Fighting identities: the body in space and place

Prizefighting has assumed deep-seated meanings as a racialized practice in the United States, epitomizing both immigrants’ rags-to-riches sagas and competing notions of the sport’s identity as an “American” enterprise. “Fighting Identities: The Body in Space and Place” combines a historical, a theoretical, and an ethnographic approach in examining the occupational culture of professional boxing as a locus for ethnoracial, class, and gender formations. Contextualized within the history of pugilism, the bulk of the research springs from interviews with a community of Latino fighters who grew up and began boxing in East Austin, Texas from the 1970s onward. The research situates the boxers’ life-stories within a theoretical framework of the body in space and place, while a four-year ethnographic sojourn inside Texas prizefighting complements the analysis with a participant observation component. The focus is on how the athletes negotiate the tension between individual agency and ideological control within various pugilistic and societal settings; how their collective status as Latino fighters is deliberated within global sporting networks; and how boxing simultaneously enables challenging various power dynamics, as it reflects existing ethnoracial, class, and gender politics in society at large. Emphasizing an ongoing dialogue between everyday practices and academic discourses within the interdisciplinary field of American Studies in particular, the discussion links prizefighting and identity formations as spatially determined processes, delineating the boxing body as a site of knowledge and various locations within the pugilistic occupational culture as sites for being and becoming. The dissertation argues that a continual relationship between space and place—turning space into place by appropriating space as one’s own—evokes a larger tension between social control and individual mobility, and that this dynamic becomes absolutely central to Latino fighters’ raison d’être. Amidst the existing social hierarchies, “Fighting Identities” come to derive meanings through space, while space becomes racialized through geographically determined boundaries of socio-economic concentrations of power in place, corresponding to such everyday parameters as ethnoracial segregation and exclusionary class and gender politics in the United States. Alongside the increasing Latinization of 21st century prizefighting, the sport is diverging from its Northeastern origins into a distinctly Southwestern phenomenon.