Kath Woodward

Rumbles in the Jungle: Boxing, Racialization and the Performance of Masculinity

Mens boxing is a sport with successful, high profile and affluent participants and one that includes many of the very much less well off. It has traditionally involved high participation by men from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. The sport is beset by contradictions, between racism and opportunity, discipline and excess, beautiful bodies and those that are fractured and damaged, and between traditional and alternative presentations of masculinity. The negotiation and presentation of raced and gendered identities have a strong presence, especially in terms of the ways in which hegemonic masculinity might be enacted. This paper is about racialized masculinities in boxing and links ethnography at a Sheffield gym that has produced some very well-known boxers, with an exploration of popular, media narratives about this particular performance of masculinities and the discursive location of boxing as a sport. It looks at the enactment of masculinities at a site that might appear to offer particularly essentialized and polarized versions of masculinity, race and class. It examines the ways in which men participate in boxing at a variety of levels and the interconnections between the public and the private stories that are told about men and boxing.

Sex power and the games

The Olympics are reputedly the greatest show on earth and offer not only entertainment and opportunities for embodied sporting achievement but also a significant site for serious sociological research.This book is a timely intervention in critical analyses of the role of the Olympic Games in contemporary social, cultural, economic and political life in 2012, when the Games are held in London. The London Games feature one of the most ambitious Cultural Olympiads, a phenomenon which is addressed in the book in the context of the interrelationships between art and sport, drawing upon original research in particular examples of art, sport and sponsorship. This book draws on feminist thinking and uses the concept of sex gender to explore some of the tensions that are played out in the Olympic Games and in the history of the Olympic Movement between its democratic principles and opportunities and its firmly entrenched inequalities. Sex Power and the Games argues that conceptualisations of sex gender and enfleshed selves offer ways of exploring and explaining some of the endurances of social and cultural inequalities that are generated as well as reflected in the Games along with the promise of transformation and opportunities for change which are important dimensions of how power operates in sport and in the Games in particular.

On and Off the Pitch: Diversity policies and transforming identities?

This article examines the operation of diversity policies and practices in the sport of football (soccer) using textual material from Government initiatives, club websites and interviews with club community based workers to suggest that new identity positions are being put into discourse. Sport and in particular football has become a site at which, rather than being classified as dangerous territory where fans have to be controlled, new, self-regulating citizen selves might be created. However, identity positions that I suggest are emerging both conform to and resist the apparatuses of governmentality which generate them and my research indicates that while there is some transformation taking place, the possibilities of new identity positions cannot be simply read off from the policy statements. Transforming identities are accommodated through discourses of charity, utilitarianism, and human rights, ranging from more paternalistic understandings of community within charity discourses to the political activism and equality based practices of human rights.

Representations of Motherhood

Motherhood is the subject of considerable discussion and review. We are all, as Rich has famously said, ‘of woman born’ (1977), and this is still the case at the current stage of technological development, although it may not be for ever. Yet, motherhood is subject both to assumptions that it is an identity that can be taken for granted — it is ‘natural’ so requires no further interrogation — and to a plethora of critiques through which meanings about what it means to be a mother are constructed. This chapter uses approaches that have been developed within cultural studies to look at the politics of representation and addresses some of the ways in which motherhood is represented, for example through discourses in popular culture.

ON AND OFF THE PITCH

This article examines the operation of diversity policies and practices in the sport of football (soccer) using textual material from Government initiatives, club websites and interviews with club community based workers to suggest that new identity positions are being put into discourse. Sport and in particular football has become a site at which, rather than being classified as dangerous territory where fans have to be controlled, new, self-regulating citizen selves might be created. However, identity positions that I suggest are emerging both conform to and resist the apparatuses of governmentality which generate them and my research indicates that while there is some transformation taking place, the possibilities of new identity positions cannot be simply read off from the policy statements. Transforming identities are accommodated through discourses of charity, utilitarianism, and human rights, ranging from more paternalistic understandings of community within charity discourses to the political activism and equality based practices of human rights.

Legacies of 2012: putting women's boxing into discourse

This article explores some of the promises of legacy following the summer games in 2012 and demonstrates some of the cultural changes which are made possible in relation to thinking about gender and sport. The article uses Foucaults idea of ideas being ‘put into discourse’ to show how womens boxing in 2012 was taken seriously as an exciting sport and has had an impact upon the cultural hegemonic masculinity of boxing. Legacy involves incremental changes and shifts in ways of thinking which open up new ways of doing sport.

The Culture of Boxing: Sensation and Affect

Joyce Carol Oates has argued that watching boxing on television is drama, whereas being at the fight is real. Staking a claim to reality is a strategy that is used in order to explain the lasting power of boxing to excite people and as part of the sports historical endurance and the cultural investment in boxing that crosses a range of fields. This article uses Oatess distinction between drama and what is real to explore the culture of boxing and its continuing, if contradictory, appeal through different cultural forms. Boxing poses a cultural dilemma and raises questions about how something so apparently brutal retains its hold on contemporary culture. The material properties of boxing invoke the senses and prioritize corporeal, enfleshed engagement. Oates also applies the notion of authenticity to mens boxing. Thus the focus of this article is upon the capacities of boxing and its affects and the particularities of the event of boxing which make its dramas real, wherever they are enacted, as well as the forces in play which create particular versions of masculinity which are enmeshed with the affects of boxing.

Bodies on the margins: regulating bodies, regulatory bodies

Sport is all about bodies, but some bodies are seen as on the margins and policies are directed at re‐situating them into the mainstream. This article explores some of the ways in which embodied selves are the target of diversity policies and practices, especially those implemented by fan‐based, anti‐racist organisations. I use the phenomenological concepts of lived bodies and embodied selves to explore some of the processes involved in addressing ‘bodies on the margins’ in sport. Sport has long been considered a site for the creation of healthy citizens, a tradition which has been rearticulated to encompass diverse groups of people who are seen as under‐represented in sport. This article looks at which embodied selves are encouraged to participate by non‐governmental regulatory bodies in sport, to investigate the tension between the positive and negative dimensions of diversity politics in sport, as an example of what Paul Gilroy calls ‘conviviality’.

The Short Guide to Gender

This book presents arguments for and explanations of the centrality of conceptualisations of gender to contemporary debates about social relations, social, political and cultural change and the endurance of inequalities. The book makes the case or gender as a theoretical onceptualisation as well as an empirical classification and illustrates the argument with a diverse range of case studies.

Women’s time? Time and temporality in women’s football

Abstract Time is central to sport, not least football, through measurements and memories. The sophisticated technologies of recording time matter in training and on the pitch, the intensity of spectatorship at the stadium or watching the big screen and memories of being present at big games generate what makes football the beautiful game. What does a focus on time and temporality tell us about the women’s game? Does the Super League mean that this is women’s time? Or are women excluded and marginalized through persistent invisibility? How are the links between past, present and future experienced in women’s football? This essay explores time and temporality in football by looking at some of the transformations, representations and experiences of women’s football.