Abstract
Scholars interested in the role and evolution of boxing in a capitalist society should welcome this study of Gleason’s Gym in New York City. Lucia Trimbur provides nuanced insight into the users of one of the world’s most famous boxing gyms. She illustrates the usefulness of ethnography, offering analysis of the data collected during a six-year ethnographic project. The book is neither overburdened nor driven by theory. It is well researched, accessible, and has a distinct political perspective.
The author seeks verisimilitude from her data as she explains the context and structure of American society. She is partisan politically, socially, and sociologically, and is on the side of those “more sinned against than sinning.” Come Out Swinging conscientiously engages with suffering, the body, and boxing’s position in public life. It firmly positions itself within the academic ideals of public sociology and physical cultural studies (PCS).
The development of PCS and the revival of public sociology in parallel are timely. The core message pervading each academic movement is similar, and throughout the years established sports’ sociologists have articulated its importance in numerous ways. Ingham and Donnelly (1990: 61), for example, championed the type of work that “supports or contributes to the amelioration and political empowerment of oppressed and suppressed groups.” Regardless of previous efforts, sport sociology has been somewhat consumed by the usual objectives and metrics of commodified higher education, typified by a shift to abstractionism that was “intensified by sub disciplinary specialization, fragmentation, and a fundamental lack of comprehensiveness” (Andrews, 2008: 45). In an attempt to combat this, with a clear connection to public sociology, PCS advocates are attempting to organize a unified body of work with the specific aim of understanding and helping bodies to better respond to the political influences impinging upon them.
This is the academic context in which Come Out Swinging was published, and by deliberately and unashamedly taking sides, Trimbur pulls boxing back from academia’s morally adrift manipulation, and perhaps inadvertently she disputes the foundations laid by Wacqaunt’s (2007) significant contribution to the sociology of sport.
The author’s analysis contrasts markedly with Wacquant’s. Whereas he ignores the environment from which the boxers are drawn, Trimbur takes the opposite approach.
In Body and Soul (2007) Wacquant begins from a comparable starting point. He, like Trimbur, had no boxing experience and his research site had numerous members who were at the mercy of economic and political decision makers. Wacquant’s ethnography took place in the late 1980s in a “cutthroat neighborhood, where handguns and other weapons are commonplace” (Wacquant, 2007: 22). Confusingly, however, his book seems to seek apolitical neutrality. In contrast, Come Out Swinging reveals the lived experiences of poor ethnic minorities in postindustrial New York, which makes the findings all the more apposite. Since Trimbur demonstrates the importance of the social context, it comes as a surprise that other sociologists could engage in a context where social degradation is so obvious and make no attempt to ameliorate that condition.
To study boxing and not to centralize the political and socioeconomic circumstances of those who box is alarming, and is a deficient representation of sociology and other aspects of academic research. Perhaps Trimbur is attempting to redress the evidential imbalance that has occurred in the boxing literature: she avoids the value neutrality of professional sociology; engages with oppressed populations; and makes steps towards their emancipation. Her book is a call for help.
The first chapter describes the historical context of Trimbur’s study. She locates the beginning of the economic and political shift towards neoliberalism in the 1960s. The well-documented economic transformation toward neoliberalism gave impetus to the FIRE economy—finance, insurance, and real estate—and the move away from the historically important manufacturing industries. This change disproportionately affected New York: “between 1965 and 1989, the number of manufacturing jobs in New York fell from 865,000 to 355,000” (p. 2). In turn, this massive rise in unemployment, and the subsequent effect on the labor market was a bifurcation of labor into “core” and “contingent” workers. The contrast between these groups was destructive—the core workers were able to benefit from the free markets while the contingent workers were at their mercy. The marginalization of contingency workers caused an increase in poverty rates and new forms of racial inequality transpired. Boxing’s traditional demographic, the poor, became alienated across racial lines and New York’s black and Latino populations became even more vulnerable to the feral tendencies of unfettered greed and exploitation.
The relationship between the urban poor and Gleason’s Gym is investigated across three chapters. Each is thematically different and illustrates the imaginative ways in which the poor and predominantly black and Latino minorities utilize the gym, and boxing, and carve out their “own” space in New York. It becomes clear that the gym space operates in contrast to the wider political ideology of self-responsibility and individualism. For example, some boxers recast boxing as work and concentrate on remolding their bodies away from the image of failures of capitalism. Relationships formed in the gym help them enter or re-enter the wage labor workforce and while some try and follow the archetypal ‘worker’ route, others devote themselves to non-capitalist success and form non-economic identities and legacies of which they can be proud. The overriding conclusion from these three chapters is a sense that although boxing is an individual sport, the relationships forged within the gym “focus on sociality, collectivity, and social support” (p. 88)—a responsibility abandoned by the state and private enterprise.
In Chapter 5, Trimbur turns her attention to the women in Gleason’s Gym. As expected, Gleason’s Gym is a heavily sexualized space: “heteronormative suppositions about gender confront women in the gym at every turn. They are excluded de facto from the community and from the sport and have to fight for their inclusion” (p. 115). This sexist space and hypermasculine sport are in direct opposition to women’s attitudes towards boxing and their principled intrusion. To succeed, they employ a number of tactics to help them negotiate and cope with the hostile space. Again, Trimbur establishes numerous points of analysis—including how women navigate administering pain—and concludes, with nuance, that women are using boxing to fight against patriarchal oppression, and form new identities in contrast to societal norms and the sexist opinions of numerous male members of Gleason’s Gym.
In the final chapter, Trimbur investigates the position and effect of white-collar boxers in Gleason’s Gym. The authentic boxing experience sought by white-collar boxers materializes as an inauthentic experience. The trainers allow the boxers to “feel” they are experiencing the real thing but in reality they are sold a romanticized version of boxing. In this economic transaction, the “client,” as the trainers and Trimbur pejoratively label the white-collar boxers, seek out “shitty gyms” (p. 137) with “killer looking” (p. 137) poor racialized minorities. Trimbur’s analysis of the transaction is scathing and ruthless. The boxing gym takes on a new role: rather than being a social springboard, or a space to reshape identities, it is re-established as an institution at the bottom of an exclusive hierarchical society. The trainers and amateur boxers become a commodity pushed in to a “servile position” (p. 140) because “blackness is valued and exchanged” (p. 141) and this is the very thing white collar boxers “buy”, and in turn, exploit.
In the final two chapters, Trimbur shows that women and white-collar boxers join the gym as a response to the pressures and opportunities of postindustrial neoliberalism. They are welcomed at the gym because their fees support the institution’s perceived and more authentic purpose, and although this review has given relatively equal attention to Trimbur’s analysis of the three themes, it is important to note that the poor Black and Latino men are always at the center of this book; how they feel, what they think, and how they act frame each chapter. Because this demographic is central to the chapters on women and white-collar boxers, there is something of an analytical shift; the subjects, women and white-collar boxers, are no longer the lens to criticize postindustrial neoliberalism. Through these contemporary gym users, Trimbur’s target is replaced by an analysis of the hierarchical power relations between women and white-collar boxers and the traditional boxers. The postindustrial neoliberal framework remains, but the critique of it is defocused, and refocused on mechanisms that it facilitates. However, this shift allows the data to convey the harshness of life for those marginalized by ideologies, structures, and day-to-day interactions.
Nevertheless, the data hide the effect of capitalism on female and white-collar boxers. Arguably, their agency is limited to micro level decisions: what gyms they train at; what cars they drive; and what jobs they take. At the meso and macro levels, their agency is perhaps just as fictional—but the reader is left to wonder what role Gleason’s Gym plays in the face of this. There are glimpses of their vulnerability: for example, white-collar boxers admit to feeling emasculated by their work, but still their agency remains. If Trimbur had kept postindustrial neoliberalism in her sights, their lack of agency may have been more evident—but by focusing on the effects of their actions, C. Wright Mills’ (1959/2000) conceptual ‘Cheerful Robot’ is materializing.
By illustrating that white-collar boxers have more freedom than the poor men of color in the gym, and by demonstrating how their decisions impinge upon the freedom of other social groups, Trimbur stumbles across what Mills calls “a point of intervention.” With Trimbur’s extremely critical analysis of white-collar boxers, the reader begins to understand that history is not being made behind their backs; they are making history and are becoming Cheerful Robots in the process. Mills (1959/2000) begs social scientists to confront Cheerful Robots: he argues it is society’s greatest responsibility. By staying focused on the poor men of color and their oppression, Trimbur confronts the Cheerful Robot and with this exemplary sociology book she will generate discussion that may discourage some Cheerful Robots from making any more unwanted history.
Well written, this book is not overloaded by academic jargon. Trimbur presents original findings about boxing and offers original and contextualized analyses. The amateurs, women, and white-collar boxers provide Trimbur with a place to regenerate the moral fiber of literature in boxing and in the sociology of sport. Trimbur “represents the interests of humanity—interests in keeping at bay both state despotism and market tyranny” (Burawoy, 2005: 369) and that is why her book is particularly valuable.