At its best, boxing augments linear time. A round is only two to three tightly orchestrated and completely spontaneous minutes. The intensity stretches minutes into decades. Practiced movements — jabs, slips, uppercuts — connect fighters to bouts that happened in the past and will happen in the future. Sarah Deming, writer and former New York Golden Gloves boxer, describes the sport’s temporal disruption as “ring time,” rather than “life time.”
In this alternative spacetime, a fighter can organize the sport’s constituent parts into endless combinations while their opponent does the same. This is a somatic process drawing on hours, days, and years of practice. Sulu LeoNimm, a theater artist and boxer, describes this as a process that allows the fighter to “push out of our planning brain, into a space that is more interesting.”
For my (admittedly half-assed) boxing practice, leaving the planning brain has been key. If PTSD is a reordering of time where the past doesn’t stay in the past, boxing time puts it back in order. Any physically exerting practice that requires total focus yields a similar outcome.
For me, boxing’s true appeal is its chaotic heap of symbols, which can also transport you through space and time. The cracked, black leather Everlast gloves I found in a Philly thrift shop have an aura of the city’s working-class populism and its begrudging inclusivity via sports fandom. Ninety-nine miles north, Hamilton Nolan describes the time-traveling quality of an underground fight on 46th Street in Manhattan: “[Even] without the clouds of cigar smoke of earlier eras,” it carries “a whiff of a nineteenth-century New York night out on the town to enjoy a little rat-baiting.” Because of a complicated interweaving of nineteenth-century Russian colonial expansion, Cold War politics, and Reagan-era immigration policies, lots of American fighters have last names that remind me of where I was born, a place to which I likely won’t be able to return.
I am not alone in mining boxing for potent symbolism. Authoritarians of all stripes — who excel at weaponizing working-class culture to gain and hold power — have long recognized boxing’s potency. On the international scale, President Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia has tried to rebuild the (brutal) Soviet amateur boxing training system that feeds into the Olympics while taking over the International Boxing Association (IBA) to “uphold Russian soft power.” More recently, Saudi Arabia has sought control over the professional side of the sport in a multi-billion dollar sportswashing exercise. Closer to home, police departments across the United States use the Police Athletic League’s boxing classes and mentorship programs to exercise soft power over the communities they police.
Central to boxing’s potential for fascist co-optation is what sociologist Kath Woodward calls the “heroic narrative” of the absolute triumph of a singular, cis, non-disabled male body. In American boxing this narrative is deeply racialized, epitomized by the 1910 white pogroms that followed Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson’s defeat of James “The Great White Hope” Jeffries. A half-century later, Muhammed Ali would subvert this white nationalism by making a stand against the Vietnam War part of his own heroic narrative.
Johnson triumphed when boxing was modernizing, with legalized prizefighting regulated by new sanctioning bodies. The sport had already undergone a classed split between amateur (Olympic-style, leisure-class) and professional (monetized, working-class) fights. Legalization and government regulation made the sport safer. But legal and medical rules protecting sanctioned fights from female and gender non-conforming bodies also hardened its hegemonic masculinity. Presaging moral panics to come, local legislatures during the late Progressive Era began banning and prosecuting female fighters, especially those boxing for money.
Legalization and government regulation made boxing safer. But it also hardened its hegemonic masculinity.
In its more chaotic eighteenth- and nineteenth-century form, the sport was male-coded, but not exclusively so. Female fighters would periodically grace the pages of the National Police Gazette, a bawdy variety newspaper that dominated boxing at the turn of the twentieth century. The Gazette covered fights at Harry Hill’s on Crosby and Houston Streets, a downtown, working-class theater and saloon dubbed “the best of the worst places,” not unlike the contemporary scene described by Nolan. In the late 1890s, papers like the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the Daily Argus News, and The World were equal parts scandalized and enamored with Gussie Freeman, a fighter from Greenpoint who was “regarded as the best man on the docks” of Newtown Creek, “defeated men and women at the prize-ring,” and ran her own saloon on the Brooklyn waterfront by 1899.
Female fighters attempted to enter boxing circuits throughout most of the twentieth century and were violently rejected. By the 1970s, fighters like Jackie “The Female Ali” Tonawanda and Marian “Lady Tyger” Trimiar were making space for themselves in amateur fights. But professional sanctioning bodies like the New York State Athletic Commission (NYSAC) were open about their desire to protect the sport’s hegemonic masculinity. In her history of women’s boxing, writer Melissa Smith quotes from a 1975 NYSAC affidavit justifying its rejection of Tonawanda and Trimiar’s professional boxing license applications: “[Boxing] is the manly art of self-defense. The licensing of women as professional boxers would at once destroy the image that attracts serious boxing fans and bring professional boxing into disrepute, to the financial detriment of those whose livelihoods depend on this activity.”
Trimiar, who would later stage a hunger strike demanding respect and pay equity for female fighters, made her amateur debut at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights. Channeling the significance of her future fights, Trimiar told a New York Times reporter: “I’d like to be a pro fighter, but if I can’t maybe I can open the door for somebody else. This is my body and this is my life.”
Tonawanda and Trimiar forced the NYSAC to grant female fighters professional boxing licenses in 1978, even though mainstream amateur organizations did not begin to sanction women’s fights until the mid-1990s.
However, women’s visible reentry into boxing was framed by strict gender binary enforcement through the medicalized and legalistic policing of women’s bodies. Ever concerned with women’s wellbeing, the NYSAC and other sanctioning bodies required women to wear breast protectors, while other state commissions required pelvic protectors, pregnancy tests, and menstruation checks. The bulky and useless gear trained a generation of fighters to double down on head blows, increasing the likelihood of long-term neurological consequences associated with repeated concussions, including chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
In 2012, 108 years after the first modern Olympic games to be hosted in the United States excluded women’s boxing, the Summer Olympics in London allowed female athletes to fight. The competition included three women’s weight classes, compared to men’s seven. Topping out at middleweight (152-165 lbs), the rules limited the type of athletic body deemed presentable and safe. Further, the IBA, the sanctioning body that was responsible for overseeing boxing at the Olympics, required female athletes to wear skirts so audience members would be able to tell them apart from male fighters.
Despite the bullshit, the 2012 Olympics were a turning point that allowed female fighters access to the legacy-making heroic narrative. For Deming, Claressa Shields has captured that narrative by winning Olympic Gold in 2012 and holding on as the top pound-for-pound fighter in 2025. Shields, who grew up in the notoriously afflicted town of Flint, Michigan, got her heroic biopic last year. According to Deming, “the fact that there has been a Claressa is in itself a victory.”
But the 2012 skirt fiasco foreshadowed the provisional nature of women’s inclusion in professional and amateur fights and dovetailed with the frothing-at-the-mouth, fascistic attack on trans athletes. In 2023, the IBA disqualified Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting from the Women’s World Boxing Championships in New Delhi for failing an unspecified gender test. The disqualification came, mysteriously, after Khelif beat the previously undefeated Russian amateur boxer, Azalia Amineva. This incident spilled over into the 2024 summer Olympics when Anglophone transphobes trained their pitchforks on Khelif after she “punched too hard.” English-language analysis of the situation has framed J.K. Rowling and her terfy online friends as IBA’s useful idiots. But English-speaking transphobes weren’t accidentally duped by a corrupt, Gazprom-funded organization into brutally attacking a cis woman; they were willing participants in revanchist service of multiple authoritarianisms.
Khelif won Gold in the Olympics and in the court of public opinion.
Gleason’s Gym is a storied club that has followed New York’s working class from the Bronx to Manhattan, and eventually into Brooklyn. Today, it perches in Dumbo, a wormhole to Gussie Freeman’s Brooklyn waterfront. As Smith recounts in her book, the gym’s owner understood that there was a market for women’s boxing in the 1970s. When Gleason’s moved to Dumbo in 1985, the space was built out with a women’s locker room and word spread among female fighters that it was not a bad place to train. By the time Gleason alumna Dee Hamaguchi fought her way into New York Golden Gloves in 1995, the gym had a deep bench of both amateur and pro female fighters.
LeoNimm, who today trains at Gleason’s with Trans Boxing, notes the focused nature of the gym: People work on their technique with their coaches, there is not much cross-talk, but there is a quiet recognition of regulars. LeoNimm’s description, which resonates with me, stands in contrast to Barbara Ehrenreich’s description of the isolating nature of fitness culture practiced in gyms, mirroring the alienation of the American worker.
Boxing gyms offer a communal experience that stands in contrast to the market-fueled atomization that rightist ideologies seep into.
Ehrenreich’s critique predicted the conspiratorial, eugenicist partnership between the broader wellness industry and the American far-right. Boxing is in no way inoculated from the fascist creep. However, there is a way in which boxing gyms like this one offer a communal experience. The marginal position of femme bodies in a boxing ring, paired with the engagement and communication required to keep safe in what is still an unsafe sport, creates the social relations necessary for building solidarity.
The quiet recognition that LeoNimm observes at the gym reminds them of a New York quality eulogized by Samuel R. Delany’s 1999 Times Square Red, Times Square Blue: a rare loose, cross-class mingling in a semi-public space.
Oksana was born in one collapsing empire and now lives in a different one. You can find her writing about cities, housing, and historical memory at oksana.nyc.
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