Bodily Reorientations Within Racial Imaginaries: Learning Boxing Styles in the United States

ABSTRACT Boxing styles typify interrelated sets of fighting techniques and combative characters. Because boxers acquire a style through bodily practice and styles in the United States are often tied to racialized social groups, an ethnography of the acquisition of boxing styles presents an opportunity to examine how youth, in conjunction with other social actors in the boxing world, reorient their bodies within racial imaginaries. Bridging experiential and psychoanalytic approaches, this framework sheds light on the intersectional nature of race, gender, nationality, class, and other embodied social differences. Theorizing bodily reorientations within racial imaginaries invites us to reconsider the relationship between embodied difference, culture, and race. More than a social construct, racial experience can be a meaningful source for people to reimagine themselves in constructive ways against societies where racialized bodies are stigmatized and devalued.