Fighting for a Gender[ed] Identity is 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 analyze 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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