ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins with the primacy of the visual and the visible within the framing device of the ring, which provides a synthesis of the public and personal spheres condensed within the image. It focuses on ways of knowing and addresses some of the big debates about the problem of methods in researching gender identities in boxing. The book also focuses on the status of bodies in the processes of identification. It looks at the problem of bodies in the making of the self and reviews some of the literature on theories of the body, before going on to develop a notion of embodiment that encompasses cultural and gender differentiation. The book engages explicitly with the 'attraction of repulsion' which characterizes boxing, its spectacles and the interpellation of subjects through spectatorship.
