On Boxing

This book is a philosophical and cultural critique of contemporary boxing. It broadens and deepens our understanding of the empirically and normatively entwined complexities of a sport that is often misunderstood and all too easily reduced to stereotypes.Moving between and among work in ethnography sociology urban studies and especially the philosophy of sport and drawing on research in boxing gyms in the US the book presents a stereoscopic view of professional boxing as both situated cultural practice and formalized competitive sport. It takes us inside and outside the ring in discussions of the cultural embeddedness of boxing and boxing gyms the formation of pugilistic selfhood and ‘boxer cool’ the nature and function of combat sport violence and sparring and the aesthetics and ethics of cornering a boxing match. With its interdisciplinary focus on the empirical and normative dimensions of professional pugilism On Boxing makes explicit the bittersweetness of the ‘sweet science’ and provides a new theoretical framework for analysing boxing and indeed sport in general.Written for a broad audience this is important reading for scholars and students working in the areas of philosophy and sociology of sport and combat sport studies as well as policy makers coaches and commentators engaged in the sport of boxing.Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at taylorfrancis under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.