Inner-city boxing gyms appeal as ordered refuges from ghetto chaos.

Evidence

The interrelationship of resistance and domination has been a central theme for several sport scholars. Loic Wacquant (1992), for example, explains the appeal of boxing to young African-American men in Chicago by situating the sport in the socioecological context of African-American life in impoverished, inner-city Chicago. Boxing is appealing, according to Wacquant, not because it reflects the disorder and disorganized of the surrounding communities but rather because boxers and boxing coaches define themselves “in opposition to the ghetto” as “islands of stability and order,” “relatively selfenclosed site(s) for a protected sociability where one can find respite from the pressures of the street and ghetto,” a “buffer against the attributes and dangers of ghetto life” (1992:229). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2786

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Bourdieu’s field/habitus framework and to broader work on resistance-through-culture being constrained within domination.