Governing excess: Boxing, biopolitics and the body
| Published date | 01 November 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480619864310 |
| Date | 01 November 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480619864310
Theoretical Criminology
2020, Vol. 24(4) 689 –705
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480619864310
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Governing excess: Boxing,
biopolitics and the body
Jennifer Jane Hardes
Canterbury Christ Church University, UK
Abstract
During the late 18th to late 19th centuries, practices of duelling and prize fighting were
criminalized in Britain, while boxing remained legal. Through a genealogical method,
this article locates discourses, primarily law, medicine, policing and science, to trace
these mechanisms of criminalization and legalization. Focusing on the jurisdictions of
the United Kingdom and the United States, I argue that the legalization of boxing did
not simply emerge as a part of a ‘civilizing process’. Rather, I explain these processes of
criminalization and legalization in the context of biopolitical rationalities of governance.
In contrast to its contemporaries, boxing was rationalized as a scientific ‘sport’ that
fitted with wider biopolitical visions of public health and well-being: allegedly it did
not breed violence or threaten the public peace but was instead practised by skilled
technicians. However, the biopolitical management of human life within rational and
scientific form comes at a price: life’s ontological need for expression, and the drive
to experience and witness boxing’s corporeal excesses remains a ghostly presence
threatening to undo the sweet ‘science’.
Keywords
Biopolitics, boxing, social theory, sovereignty, violence
Introduction
Duelling, prize fighting and boxing were contested practices in a period of rapid social
change. Judicial duels, otherwise known as ‘trials by combat’, were publicly sanctioned
modes of punishment within a theological worldview that proclaimed the accused
Corresponding author:
Jennifer Jane Hardes, Sociology, Canterbury Christ Church University, North Holmes Road, Canterbury,
Kent, CT1 1QU, UK.
Email: jennifer.hardes@canterbury.ac.uk
864310TCR0010.1177/1362480619864310Theoretical CriminologyHardes
research-article2019
Article
690 Theoretical Criminology 24(4)
innocent or guilty in the eyes of God and the sovereign. Modern duels, imported from the
Continent in the late 16th century, succeeded judicial duels that concluded in England in
the 15th century. Though technically a criminal act, upper-class gentlemen partaking in
modern duels were typically granted exceptional status in law, avoiding conviction. If
duellists were punished, it was usually with a monetary fine. Prize fighting, by contrast,
while gambled on by these moneyed classes, was considered an activity of the delinquent
lower social echelons and held a firm ‘criminal’ status in law. Changes to the English law
in the late 18th to late 19th centuries saw the criminalization of duelling between ‘men
of honour’ and a final stamp down on the ‘brutal’ custom of prize fighting. However, one
activity, ‘boxing’, never did encounter the law in the same way.
Through a genealogical approach to historicizing crime and the construction of crimi-
nal subjects (e.g. Garland, 1997, 2014; Rafter, 2005), I explore how boxing plausibly
circumvented criminalization and emerged as a legitimate ‘sport’, in contrast to duelling
and prize fighting, which were cast as criminal and excessive. I aim to locate the dis-
courses of law, medicine, policing and science to trace these processes of criminalization
and legalization. As Foucault (1991: 82) writes: ‘The search for descent is not the erect-
ing of foundations: on the contrary, it disturbs what was previously thought immobile; it
fragments what was thought unified; its shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined
consistent with itself.’ Genealogy does not endeavour to produce a ‘true’ narrative,
though it ought to be credible and uphold the rigours of historical research evidence
(Castel, 1994). I selected historical evidence with the intent to present a plausible story
about the development of boxing with this genealogical aim in mind. I drew on pam-
phlets, news items, popular literature along with legal cases and statute from the late 18th
century to the present day, across the jurisdictions of the UK and the USA, to construct
this genealogy. Analysing archival and historical documents genealogically demon-
strates that the rationalization of boxing is not an inevitable result of historical processes.
I do not argue as others have elsewhere that boxing, and thus subsequent practices of
mixed martial arts (MMA), emerged as part of a long-term historical, ontologically dia-
lectical civilizing process (Brent and Kraska, 2013; Dunning, 1990; Elias, 1986; Sheard,
1997). Instead, I aim to understand how processes of criminalization and legitimation
emerged among contested knowledges produced through discursive regimes.
I argue that boxing was justified because it mapped onto, and attempted to contain
itself, within the scientific rationalities developed throughout the late 19th and the early
20th centuries. Three key developments made this possible. The first was the seculariza-
tion of medicine and the rise of a public health agenda. At the end of the 18th century, the
ascent of medical science contributed to the setting that enabled boxing to materialize as
a sanitized sport. The second was the rise of police sciences and its security agenda.
These two discursive regimes emerged in a period wherein medical practitioners oper-
ated increasingly as uniting bodies that intervened at the level of the population rather
than individual and, likewise, police emerged as key arbitrators of public health (Foucault,
2014). Finally, and most centrally to this article, were the disciplinary formations forged
by boxers: the ‘mundane technologies’ they employed, and the techniques they embod-
ied (see Downey, 2007). Boxing was championed through its rationalization as ‘scien-
tific’; it was technical, controlled and thus compatible with a ‘biopolitical’ public health
agenda. This health agenda and the scientific rationale of boxing also explicitly emerged
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