The tyranny of the male preserve

Within this paper I draw on short vignettes and quotes taken from a two-year ethnographic study of boxing to think through the continuing academic merit of the notion of the male preserve. This is an important task due to evidence of shifts in social patterns of gender that have developed since the idea was first proposed in the 1970s. In aligning theoretical contributions from Lefebvre and Butler to discussions of the male preserve, we are able to add nuance to our understanding of how such social spaces are engrained with and produced by the lingering grasp of patriarchal narratives. In particular, by situating the male preserve within shifting social processes, whereby certain men’s power is increasingly undermined, I highlight the production of space within which narratives connecting men to violence, aggression and physical power can be consumed, performed and reified in a relatively unrestricted form. This specific case study contributes to gender theory as an illustration of a way in which we might explore and understand social enclaves where certain people are able to lay claim to space and power. As such, I argue that the notion of the male preserve is still a useful conceptual, theoretical and political device especially when considered as produced by the tyranny of gender power through the dramatic representation and reification of behaviours symbolically linked to patriarchal narrations of manhood

Work and shoot: Professional wrestling and embodied politics

This article describes and conceptualises a period of auto-ethnographic research in which the author trained in the physical performance form of professional wrestling at a small wrestling school in East London (UK). The author describes his experiences of wrestling as a practice of cooperation, improvisation, and care for the other, which counterpoints the outwardly manifested antagonism and violence of the practice. In the argot of wrestling, the creation of the illusion of violence through cooperation is termed ‘work’, which stems from the association of wrestling with the culture of late 19th and early 20th-century carnivals and fairs. As a physical and embodied practice, work demonstrates an ethics of care, trust and openness to the other. The author reads his embodied observations of working against the labour economy of professional wrestling in order to theorise work as a practice of subversion and resistance. While the precarious labour economy of professional wrestling disciplines its workers into adopting certain dangerous and deleterious practices, the cooperative nature of the performance form practices and models a politics of friendship