Boxing and Performance

Boxing and Performance is the first substantial piece of work to place the lived experience of female and male boxers in dialogue with one another.

Crews and Lennox critically reflect on their ethnographic experiences of boxing and their reading of the cultural representations of the sport. They conceive of the project as an extended sparring session. This book offers a unique perspective on boxing in/as performance and boxing in/as culture. It explores how the connections between boxing and performance address ideas about bodies, relationships, intimacy, and combat. It challenges and renegotiates oft-repeated narratives used to make meaning about boxing.

This volume examines questions of visibility, voice, and agency and will appeal to scholars and students in the fields of performance and media, and sport and social studies.

Sarah Crews is Senior Lecturer in Performance and Media at the University of South Wales. Sarah’s research interests include performance and the body, gender and sexuality, and boxing and physical culture.

P. Solomon Lennox is Head of Department of Arts at Northumbria University. His research sits within the field of performance studies and explores the relationship between the physical performance practices of combat sports, theories of performance space, and narrative identity.