Review of Chapter 6 of Sport and Crime

 Chapter 6 Cultural Criminology, Sport and Transgression

The chapter opens with Ferrell et al’s (2008) discussion in cultural criminology of informal fighting which opens that invitation to cultural criminology. But Millward et al note that the connection directly to sport is not made. This chapter rides the contradictory ambiguous line between sport and violence. This is fully in line with my work.

Millward et al examine the history of cultural criminology. My own journey involves studying sociology and popular culture as an Open University student on courses imbued with the work of Stuart Hall and feel all of my criminology has taken account of cultures.

This culminated in my PhD on joyriding set in the context of the wider ‘car culture’. I did not use the term ‘edgework’ but did cite Lyng and Mitchell (1995). Millward et al focus on work on BASE jumpers and I make something of parkour and its move from outlaw status to ‘sport’ considered for the Olympics.

Millward et al go onto consider Mixed Martial Arts and even Bare-Knuckle Boxing. Clearly these tread that ambiguous line between legitimate and illegitimate violence (see also Dale Spencer and Karen Corteen’s chapters in Power Played on MMA and wrestling respectively.

A brief reflection on homosociality in boxing and MMA

As some of you might have noticed this is not just a review of Deborah Jump’s excellent The Criminology of Boxing, Violence and Desistance but often a restatement of some of my own work. Indeed an attempt to clarify in my own mind some of these issues. Please join in on here or twitter. This little inter-round ‘ring girl’(?) does not relate to any particular chapter but to the theme of homosociality which I detect throughout but goes unnamed as far as I can determine currently.

I offer no definition of my own other than to say I disliked the all male grammar school I attended, much of the all male Scouts and rugby. I see I only used the term once in my PhD, in a discussion on the extent of homophobia amongst the boys and young men.

A quick look on Google Scholar for ‘homosociality boxing’ through up a number of items and I was intrigued by the following.

Bird’s (1996) WELCOME TO THE MEN'S CLUB Homosociality and the Maintenance of Hegemonic Masculinity is clearly a starting point.  She notes:

The men who described themselves as less competitive (or noncompetitive), on the other hand, explained that they considered the intensity with which other men engaged in competitions (especially sports) as relatively unimportant for them- selves. At the same time, however, these men recognized the expectations of masculinity to be competitive. One man explained, Guys don't know what it means not to be competitive. Even those men who tell you that competition is silly know they have to [compete]. It's like otherwise you're gonna get walked.

Silly me, I’m doing it now.

I very much like Ungar’s recent PhD on The Boxing Discourse in Late Georgian England, 1780-1820: A Study in Civic Humanism, Gender, Class and Race which makes extensive use of the term. His understanding of the hegemonic seems to accord with my own. For instance, ‘Politeness was “French” and foreign; boxing was “English” (p74). 

Stenius (2015) also addresses homosociality in The Body in Pain and Pleasure An Ethnography of Mixed Martial Arts.

Doubly interesting is Jennifer Ruth Lewis-Vidler PhD on Traveller, Boxer and Fascist: The Identities of Joe Beckett which deploys the concept liberally and has material on Tyson Fury.

recommending ‘Fighting is the Most Real and Honest Thing’ by Brent and Kraska

You could see this as cultural criminology, sport sociology, part of the sociology of masculinity; here I'm claiming it for sports criminology.


‘Fighting is the Most Real and Honest Thing’ Violence and the Civilization/Barbarism Dialectic

1. John J. Brent^* and

1. Peter B. Kraska

* Doctoral Fellow, University of Delaware, Department of Criminology/Sociology, Center for Drug and Alcohol Studies, Newark, DE 19716, USA; JBrent@udel.edu; P.B. Kraska, School of Justice Studies, Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY, USA, Peter.Kraska@eku.edu.

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the activity of ‘cage-fighting’ has attracted massive audiences and significant attention from media and political outlets. Underlying the spectacle of these mass-consumed events is a growing world of underground sport fighting. By offering more brutal and less regulated forms of violence, this hidden variant of fighting lies at the blurry and shifting intersection between licit and illicit forms of recreation. This paper offers a theoretical and ethnographic exploration of the motivations and emotive frameworks of these unsanctioned fighters. We find that buried within the long-term process towards greater civility rest the seeds for social unrest, individual rebellion and ontological upheaval. By revealing the dialectical relationship between contemporary mechanisms of control and these uncivil performances, we argue these transgressions are a visceral reaction to today’s highly rationalized modes of state and social governance. More broadly, we attempt to understand the interrelationship between contemporary controls and sport fighting as a microcosm of the long-running struggle between civility and barbarism.