Fighting Sports, Gender, and the Commodification of Violence: Heavy Bag Heroines

(Hardback)

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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.

Reviews

In Fighting Sports, Gender and the Commodification of Violence: Heavy Bag Heroines, Victoria Collins crafts a foundation of attentive ethnography in which her voice and the voices of her subjects ring through. On this foundation she develops an elegant, nuanced analysis of gender performance, amateur fighting, physical fitness, and marketed experience. Her prose floats like a butterfly; her analysis stings like a bee.

-- Jeff Ferrell, author of Drift: Illicit Mobility and Uncertain Knowledge

Victoria Collins is a skillful writer whose ethnography is as intimate as it is insightful. Fighting Sport, Gender, and the Commodification of Violence offers a rich analysis of women in combat sport; a valuable read for students, educators, and fans alike.

-- Kate Henne, Director, School of Regulation and Global Governance

Author Bio

Victoria E. Collins is associate professor and graduate program coordinator in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University.