Global Masculinities and Manhood

9. Body Politics: Masculinities in Sport

9 Body Politics Masculinities in Sport KATH WOODWARD introduction This chapter explores some of the processes through which embodied masculinities are reproduced and experienced in sport. These processes inextricably bring together the materiality of bodies and the social and cultural practices through which identifications in particular versions of masculinity are made. Sport has strong and long-lasting associations with both masculinity and embodiment and I seek to explore some of the interconnections between the two by looking at the centrality of bodies and body practices in sport and the histories of embodied masculinity that have such powerful resonance in sporting narratives, especially those of social exclusion and the struggles against inequalities. I have chosen to focus upon a sport where corporeality is pivotal, a contact sport that might seem to be both the most physically dangerous (although it is not actually top of the league table for injuries) and the most dramatic, with its one-on-one contact and pugilistic associations, namely boxing. Boxing highlights the physicality of sport, through the routine rigorous training regimes, which also characterize all sports and, especially, in its own practices; no other sport actually awards points or an outright victory to the person who renders the opponent unconscious , deliberately. Because bodies are so central to boxing, the sport offers an excellent site for theorizing gendered embodiment, especially in a sport that is also marked by histories of racism and social exclusion. A focus upon bodies in sport can present problems; even more so with boxing, which is beset by inequalities of class, race, ethnicity, impairment, generation, and location, which might entail the risk of reducing the self to the body by dwelling on the embodied aspects of selfhood at the expense of other dimensions , notably the intellectual and affective. These different dimensions of inequality are interconnected and demonstrate the social implications and situations of embodiment. My aim is to explore the possibilities of rethinking embodiment without such reductionism, but within a framework that retains the materiality of corporeality in the configuration of embodied identifications and acknowledges the importance of bodies themselves as situations through which gendered identities are forged. Unequal Bodies: Differentiation Sports such as boxing have been seen as an appropriate route for black and minority ethnic young men to gain self-respect and escape poverty (Sammons , 1988). Narratives of escape from poverty and the ghetto have leant enormous weight to the cultural capital of boxing (Berkowitz & Ungar, 2007; Boddy, 2008). Boxing embodies and performs anxieties about class, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. However, such a path may also include the reinstatement of inequalities and assume a reductionist view of embodied identifications. Sporting masculinities present problems for theories of embodied identification , for example, through the possibility of devaluing the body in relation to the mind. For black athletes, the celebration of body practices in sport may be at the expense of success in intellectual practices. For example, the long tradition of boxing as a route out of poverty for migrant young men, in particular, can mean that it is the only escape and physical capital the sole investment, overriding other forms of cultural capital, which could, for example, be accessed through education and intellectual activity. Phenomenological accounts of the often contradictory experiences of lived bodies in sport have challenged the mind-body binary (Bourdieu, 1990; Crossley, 2000; Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Wacquant, 1995a; Young, 2005).Other versions of the thinking body engage with the psychosocial dimensions of the self, such as Jefferson (1996), allowing the possibility of seeing the self as an assemblage of inner and outer worlds. This chapter sets out the issues relating to taking an embodied understanding of gendered identification in the case of masculinities in sport and suggests some solutions to the limitations through an approach that encompasses material bodies as situations and as situated, drawing upon the feminist work of Simone de Beauvoir as developed by Iris Marion Young. BODY POLITICS: MASCULINITIES IN SPORT · 203 Masculinities Global sport remains largely dominated by the “men’s game” in so many fields (Messner, 2002). However, the “men’s game” does not necessarily invoke an unproblematic, hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995, 2002, 2005). The centrality of bodies and the measures of embodiment are part of the culture of sport which offers such primacy to masculinities, but sporting masculinities are ambivalent and ambiguous, too, and are subject to the cultural transformations of other gendered identifications (Woodward, 2009b, 2007). Men’s boxing holds out...