Abstract
In On Boxing (1987), Joyce Carol Oates claimed that ‘boxing is for men, and is about men, and is men’. Paradoxically, F.X. Toole made these lines the epigraph to a collection of stories containing the unforgettable ‘Million Dollar Baby’ (later a film), about a woman boxer. Modern boxing and its modernist and postmodernist literary representations raise urgent questions about gender, the body and the cultures of spectatorship. This paper explores some of these questions, looking at texts from Shaw and Djuna Barnes to Oates and Toole, placing them beside the histories of both men's and women's boxing in the modern period. At the close, it examines the emergence and success of Indian women boxers such as M.C. Mary Kom against a background of deprivation and neglect, asking what this might reveal about the culture of boxing itself.
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