Governing excess: boxing, biopolitics and the body

Theoretical Criminology (forthcoming)
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Abstract

During the late-eighteenth to late-nineteenth centuries, practices of duelling and prize fighting were criminalized in Britain, while boxing remained legal. Through a genealogical method, this paper 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’.

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The posthuman.Rosi Braidotti - 2013 - Malden, MA, USA: Polity Press.
Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.Michel Foucault - 2001 - In John Richardson & Brian Leiter (eds.), Nietzsche. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. (139-164).
Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy.Roberto Esposito - 2008 - Univ of Minnesota Press.
Society must be defended: lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76.Michel Foucault - 2003 - New York: Picador. Edited by Mauro Bertani, Alessandro Fontana, François Ewald & David Macey.

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