Experience on the Ropes: Embodiment, Narrative, and Boxing
Abstract
In this thesis, I explore embodied, experiences of boxers at gyms in Southwestern Ontario—this analysis of boxing, community, and identities illustrates a vernacular poetics and works out from boxers’ quotidian theories. Sports are an important site to produce cultural identity, understandings of gender and sexual dimorphism, and the definition of ability/disability. I draw on critical theory that emphasises the ‘theory’ produced through stories. Fieldwork, guided by the concept of ‘emergent design’, was conducted between 2017 and 2021. Research problematics included: disability and injury in athletes, the self-application of disciplinary techniques, embodied experiences, and the meaning of ‘community’ for participants. I used a methodological ‘toolkit’ of emergent design. Research was guided by ‘an anthropological sensibility’: participant observation, auto-ethnography, and unstructured interviews. Emergent design allowed me to respond to unanticipated directions—gym closures, the COVID-19 pandemic, my medical leaves/disability. Participants’ narratives are presented in a way shaped by experimental narrative formats in contemporary anthropology. This approach is inspired by an eclectic mix of social studies of sport, illness, disability, masculinity, race, and trauma. I became a part of the local boxing ‘community’ by going to boxing classes, sparring, watching fights, and participating in community events. Participants’ narratives illustrate the complexities of ordinary, intersubjective life, the role of boxing and sport in efforts to make-up identities. Sport is assumed to be ‘productive’ of opportunities: athletes were constrained by injuries, trauma, and the hierarchical structure of competition. I explore the myriad ways participants and I have been differently interpellated by various sports ideologies—the ‘pain principle’, discipline and ‘character’, the hierarchical institutional structure of sports. Boxers were conscious of the potential risks of participation (including concussions, injured hands, broken bones), but negotiated participation around the disciplinary discourse of ‘character’—they had a sense that sport would make them more disciplined/successful in their careers and relationships. Participants’ narratives explore the complexities of embodiment: boxing offered participants a lens to make sense of their daily, embodied practices, make friends and be a part of a ‘community’; at the same time, however, boxers experienced injuries, physical trauma, and hierarchical pressures of sport.