Register
Register here for the annual meeting and to begin or renew an ASA membership
Register here to submit a proposal through the ASA's 2012 submission site.
Register here for JHU Press and ASA membership services, including online access to American Quarterly and the Encyclopedia of American Studies Online.Register here to join an ASA community. Only current ASA members may contribute to the community blogs. Registration is not required to submit display or text ads or news and events or to view many pages. We will refuse posts that are not of professional interest to ASA members.
Click here for membership FAQ's
Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
By University | By Year
Benita, Heiskanen . "Fighting Identities: The Body in Space and Place," University of Texas at Austin, August 2004, .
“Fighting Identities: The Body in Space and Place” combines a historical, a theoretical, and an ethnographic approach in examining the occupational culture of professional boxing as a locus for ethnoracial, class, and gender formations. Contextualized within the history of pugilism, the bulk of the research springs from interviews with a community of Latino boxers who grew up and began boxing in East Austin, Texas from the 1970s onward. The research situates the boxers’ life-stories within a theoretical framework of the body in space and place, while a four-year ethnographic sojourn inside Texas prizefighting complements the analysis with a participant observation component. The focus is on how the athletes negotiate the tension between individual agency and ideological control within various pugilistic and societal settings; how their collective status as Latino fighters is deliberated within global sporting networks; and how boxing simultaneously enables challenging various power dynamics, as it reflects existing ethnoracial, class, and gender politics in society at large.
The discussion links prizefighting and identity formations as spatially determined processes, delineating the boxing body as a site of knowledge and various locations within the pugilistic occupational culture as sites for being and becoming. The dissertation argues that a continual relationship between space and place turning space into place by appropriating space as one’s own becomes central to Latino boxers raison d’etre. Amidst the existing social hierarchies, “Fighting Identities” come to derive meanings through space, while space becomes racialized through geographically determined boundaries of socioeconomic concentrations of power in place, corresponding to such everyday parameters as ethnoracial segregation and exclusionary class and gender politics in the United States. Alongside the increasing Latinization of 21st century prizefighting, the sport is diverging from its Northeastern origins into a distinctly Southwestern phenomenon.
Quick Links
American Quarterly [official journal site]
American Quarterly [editorial site]
Encyclopedia of American Studies
Encyclopedia of American Studies [editorial site]