Pugs at Work

Pugs at Work: Bodily Capital and Bodily Labor among Professional Boxers

Pugs at Work: Bodily Capital and Bodily Labor among Professional Boxers

Bodies Matter

The body is fundamental to all forms of sporting practice. Yet in sport, as in many other spheres, practically and theoretically the body has been confined to the sphere of the natural sciences, especially biology and medicine (and the 'mind' to philosophy and psychology). This annexation reflects the 'rationalist bias in Western culture' (Hargreaves, 1987, p. 139) which entails a dualism in which the body and mind are separated, with the mind representing civilisation and the body representing nature. It is therefore hard, in Western thought, to imagine the body as anything other than a 'natural phenomenon'. Thus it is only very recently that the sociology of sport - mirroring sociology more widely - has taken the body seriously as a topic of enquiry. Brian Turner's The Body and Society (1984) marked the first 'genuine sociology of the body', although sport historians and sociologists had started to write about the sporting body from the 1970s (Hargreaves & Vertinsky, 2007, p. 1).

This omission, as Booth and Nauright note, is a 'double paradox'. 'First, by definition sport is a corporeal practice; second, power, inequality, and oppression are embodied' (Booth and Nauright, 2003: 1). How bodies function, appear and are treated is of central importance. John Hargreaves has argued that the body represents a major site of social struggle and that in 'the battle for control over the body' important power relationships, such as over class, gender, age, and 'race', are constituted and structured (Hargreaves, 1987, p. 140). Over the past 20 years there has been a proliferation of writing on all aspects of the body, recognising the cultural and social significance of embodiment in all areas of life and revealing a consensus that the 'body matters' (Hargreaves and Vertinsky, 2007, p. 1).

Embodiment and the Social Construction of Bodies

To use the term embodiment is to challenge the idea of the body being a 'natural' biological thing, and to recognise that our bodies are not just biological, but that our physicality is moulded by social and cultural as well as physical processes (Shilling, 1997, p. 65). Human beings are embodied subjects and the material body is the site in which differences of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and class are constituted and made visible (Benson, 1997, p. 128). The body does more than provide the means by which to live, it 'shapes our identities and structures our interventions in, and classifications of, the world' (Shilling, 1997. p.65). That is to say, our bodies are socially constructed; society has invaded, shaped, classified, and reproduced the body, and that unequal power relation underpins these processes.

In returning the bodies to the realm of sociology the kinds of questions and issues sociologists have taken up include: examining images of the sporting body; exploring how the body is constructed by social forces; and highlighting the ways in which body classifications and differences shape our identities and ...