Globalizing Boxing

Description

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Boxing is a traditional sport in many ways, characterized by continuities in the form of practices and regulations and heavy with legends and heroes reflecting its traditional/historical values. Associations with class, hegemonic masculinity and racialized inclusions/exclusions, however, sit alongside developments such as women's boxing and involvement in Mixed Martial Arts. This book will be the first to use boxing as a vehicle for exploring social, cultural and political change in a global context. It will consider to what degree and in what ways boxing reflects social transformations, and whether and how it contributes to those transformations. In exploring the relationship it will provide new ways of thinking critically about the everyday.

Kath Woodward is Professor of Sociology at the Open University. Her publications include Embodied Sporting Practices Regulating and Regulatory bodies (2009), Social Sciences; the Big Issues, 2nd edition (2009) Boxing Masculinity and Identity: the "I" of the Tiger (2007), Questions of Identity (2004), Understanding Identity (2002) and, with Sophie Woodward, Why Feminism Matters (2009). She has just completed work on Sport Across Diasporas at the BBC World Service as part of the AHRC funded, Diasporas, Migration and Identities programme and works on gender race and diversity at the ESRC funded Centre for Research into Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) at the Open University and Manchester University. She is on the editorial board of Soccer and Society and the Journal of Leisure Studies and has forthcoming special editions of Soccer and Society, Football, Sounds and Things and of the journal M/C on Diasporas.

Kath Woodward does a great job of demonstrating how boxing can provide a constructive site for exploring social, economic, political and cultural processes ... and [sheds] light on the many contradictions that shape boxing today ... Woodward's book is a good read for any boxing fan ... [as well as] academics and others interested in gender studies in sport. * Idrottsforum - Nordic Sport Science Forum *