Boxing the Boundaries: Prize Fighting, Masculinities, and Shifting Social and Cultural Boundaries in the United State, 1882-1913

Abstract

Leisure and sports are recently developed research topics. My dissertation illuminates the social meaning of prize fighting between 1882 and 1913 considering interactions between culture and power relations. My dissertation understands prize fighting as a cultural text, structured in conjunction with social relations and power struggles. In so doing, the dissertation details how agents used a sport to construct, reinforce, blur, multiply, and shift social and cultural boundaries for the construction of group identities and how their signifying practices affected the ways in which power was distributed in American society. Accordingly, my dissertation examines how cultural autonomy affected the socially organized forms of power. As an intersectional study of prize fighting, my dissertation also criticizes the reductionist, structuralist, and binary conception of culture, power, and social relations and stresses interconnections between social history and cultural history.