The experience of being a novice boxer in a gym in Chicago encouraged a French sociologist to punch out a book
Loic Wacquant, perhaps the only French sociologist who spent at least three years in the Woodlawn Gym in Chicago, Illinois, boxing with both amateurs and professionals, emerged from the experience strong, spry and of a mind to punch out some books and papers.
Wacquant is now a researcher at the Centre de Sociologie Europ�enne in Paris, and a professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley.
His book, Body Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer, published in 2003 by Oxford University Press, serves up more than 200 pages of detail. Wacquant writes that, prior to entering "a boxing gym in a neighbourhood of Chicago's black ghetto, I had never practised that sport or even considered trying it. I thus found myself in the situation of the perfect novice". That was in 1988.
Three to six sessions a week he trained ? shadowboxing, working the speed bag, sparring ? and eventually fought in a Golden Gloves tournament. "I even thought for a while of aborting my academic career to 'turn pro'," he writes, "and thereby remain with my friends from the gym and its coach, DeeDee Armour, who had become a second father for me."
The book grew in part from a paper Wacquant scribbled during his first summer there, "when getting my nose broken during a sparring session had forced me into a period of inactivity propicious to a reflexive return on my novitiate in progress".
We get analysis, but best of all we get a fist/hand account of the action: "Jabs from me, blocked by his fists, versus jabs from him, blocked by my nose. I'm better able to see his punches coming, but I still don't move fast enough. He lands another punch on my face, a right that makes my headgear turn sideways. DeeDee growls 'Move yo' head, Louie!' I'm trying!"
A second book, to be called The Passion of the Pugilist, will, Wacquant says, address "the dialectic of desire and domination in the social genesis of the boxer's vocation", "the work of the trainer as virile mothering", "confrontation in the ring as a homoerotic ritual of masculinisation", and other topics that did not fit or had not matured in time to go into Body Soul.
But one needn't entirely wait. Waquant has published monographs galore. The titles, like the text, are sweaty admixtures of sociologicalese and pulp non-fiction. Among his more hard-hitting papers one finds A Fleshpeddler at Work: Power, Pain, and Profit in the Prizefighting Economy and Pugs at Work: Bodily Capital and Bodily Labour Among Professional Boxers.
A paper called Whores, Slaves, And Stallions ? Languages Of Exploitation And Accommodation Among Prizefighters, in the journal Body and Society, hard-boils down to this:
"The boxer's experience of corporeal exploitation is expressed in three kindred idioms ... The first likens the fighter-manager combo to the prostitute-pimp duet; the second depicts the ring as a plantation and promoters as latter-day slave masters; the third intimates that boxers are used in the manner of livestock".
? Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
? The original picture used to illustrate this article was removed on 12 January as it had been captioned wrongly and was not relevant.
No comments:
Post a Comment