The prizefighter's three bodies

Abstract

Based on three years of participant observation and apprenticeship in a black boxing gym on Chicago's South Side, this article reconstructs the prizefighter's lived sense and experience of corporeal instrumentality, aesthetics, and ethics ‐ the ‘three bodies’ that together define the distinctive, ‘aisthesis’ of pugilistic practice as corporeal craft and ghetto trade. This serves to argue that professional boxing offers not so much an opportunity for economic betterment as the promise of social difference and even transcendence: the professional ethic of sacrifice enables boxers to tear themselvesfrom the everyday world and to create a moral and sensual universe ‘sui generis’ wherein a transcendent masculine self may be constructed.