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.

This volume is in honor of William J. Chambliss who has influenced and provided a foundation for new directions and approaches in sociology, criminology, critical criminology, and the sociology of law. This is to name a few of the many inspirational and foundational ways he has changed the course and methods for generations to come, inspiring not only the editors and contributors of this volume. Each of the chapters detail various ways Bill's work has impacted on the perspectives and/or research of the authors, including, but not limited to, the way each understand the value of non-traditional methods, law and power, the very definition of crime, organized crime, and unmasking the power structures and powerful that cause inequality, social ills and pains. Contributors are: Elizabeth A. Bradshaw, Meredith Brown, William J. Chambliss, Francis T. Cullen, Jeff Ferrell, David O. Friedrichs, Mark S. Hamm, Ronald C. Kramer, Teresa C. Kulig, Raymond Michalowski, Christopher J. Moloney, Ida Nafstad, Sarah Pedigo, Gary Potter, Isabel Schoultz.

This volume is in honor of William J. Chambliss who has influenced and provided a foundation for new directions and approaches in sociology, criminology, critical criminology in particular, and the sociology of law. This is to name a few of the many inspirational and foundational ways he has changed the course and methods for generations to come, inspiring not only the editors and contributors of this volume. Each of the chapters detail various ways Bill's work has impacted on our own perspectives and/or research including, but not limited to, the way we understand the value of non-traditional methods, law and power, the very definition of crime, organized crime, and unmasking the power structures and powerful that cause inequality, social ills and pains. Contributors are: Elizabeth A. Bradshaw, Meredith Brown, William J. Chambliss, Francis T. Cullen, Jeff Ferrell, David O. Friedrichs, Mark S. Hamm, Ronald C. Kramer, Teresa C. Kulig, Raymond Michalowski, Christopher J. Moloney, Ida Nafstad, Sarah Pedigo, Gary Potter, Isabel Schoultz.