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Fighting Identity

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Fighting Identity Synopsis

This book is an immersive ethnographic account of how fighters at a Polish-owned Muay Thai/kickboxing gym in East London seek to reject prior identity markers in favour of constructing one another as the same, as fighters, a category supposedly free from the negative assumptions and limitations associated with prior ascriptions such as race, class, gender and sexuality.

It explores questions of subjectivity and identity by examining how and why fighters sought to disavow identity, which involved casting aside pre-established ways of thinking, feeling and acting about constructed differences to forge deep bonds of carnal convivial friendships. Yet, this book argues that becoming a fighter is highly socially contingent and remains subject to rupture due to the durability of taken-for-granted thinking about race, gender and sexuality, which, if drawn upon, could pull people out of the category of fighter and back into longer-standing durable categories. This book deploys Butler's theory of performativity and Bourdieu's conceptualisation of habitus to explore the context-specific ways people transgress identity whilst remaining attentive to the constrained nature of agency.

The book is intended for undergraduate and master's students on courses looking at race, racism, gender, social anthropology, sociology and sociology of sport.

About This Edition

ISBN: 9781032279213
Publication date:
Author: Amit Singh
Publisher: Routledge an imprint of Taylor & Francis
Format: Paperback
Pagination: 164 pages
Series: Routledge Advances in Ethnography
Genres: Ethnic studies
Feminism and feminist theory
Gender studies, gender groups
Social theory
Sociology: sport and leisure
Social and cultural anthropology
Research methods: general
Sports

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