From Fighting for Fitness to Brutal Bare Knuckle – A Deviant Leisure Perspective on the Phenomena of Unlicensed Boxing in England

• In Event: Deviant Leisure: Demand, Desire and the Harmful Marketplace

Abstract

This paper considers an array of different manifestations of unregulated boxing as competition and entertainment in England. The move from the institutionalised certainty of work toward an uncertain present characterised by increasing precariousness has become a problematic one for many young people. Those denizens of the working-class are now denied the traditional routes into adulthood of preceding generations. This experience is even more acute in a post-industrial English towns and cities which once had a strong industrialised base. Yet simultaneously, todays hedonistic, consumer society and its associated economies present an ever greater array of leisure activities for both individuals themselves, and consumers more broadly. In the sphere of entertainment and leisure, a spectrum of ‘boxing’ events from white collar and charity boxing to more extreme forms of bare knuckle fighting now provide a setting for recreational leisure. Drawing on ethnographic research undertaken in and around a range of unregulated ‘boxing’ events, this paper considers multifaceted forms of ‘unregulated boxing’ which (in some guises) are now being moved from the societal margins to the ‘mainstream’. Drawing on our observations and interviews, both in and around unlicensed fight events (and via gyms and training with fight participants), it considers unregulated boxing’s place from legal limbo to the out and out illegal via the perspective of criminological ethnography and ‘Deviant Leisure’.

Authors

• James Treadwell, Birmingham City University, UK

• Adam Lynes, Birmingham City University, UK