Fighting Sports, Gender, and the Commodification of Violence
Heavy Bag Heroines- Authors:
- Publisher:
- 2021
Summary
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 Collins examines broad understandings of gender, violence, self-defense, commodification, and health and fitness from the point of view of women who engage in the sport. Collins unpacks dominant assumptions about gender and the sport through the eyes of the women's 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 as a means 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.
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Bibliographic data
- Copyright year
- 2021
- ISBN-Print
- 978-1-7936-0063-9
- ISBN-Online
- 978-1-7936-0064-6
- Publisher
- Lexington, Lanham
- Language
- English
- Pages
- 206
- Product type
- Book Titles
Table of contents
- Contents No access
- Acknowledgments No access
- Chapter 1 Finding Boxing in a Strip-Mall No access Pages 1 - 20
- Chapter 2 From Amazonians to Cardio Classes No access Pages 21 - 40
- Chapter 3 Commodifying and the Woman Boxer No access Pages 41 - 64
- Chapter 4 Fighting Tough . . . but Not Too Tough No access Pages 65 - 84
- Chapter 5 There Are Only Three Rules of Fight Club, “No Spectators, No Social Media, and No Boob Shots!” No access Pages 85 - 104
- Chapter 6 Sparring Like Men? No access Pages 105 - 124
- Chapter 7 Violence, Safety, and Self-defense No access Pages 125 - 148
- Chapter 8 The Female Fight No access Pages 149 - 172
- Conclusion No access Pages 173 - 180
- Bibliography No access Pages 181 - 202
- Index No access Pages 203 - 204
- About the Author No access Pages 205 - 206





