Fighting Identity: An Ethnography of Kickboxing in East London

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.

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.

The book is intended for undergraduate and master’s students on courses looking at race, racism, gender, social anthropology, sociology and sociology of sport.

Amit Singh has a PhD in Psychosocial Studies from Birkbeck, University of London. He has written on questions of race and subjectivity and is involved in public education projects such as the Connected Sociologies Curriculum Project. He also runs a 26-week supplementary sociology enrichment curriculum - ＂Race, Class & Society＂ - across two sixth forms in South and East London, as well as an annual summer school.