Fight Sports and American Masculinity: Salvation in Violence from 1607 to the Present

Abstract

In the preface to Fight Sports and American Masculinity Christopher David Thrasher argues strongly in favor of integrating a serious examination of the relationship of masculinity and forms of violence into sports history. He promises even more—a survey of four hundred years of “fight sports” (boxing and various forms of wrestling and martial arts) and an elaboration on how “popular culture provides a place of cultural negotiation where Americans set boundaries of citizenship, race and gender” (p. 2). Thrasher also places his study in a wider geographic context, underlining that knowledge about fight sports (and fighters, too) often travel beyond national boundaries. The book is chronologically structured. An introduction provides a prehistory of global fight sports before chapter 1 outlines the roles of wrestling, pugilism, and gouging in early North America until 1810. Thrasher proceeds with two chapters with more or less parallel time frames, each spanning from the mid-nineteenth century well into the twentieth century: chapter 2 explains the rise of formalized boxing until 1915, and chapter 3 discusses the arrival and dissemination of Asian martial arts in the United States until World War II.