CULTURE, MANHOOD, AND BOXING

Culture, Manhood, and Boxing

PROPOSAL

This Thesis explores the contours of how professional boxing champion Oscar De La Hoya has been constructed through the popular and boxing press. The analysis points to the complicated relationships between ethnicity, masculinity and public personae and how one sporting icon is poised between two communities: the Latino community, predominantly in the South-west of the USA, and the broader mainstream audiences for sport and entertainment (Sugden, 1996). The essay explores how De La Hoya's success and quest for mainstream acceptance has complicated how his 'home' communities react to and position him as a fighter, media icon, and Latino male.

As so often happens with scholarly writing in the area of media studies, opportunities for critique and analysis present themselves in the most unexpected ways. In the present case, my perusal of periodicals for my studies into football yielded an unexpected result. In the open stacks of the library at Arizona State University I found a specialist magazine that examines professional boxing. What was remarkable about this magazine was not the cover that touted a 'classic' bout between the 'Golden Boy' Oscar De La Hoya and Feacutelix Trinidad (a fight in which De La Hoya suffered his first professional defeat), but what someone had scrawled across the image of De La Hoya: a common three-letter epithet typically used to question and defame the masculinity and heterosexuality of males in the US (Wacquant, 1990).

This grabbed my attention, and I began to consider the relationship between De La Hoya and the various communities who would be interested in his success or failure. My first impressions were that those with the greatest interest are that diverse collective known as boxing aficionados or, more broadly, sports fans. However, a brief exploration of the sporting literature surrounding De La Hoya suggested richer possibilities, including the exploration of how and why his masculinity resonated with various communities. Of course, in an analysis of US popular and sporting media, considerations of De La Hoya's mediated masculine persona and its reception cannot easily be disentangled from the related issues of race and ethnicity given his status as a Mexican American (Kawakami, 2000). And so the serendipitous discovery of De La Hoya's image with the word 'fag' written across his forehead has led to the present consideration of how his race, masculinity and identity raise interesting questions about identity, authenticity and the meaning of manliness in perhaps the most masculine of all sports (Cheng, 1990).

Culture, Manhood, and Boxing

LITERATURE REVIEW

Boxing and Masculinity

Boxing is one of several global sports that manifest the connections between masculinity, sport and culture. The British sociologist John Sugden observes that boxing 'has proven to be very resistant to female involvement'. Exploring the question of how and where boxing takes place, Loumlic Wacquant identifies the boxing gym as a 'quintessentially masculine space', while Varda Burstyn observes that despite the incursions of female managers, judges and, most significantly, pugilists, 'boxing is uncontestably a violent sport, and a masculine sport' (Graham, ...