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Dale C. Spencer, Come Out Swinging: The Changing World of Boxing in Gleason's Gym By Lucia Trimbur Princeton University Press. 2013. 224 pages. $27.95 cloth, Social Forces, Volume 94, Issue 3, March 2016, Page e65, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sou021
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Since the landmark publication of Loïc Wacquant's ethnography of boxing in Body and Soul nearly ten years ago, there have been a number of ethnographic works following his lead and demonstrating the sociological insights that can be gained through the study of combat sports and martial arts. In this line of works, Lucia Trimbur's Come Out Swinging serves as a superb example of the many insights regarding contemporary Western postindustrial life that can be gained through an ethnography of boxing. Clearly a skilled writer, Trimbur smoothly oscillates between individual narratives, detailed field notes, archival materials, and theoretical reflections throughout the text. More than anything else, Come Out Swinging exposes the social experience of postindustrialism and how and why people construct identities in such circumstances working with and on their bodies.
Trimbur's ethnography took place in the vaunted Gleason's Boxing Gym in New York City. While that is her primary research site, her vast knowledge of the sport and the specific history of the gym is immediately apparent to the reader. She reveals that the gym began as a working-class male sanctuary, but has changed since the 1960s, when women and people of different class and racial backgrounds began to take up boxing both as a pastime and as a profession. Through a historical overview and contemporary vision of the gym, she shows how new social practices, social relations, and relations of power emerged while novel spaces of interracial, interclass, and inter-gender contact and communication were manufactured in the past four decades.
