Los tres cuerpos del boxeador profesional

Abstract

Based on thee yeards of participante observation and apprenticeship in a black boxing gym on Chicago's South Side, this article reconstructs the prizefighter's lived sense and experience of corporeal instrumentality, aesthetics, and ethics - the 'three bodies' that togheter define the distinctive 'aisthesis' of pugilistic practice as corporeal craft and ghetto trade. This serves to argue that professional boxing offers not so much an opportunity for economic betterment as the promise of social difference and even transcendence: the professional ethic of sacrifice enables boxers to tear themselves from the everday world and to create a moral and sensual universe 'sui generis' wherein a transcendent masculine self may be constructed.