| Women's boxing will make its long-awaited debut at the Olympic Games in 2012. The sport has seen a resurgence of interest and participation since the early 1990s, however, it has also garnered much controversy including a recent push to require elite female amateur athletes to wear boxing skirts during competition. Such throwbacks to gender essentialism are inline with popular cultural criticism of women's participation in what is still referred to as the "manly art of boxing.";In analyzing women's participation in boxing from a cultural and sociological perspective, considerations such as gender theory, ritual and pollution, masculine domination, habitus, and cyborg theory are examined for clues on how best to situate a masculine-gendered sport such as boxing in an era of changing gender ideologies. |
