Moral Guardians, Miniskirts and Nicola Adams: The Changing Media Discourse on Women’s Boxing

Abstract

Messner states that ‘violent sports as spectacle provide linkages among men in the project of the domination of women’ (1990, p. 213). Boyle and Haynes (2000, p. 137) claim that ‘nowhere is the metaphor of the male body as weapon or fighting machine more evident than in the sport of boxing’. Lindner (2012, p. 464) argues that ‘boxing has been the last “bastion of masculinity” within the Olympic content’. Given these appraisals of boxing, what is the feminist approach to understanding women’s desire to box? Cultural feminists are most likely to oppose women’s boxing on the grounds that violence has been one of the most prominent factors in women’s oppression. Conversely, physical feminists (e.g. McCaughey, 1997) argue that boxing can be empowering and has the potential to change gender scripts, which is part of the endeavour for women’s liberation. Hargreaves (2003) explains that boxing is at odds with the supposed ‘essence’ of femininity and blurs the traditional male/female boundaries. She argues that women are taught to be vulnerable, passive and not aggressive, whereas women who box ‘are empowering themselves by appropriating male symbols of physical capital and shifting gender relations of power’ (Hargreaves, 2003, p. 219).