Rings of Dissent: Boxing, Performance, and Resistance in the Late-Stage American Empire

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This panel brings together the editors and a selection of contributing authors of the edited anthology, Rings of Dissent: Boxing and the Performance of Rebellion (University of Illinois Press, 2025), for an engaging authors-meets-readers session. Rings of Dissent explores the brilliance and contradictions, liberatory possibilities, resistance, and complicity that exist in professional boxing. Rings of Dissent argues that subversive and often contradictory performance practices are everywhere in boxing.

Rings of Dissent situates professional boxers within a capitalistic and neoliberal sports culture, reflecting how boxers both challenge and uphold the idea of an apolitical sporting arena. The performative political actions that encompass boxing culture require scholars to engage in new ways of listening, reading, analyzing, interpreting, and writing. In a series of essays and interviews by notable and emerging scholars, Rings of Dissent draws attention to the cultural politics and performances of marginalized boxers to reveal the structures of power and practices of agency that are always at work around Black, Brown, and queer bodies. Rings of Dissent imagines the boxing ring as a unique and generative site for examining the performance of race, ethnicity, citizenship, gender, and sexuality as well as power and resistance.

Rings of Dissent is interested in the untold stories and performances of underappreciated and under studied boxers. Common are the tales of Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, and Julio Cesar Chavez, which this book aims to deviate from to highlight the performances of resistance by a handful of important and overlooked boxing dissenters. We invoke Robin D.G. Kelley’s seminal text, Race Rebels, to underscore our understanding of performing dissent in boxing as we recognize that the meaning and impact of boxers’ performances happen in relation to the social, historical, and political moment. Political acts “do make a difference, whether intended or not” by the performances of dissent enacted by the boxers who are examined in this anthology. Whether fighters intentionally create counternarratives and counter-spaces is not where we draw the line. Instead, we focus on examining the social context that renders these actions and performances of dissent as politically significant.

The history of boxing is defined by the ubiquity and entrenched nature of resistance and opposition. Boxing has always been a place where the marginalized and the left-behind have fought for a place at the table. Rings of Dissent is a representation of this understanding and what Sports Scholar Ben Carrington calls the critical paradigm of race and sport, which is an effort to theorize and situate sport “as a site of contestation, resistance, and creative freedom.”

This panel invites conference attendees to engage with the editors, contributing authors, and a guest professional boxer at the intersection of American Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Sport Studies, exploring how sport reveals broader issues of power, identity, and resistance in late-stage American empire. By challenging the notion of an apolitical sporting arena, the discussion seeks to inspire new ways of thinking about sport and boxing as a site for critical inquiry.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Panelists

• Rudy Mondragón, Loyola Marymount University

• Gaye Theresa Johnson, University of California-Los Angeles

• David Leonard, California State University, Chico

• Lucia Trimbur, City University of New York

• Javon Johnson, University of Nevada-Las Vegas

• Priscilla Leiva, Loyola Marymount University

Biographical Information

Rudy Mondragón (Rings of Dissent Editor) is an assistant professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University. His current project, The Brutal Economy of Boxing, examines the exploitative political economy of boxing while also highlighting how fighters maintain dignity and enact resistance through creative ring entrance performances. Mondragón has published in Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, Journal of Sports History, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, and Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies. He earned his PhD in Chicana/o Studies at UCLA.

Gaye Theresa Johnson (Rings of Dissent Editor) is the author of Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement (UC Press, 2015) and co-editor with Alex Lubin of Futures of Black Radicalism (Verso 2017). She is Associate Professor of African American Studies and Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, where she writes and teaches on race, cultural politics, and freedom struggles.

David J. Leonard (Rings of Dissent Editor) is the author of Playing While White Privilege and Power on and off the Field (University Washington Press) and After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness (SUNY Press, 2012) and co-editor of Visual Economies of/in Motion: Sport and Film (Peter Lang, 2006), and Commodified and Criminalized: New Racism and African Americans in Contemporary Sports (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011). He is Professor in the Department of Multicultural and Gender Studies at California State University Chico, where he writes and teaches about issues of anti-black racism, media culture, inequality, and the criminal justice system.

José M. Alamillo is professor of Chicana/o Studies at California State University Channel Islands (CSUCI). His research focuses on Mexican American cultural history with a focus on labor, immigration, gender, leisure, and sports. He is the author of Making Lemonade out of Lemons: Mexican American Labor and Leisure in a California Town (2006) and co-author of Latinos in U.S. Sport: A History of Isolation, Cultural Identity, and Acceptance (2011), Deportes: The Making of a Sporting Mexican Diaspora (Rutgers University Press, 2020). He is currently researching Sports during the Chicano/a Movement in the United States.

Priscilla Leiva is an Associate Professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University where she teaches courses in sports studies, urban studies and U.S. history. She is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the relationship between stadiums, race and civic identity in Los Angeles. She co-founded Chavez Ravine: An Unfinished Story with Palo Verde resident and lifelong activist Carol Jacques. Her public humanities work includes collaborations with the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, Imagining America, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Boyle Heights Museum.

Javon Johnson is an Associate Professor and Director of African American & African Diaspora Studies at UNLV, with an appointment in Gender & Sexuality Studies. His work explores performance, blackness, black feminist and queer theory, masculinity, and ethnography. Johnson is the author of Killing Poetry: Blackness and the Making of Slam and Spoken Word Communities and co-editor of The End of Chiraq: A Literary Mixtape. A renowned spoken word poet and three-time national poetry slam champion, he has also published Ain’t Never Not Been Black and appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, CNN’s United Shades of America, and more.

Lucia Trimbur is Associate Professor of Sociology and American Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY) and a Global Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her work focuses on the relationships among embodied practices, perceptions of racial, class, and gender difference, and hierarchies of power. Her first book, Come Out Swinging: The Changing World of Boxing in Gleason's Gym, was published on Princeton University Press in 2013. She is currently working on her second book, Lights Out: The Creation of the Concussion Crisis, under contract with Columbia University Press, which looks at how rule changes in American football transform the play of the game as well as attitudes toward and investments in the sport.