This lecture looks at the ways that members of Gleason’s Gym, a boxing gym in postindustrial New York, use pugilistic training to answer back to forms of inequality, such as anti-black racism, class stratification, and gender subordination as well as to forge new identities and entertain themselves with capital from new markets. Each of the gym’s groups—poor men of color, middle-class white women, and wealthy white white-collar men—invests their own meanings in the gym’s culture, undertakes boxing training in different ways, and produces new lived experiences. This meaning-making helps people mediate the injuries of racial, class, and gender hierarchies. But it doesn’t change those hierarchies; rather it operates within them. Lucia Trimbur argues that this is the landscape of postindustrial New York City, offering gym members the ephemeral possibilities of new identities at the same time it packages and commodifies their lived experience.

Lucia Trimbur is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at John Jay College, the City University of New York (CUNY) and Doctoral Faculty in Criminal Justice at CUNY’s Graduate Center. She completed her doctoral degree in African American studies and sociology at Yale University. Her book, Come Out Swinging: The Changing World of Boxing in Gleason’s Gym, was published on Princeton University Press in August 2013.