ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the ways in which the routine and the dramatic combine, along with the personal investments that are made in the public displays of boxing in order to evaluate the extent to which boxing identities, especially masculinities, are discursively produced and reconstructed. It also explores how boxing brings together public and personal stories in the reconstruction of masculinities. The chapter brings together different symbolic systems, including stories and pictures, in the making of identities. It includes a discussion of the contemporary phenomenon of celebrity, as one of the most visual and visible aspects of contemporary sporting cultures and some of the ways. Boxing offers an example of representational processes in play in popular culture, illustrating well the constitutive dimensions of representation, bringing together different symbolic and discursive systems. Boxing's myths and legends are constitutive of gendered identities with particular resonance for masculinity and those who invest in these masculinities.
