An ethnographic exploration into the increasingly popular world of
white collar boxing. Travis Satterlund, a sociologist, spent over a
year and a half researching a boxing gym and its participants,
toiling alongside gym members, learning the boxing trade, sweating
and enjoying the doses of macho from banging heads with fellow
pugilists. He learned how to throw a variety of punch combinations;
how to defend and parry punches; how to take a punch; he learned of
the hard work, commitment, and dedication necessary to become even
an average boxer; and, most importantly, he learned about the
culture of KO Gym and its members. While expecting to find a gym
filled with young, working-class, non-white menlike he saw on
television and in movieshe was surprised when he initially arrived
at KO Gym. Though there were indeed diverse, young men at the gym
who trained seriously for competitions, the place was also filled
with white menboth young and middle-agedwho were also training.
Moreover, there were a couple of women training, and the two
trainers were white, one of whom was a woman. This countered his
expectations and piqued his interest. Satterlund wanted to learn
about these mostly white boxers that he would later learn were
almost entirely middle to upper middle-class. What brought them to
the gym? What did they get out of it? Sociologically, what was
happening? This book reveals that gym members used the cultural
meanings associated with boxing as resources to construct boxing as
an activity from which they could derive gendered identity rewards.
As such, Satterlund shows how authenticity of the gym was socially
constructed to meet these identity rewards and also to resolve
these dilemmas. Moreover, while most of the men at the gym had
secure middle-class jobs, these jobs were not the primary basis for
their feelings of self-worth, especially in relation to their
identity as men. In essence, then, the boxing gym offered a means
for the men to compensate for their inability to signify power,
control, and toughness in their professional lives. Women also
sought identity rewards from boxing and had reasons to want to
signify masculine qualities. For them, too, boxing was a way to
signify agency and strength. Yet, they also faced dilemmas in
seeking to distance themselves from other feminine women without
being viewed as too masculine. At the same time, however, social
class complicated matters considerably, creating other issues for
both the men and the women. Satterlund thus uses the context of KO
Gym and its membership to analyse the many nuances of these gender
identity-related issues, focusing not only on how social class both
disrupts and facilitates how a gendered space is created, but how
gender inequalities are created, maintained and reproduced in white
collar boxing.
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