments as represented in Cinderella Man and more widely, for example in the more routine, everyday practices through which identities are reconstituted and the investments in such heroic (and not-so-heroic) figures of masculinity are what this book is about. Such boxing moments present a means of exploring the interrelationship between psychic and social dimensions of identity and, more specifically, of understanding the making and re-making of masculinities.

These processes of identification, whether of boxers themselves, the audience of such films and spectators of the sport itself and those who buy into its culture, are not straightforward. The film narrative of Cinderella Man and the real-life biography of its hero may be a simple story of good and evil and present an honourable route out of poverty and disadvantage, but the attraction of boxing and the pull of a heroism that depends on this version of masculinity are more puzzling. Boxing masculinities carry many of the features of traditional, hegemonic masculinity. It is a sport characterized by corporeal contact, courage, danger and in some cases violence, which might seem out of place in the contemporary world of change and fragmentation and the emergence of more ambiguous, less traditional gender identities. One might also expect to find resistance to the challenge of new masculinities and strong ties to more traditional, gendered identities in boxing. This raises questions about how different identities can cohabit in a terrain of transformation. What is the relationship between contradictory versions of masculinity and how do they coexist? Sport is often characterized by gender divisions and inequalities and hence polarized gender identities. There is a tension between the increased opportunities offered by sport and resistance to change, although sport remains a site of resistance, especially in terms of transforming masculinities (Messner, 2002). Such tensions are highlighted in boxing. Boxing is still something of an anomaly in a world of transforming gender relations and the emergence of greater social inclusion and equality in social relations based on gender, ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’, sexuality and dis/ability. If boxing is a bastion of traditional masculinities, how does this persist in a climate of change, for example when even feminists argue that we live in ‘post-feminist times’? Or is there less radical transformation taking place in the wider world? How do these identifications operate for women? The attraction of boxing, not only to participants, but also to spectators, fans and all involved in its culture suggests that such versions of masculinity retain strong, if contradictory, claims.

I have chosen to focus upon men’s boxing and masculinities because of their troublesome features. In many ways the continued success of such a sport is difficult to comprehend. Boxing is dangerous, but not only because of the risk of injury. Other sports are more hazardous in terms of the scale and number of injuries sustained, but boxing is exciting for its overt expression of aggression, because it carries the promise of risk. Boxing is the Dark Continent. It is frightening. I have followed boxing since my very first experience of the sport, very much at a distance, as a very young child, creeping into my parents’ room in the middle of the night to listen to the radio with my father. He was listening to Rocky Marciano, the only undefeated heavyweight of the twentieth century, beating Jersey Joe Walcott in 1952; a key moment in the annals of boxing. I certainly picked up on the excitement, if not the visible violence. As a follower, although not a practitioner of boxing myself, I am only too aware of the troubling nature of a sport which is exciting because it carries the risk of injury and violence played out in public in front of the spectator. However, boxing survives in a changing climate of more fluid identities and greater gender equalities. Boxing masculinities do not fit so comfortably within a framework of flexibility and contingency in explaining how identities are taken up as other versions, such as those of ‘new men’. Men’s boxing still retains a high degree of cultural dominance and the genealogy of the sport is strongly configured around its associations with masculinity. Joyce Carol Oates expresses this powerfully as ‘Boxing is for men and is about men, and is men’ (1987: 72). Oates’ comment is not only an empirical observation about the people who take part, but an expression of the powerfully gendered metaphors of the sport. This is not to say that women are not part of the sport and its history. Women’s boxing has a long history and the sport has achieved considerable popularity, especially in the US in recent years, but, as I shall demonstrate, it is men’s boxing especially that recreates legends of heroism and constructs the myths of masculinity in which practitioners and followers invest. Boxing is not just about men; it is about masculinity. However, this is not a masculinity reserved for men. Personal investments in public stories are more often related to heroic masculinities, but this does not of course limit their appeal to men. Boxing masculinities are configured within histories and mythologies of belonging which resonate with the desire to locate the self in relation to roots and the past, which extend beyond the specific gender identifications in boxing.

Expressions of the desire to belong and to stabilize identity are features of traditional masculinity that present another anomaly in theorizing identity. Increasingly, analyses of identification and of the self are informed by critiques that stress the hybridity and fluidity of identity, in opposition to fixity and certainty. Boxing is thus troubling in the contemporary world. Masculinities in this field do not exist in some separate cultural terrain but co-exist with other identifications and other versions of selfhood. Such masculinities can be construed as attempts at reconstructing the self through myths of origin invoking the roots of identity. Or they can be seen as responses to an unsettled and unsettling world of transformation and change, especially in relation to gender roles. Examples of attempts to secure the self and to establish some sense of belonging demonstrate some of the difficulties that emerge from framing identity in a sea of discursive uncertainty. Identification in a sport like boxing promises some security in knowing what masculinity means, but such attempts at setting boundaries of selfhood cannot be adequately explained as either false consciousness or misrecognition. If we think we can say who we are with some degree of surety, for example by tracing our identities back to some original source, we risk being accused of being deceived and in a state of false consciousness. This accusation could be based on the claim that the sense of security such identities afford has no substance, or because such identities are dependent upon and determined by social forces outside ourselves. Identities are reproduced and configured through discursive practices and regimes which are characterized by uncertainty. The resolutions adopted, for example in attempts to secure some sense of self in bounded masculinities, require more than a discursive explanation, which sees them as shaped and determined by cultural forms and practices. The powerful draw of such masculinities highlights the interrelationship between stability and uncertainty and demonstrates the need for a synthetic approach that combines different elements in the reconstruction of identities, the social and the psychic, the particular and the universal and agency and constraint.

The interpellation (Althusser, 1971) of public moments, such as those represented in films, are only part of the processes of assembling the self. Selves are reconstructed through the iterative practices and routines of everyday life. Public representations and spectatorship are, of course, only parts of boxing culture. Boxing involves the most rigorous training programmes in the gym. Thus the sport brings together the routine of the gym and the spectacle of public contests; it combines everyday embodied practice and public stories of celebrity, heroism and anti-heroism. Boxing combines the embodied practices and the daily physical grind of training with aspirations that are forged in particular economic and social circumstances and the aspirations which recruit boxers are firmly grounded in a material reality of social, economic and cultural disadvantage. Fantasy and reality are inextricably enmeshed. Boxing is par excellence an example of a space where the two meet; where celebrity and the routine, fantasy and corporeal, material and social reality and aspiration and desire become one. Thus boxing offers a route into exploring some of the mechanisms of identification that incorporate, routine practices, embodiment and psychic investment through personal and public representations.

In order to consider some of the regimes and apparatuses of identification through which masculinities are forged in boxing, this book combines analyses of the habitual and the routine, for example of everyday experience of training in the gym, with deconstruction of the spectacular, more public events, including media and literary coverage of the sport. This analysis brings together personal and public stories. This book explores the recruitment of people in the gym and in the ring and as spectators and followers who are implicated in boxing masculinities through the routine embodied practices of the sport and through its representation. Masculinities are made and remade through the body practices of routine and embodiment is a key concept in understanding the habitual. Identity formation can be understood through habit, habitus and bodily practices. Such a theoretical framework lends itself well to the corporeal engagement in the sport and the reproduction of embodied selfhood. However, whilst such approaches most effectively address the embodied self they are less successful in engaging with the fantasies and psychic investment which link personal and public stories and the interrelationship between the particular and the universal. The violent spectacle of boxing and its physical dangers for boxers suggest the appeal of unconscious aspects of identification. Traditional masculinities as enacted in boxing may offer the promise of secure boundaries to the self but they are based on extremely dangerous practices. What is even more troubling is the spectatorship of such a risky, if exciting sport which invokes unconscious fears and desires. Identity has to be embodied because ‘we are our bodies’ as Bourdieu has argued, but the investment made in boxing masculinities is not just about those who engage in the sport. It is about those who watch and those who buy into its culture and collude with its identifications. Boxing masculinities have to accommodate these tensions and ambivalences between heroic success and fear of failure. My argument demands a synthesis of embodiment and discursive meanings, as reproduced through public and personal narratives and spectacles, both in the ring and on film. These aspects of identification involve acknowledgement of unconscious desires and anxieties.

Boxing, Masculinity and Identity works through some of the identity puzzles that are thrown up by boxing in order to engage with contemporary debates about masculinity, including ambivalence and contradiction in the processes of making up the self. Boxing is used to acknowledge the power of representation and the ‘thrill of the fight’ as well as the more routine, embodied aspects of identification through which subjects are recruited into gendered identities, starting with processes of identification and boxing masculinities.

Chapter 2, ‘Masculinity on the ropes? Boxing and gender identities’ focuses upon masculinities as gendered identities. It addresses changes and continuities in relation to the transformations that have taken place in academic concerns with identity, subjectivity and the self and how identities might be seen to have been transformed, rethought and re-enacted. There has been both an increased interest in masculinity as the subject of academic enquiry and the suggestion that new masculinities have emerged in recent years. In sport, pro-feminist critiques have been developed (for example, McKay et al., 2000; Messner, 2002) drawing upon feminist theories and methodologies, which have put masculinities, as gendered identities, under the spotlight of research. Masculinities are still seen to be constructed in relation to femininity as well as within a deeply racialized context. The chapter then explores some of the specific dimensions of masculinities in relation to sport and specifically to boxing, as a place where one would expect hegemonic masculinity to be holding on and resisting the tide of ambiguity and contradiction and the advent of the ‘new man’. Key moments in boxing history are identified. Focusing on gender, ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’, my arguments are framed by political and moral discourses. Boxing history is marked by social exclusion and processes of ‘othering’ especially through racialization, ethnicization and gender differentiation and by notions of honour which are gendered through their associations with militarism. The persistence of gender binaries and the mechanisms through which they are constructed raise important questions about how and why women might ‘do’ masculinity in sport or whether there are alternative reconfigurations of gender identities. This discussion focuses on the tension within sport as a field with the potential for the transformation of selfhood and on oppositions and resistances and highlights the key dimensions of boxing masculinities in the history of the sport, which incorporate the articulation of class, ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ with gender.

Chapter 3, ‘Outside in, inside out: routine masculinities’, focuses on ways of knowing and addresses some of the big debates about the problem of methods in researching gender identities in boxing. This is illustrated by the specific difficulties which beset researchers, comparing ‘insider’ participant observation studies with ‘outsider’ non-participant observation. Boxing research really highlights these methodological issues and addresses the problems of investigating processes of identification. Most ethnographic research into boxing has been carried out by men, who have ‘joined in’ and who are not surprisingly very proud to include tales of their own sparring endeavours as well as, in some cases, their adventurous encounters with assorted perils within the account of the research (for example, Wacquant, 1995a, 1995b, 2004; Sugden, 1996; Beattie, 1997; de Garis, 2000). Few ethnographies of sport by male researchers acknowledge or make visible the researcher’s gendered identity and maleness passes unquestioned (Wheaton, 2002). These debates are used to explore the question of ontological complicity (Merleau-Ponty, 1962) as is the issue of accessing authentic ‘truth’, which have much wider application outside sports research. The interrelationship between insiders and outsiders also contributes to an exploration of the networks and connections through which masculinities are reconstructed and reinstated. This chapter also considers some of the debates about the status of the texts that are deployed in different methodologies and the relationship between ethnography, interviews and analysis of other texts, including the ‘public’ stories of the press, the film and television media and literary sources. My aim is to highlight the necessity of combining the personal and the public and the inside and the outside, which includes the psychic and the social and to develop a methodology that synthesizes these dimensions using different texts as well as different dimensions of identity. My argument suggests that the personal stories yielded by ethnography and other qualitative methods have to be explored along with analyses of the public stories manifest in media representations of boxing as a sport which occupies a contentious place in public debates and there has to be some acknowledgement of situated knowledges and partial visions (Haraway, 1991). Much of the existing research in boxing has involved participant observation and ethnographies which have taken place in the ‘situation’ of the gym and has involved some embodied collusion in its routine training practices. Embodiment is the concern of the next chapter.

Chapter 4, ‘Boxing bodies and embodied masculinities’ focuses on the status of bodies in the processes of identification. Boxing is all about bodies; two bodies in the ring and the physical ordeal of training in the gym. Boxing images foreground bodies and the body is central to the issue of how and why people box. Chapter 4 looks at the problem of bodies in the making of the self and reviews some of the literature on theories of the body, before going on to develop a notion of embodiment that encompasses cultural and gender differentiation. This chapter focuses on bodies in processes of identification. Boxing, even more than other sports, might appear to be an activity where the body is central, but much of the discussion of the sport has assumed a mind/body split where the self is associated with the mind which seeks control over the body. This dichotomy is one key area of debate in this chapter along with the other ways in which the gendered body has been theorised in relation to social constructivist approaches, for example Foucauldian notions of the regulation and disciplining of the body, which are interesting in relation to the body regimes and regimens in a sport such as boxing. Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of ‘embodiment’ is particularly useful in overcoming the problem of binaries and as contributing to Bourdieu’s approach to embodiment encompassing the active construction of identities within sport within the context of investment in cultural capital and in particular physical capital, in the case of boxing. However, theories of the body need to address the diversity of bodies, their materiality and their differences. The enactments, through which meanings about gendered identities are produced and re-produced, are located within specific social and cultural spaces and in the context of the different and mostly unequal operation of power. These specificities and inequalities have to be incorporated into the analysis of embodiment and the status of the agent...