Tucker, SherrieKim, Jeonguk2011-01-032011-01-032010-07-282010http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:11077https://hdl.handle.net/1808/6980Leisure 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.463 pagesenThis item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.American studiesUnited States--HistoryAmerica--HistoryCultural historyGenderSportsDissertationopenAccess