Fighting Identity

<p>This book is an immersive ethnographic account of how fighters at a Polish-owned Muay Thai/kickboxing gym in East London seek to reject prior identity markers in favour of constructing one another as the same, as fighters, a category supposedly free from the negative assumptions and limitations associated with prior ascriptions such as race, class, gender and sexuality.</p><p>It explores questions of subjectivity and identity by examining how and why fighters sought to disavow identity, which involved casting aside pre-established ways of thinking, feeling and acting about constructed differences to forge deep bonds of carnal convivial friendships. Yet, this book argues that becoming a fighter is highly socially contingent and remains subject to rupture due to the durability of taken-for-granted thinking about race, gender and sexuality, which, if drawn upon, could pull people out of the category of fighter and back into longer-standing durable categories. This book deploys Butler's theory of performativity and Bourdieu's conceptualisation of habitus to explore the context-specific ways people transgress identity whilst remaining attentive to the constrained nature of agency. </p><p>The book is intended for undergraduate and master's students on courses looking at race, racism, gender, social anthropology, sociology and sociology of sport. </p>