Muay Thai gym friendships extend into private life, not just public tolerance.
Evidence
Andrea: I made friends with a lot of straight people..,.. I dont really hang out with straight people! Laughs … Yeah … before I came here i didnt really have any straight friends … but now! I expanded my horizons and feel straight people aint too bad! I might go straight pride to celebrate them! [Queer Italian fighter] … Mo grew-up and went to school in a part of East London where all of his friends were “Bengali and Muslim”. It was only through training to fight that he “met people from all backgrounds” and became aware of alternative worldviews and cultures, which is something he posits as a universally positive thing. Were it not for him pursuing the sport, he would not have been exposed to difference in such a way. Of course Andrea’s account is somewhat light-hearted, but over the years they have developed a close friendship with Filip, a Polish fighter in his early 40s, whom Andrea would never have met outside the space (and vice-versa) due to the social worlds they inhabited. Yet now, not only do they train and spar together, but they also have beers together after training and regularly socialise outside of the gym, demonstrating how people carry their localised convivial friendships outside of the space with them; once more, this is very different from acknowledging the Other in public and then living a segregated private life, as many people do. Instead, here we witness people’s lives become intertwined both inside and outside of the gym, which speaks to something far richer. — Amit Singh, “Carnal conviviality” and the end of…, 46
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the ‘civil indifference’ / conviviality literature on cross-group contact spaces, and to the ADDENDUM-adjacent discussion of shared practice spaces as infrastructure for bridging social distance. — connects to: Muay Thai gyms’ partner-based training structure fosters mutualistic bonds that override ascriptive difference. — Amit Singh, “Carnal conviviality” and the end of…, 55; Cross-ethnic friendships formed during fight training persist beyond the gym into fighters’ daily lives — Amit Singh, “Carnal conviviality” and the end of…, 56
- corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — Amit Singh, “Carnal conviviality” and the end of…, 46
Related
- Muay Thai gyms’ partner-based training structure fosters mutualistic bonds that override ascriptive difference. (similarity 0.89)
- Cross-ethnic friendships formed during fight training persist beyond the gym into fighters’ daily lives (similarity 0.86)
- Shared combat training can erase racial and gendered hierarchies through bodily friendship. (similarity 0.82)
- Physical training to fight can forge bonds that resist racial thinking (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- Cross-ethnic friendships formed during fight training persist beyond the gym into fighters’ daily lives
#exemplifies(0.95) — Amit Singh, “Carnal conviviality” and the end of…, 56 - Muay Thai gyms’ partner-based training structure fosters mutualistic bonds that override ascriptive difference.
#corroborates(0.85) — Amit Singh, “Carnal conviviality” and the end of…, 55