The fight is universal and has nothing to do with gender … while it might be masculine, it is not about men. And if masculinity is so easy to imitate by way of two women boxing authentically, rather than flailingly, or as a joke, is masculinity so inviolate? (Mischa Mertz 1 )

The image of the phallus as power is widespread to the point of near-universality, all the way from tribal and early Greek fertility symbols to the language of pornography, where the penis is endlessly described as a weapon, a tool, a source of terrifying power. (Richard Dyer 2 )

I am totally opposed to women's boxing. A woman is a petite person, not to be knocked about. (Arthur Tunstall 3 )

When Diana Guzman walks into the boxing gym near the housing estate in which she lives to ask a trainer for lessons on how to box, she is immediately dismissed with the recommendation she try aerobics instead. In the dank wetness of the sweaty basement studio, amid the grunts of a group of young men working out, the male trainer's message to the teenage girl is clear: Diana is female and, therefore, can never participate in the male and inherently masculine arena of boxing. She is, by the very definition of her femaleness, bound by the 'baggage' of her biology.4 Like veteran detractor Arthur Tunstall in the Age some four years ago, the trainer reinforces in the young girl's psyche the commonly held notion that a woman is 'not to be knocked about'. At least, that is, when she is standing visible within the parameters of the ring, and not beyond the invisible walls of the all too often bloodied domestic front.

This scene from Girlfight 5 (2000) — Karyn Kusama's cinematic portrayal of a young woman's fight to fight — is currently being played out across boxing rings throughout the world as women boxers fight for the recognition and redefinition of their sport. Nowhere is this more apparent than in New South Wales, where it remains illegal for women to participate in either an amateur or professional match, or in any contest, display or exhibition of boxing skills.6

As an issue, the subject of women's boxing is regarded as of one of the sport's longest grudge matches, played out between the State's lawmakers and burgeoning female fighter lobby groups. Born out of a successful attempt by the Wran Labor Government in 1984 to stop a major kickboxing event at Sydney Town Hall, the NSW Boxing and Wrestling Control Act (1986) was first amended after the government decided it was not in the 'interest of good manners or decorum' for women to fight.7 As then Minister for Sport, Michael Cleary maintained in his 1986 address to parliament, 'the spectacle of women attacking each other' was simply not 'acceptable' to most people and women who persisted in fighting risked 'becoming freaks in some sort of Roman circus disguised as a sporting contest'.8 Some fifteen years or so later, section 62 (D) of the Act (1986) still rules against a woman's right to fight in the ring.9 Women who flout the law risk hefty fines and possible gaol sentences. Their promoters can face double the penalty. Meanwhile, the woman boxer's male counterpart continues to fight for unprecedented sums of money, sponsorship deals, endorsement packages and career advancement.

Entrenched in sexual discrimination, individual liberty and the notion of free will, the issue of women's boxing in NSW remains a contemporary problem in the State's legislation on leisure, sport and what women are lawfully allowed to do with their bodies. As it currently stands, NSW is the only state or territory in Australia that legally bans women from participating in a sport that, for many, is still seen as one of the last posts in which to celebrate male pride.

While stories of women working the ring are only just beginning to surface in mainstream culture, women have been boxing professionally for at least 100 years. Women's boxing was performed as a demonstration sport at the 1904 Olympics in St Louis, Missouri. Yet, despite the history, the public image of women in the ring remains closer to a perverted parody of masculinity than to the athleticism of such fighters as Anthony Mundine or Mike Tyson. Unlike a man who means business when he dons the gloves, a woman who stands ready to punch — whether 'de-feminised' by the bulk of her body or 'de-sexualised' by her shadowy gender — is generally cause for ridicule; a transgression of the 'natural' order of things and a vulgar attempt to be male.

In this paper, as part of an overall examination of the politics informing women's boxing, I return to questions that dominated the early years of feminism and which continue to surface in the boxing debate. That is, what is it about women who take up activities traditionally associated with violence, aggression and power that so disrupts the boxing brigade, politicians and conservatives? What is it about so-called 'aggressive' women dancing in the ring — all fired up and bloody-eyed — that unsettles some male and female spectators? Certainly, with regard to injuries it is no more dangerous for women than men, so what is it about women's bodies that make them 'unfit' to box?

Aspecific politic informing this inquiry is, of course, the assignment of gender-driven physical specificity and the way in which this limits and controls corporeal experience(s). The work of Michel Foucault is important here; in particular, his notion that the body is not an historical given but, rather, an object of physical and psychical coding, enhanced by a specific set of cultural rules and constituted by what he terms 'power/knowledge' relations.10 By this, Foucault is referring to the way in which sex-specific behaviours and patterns are grafted into and upon human experiences to form notions of 'masculinity' and 'femininity'; thus regulating what society deems possible and natural for male and female bodies to both do and appear. This, in a social realisation, works to deny some bodies from particular performative acts, with codes dictating patterns of normal and extra-ordinary behaviour. While this material has been well documented with regard to broad feminist objectives, I want to consider these gender-coded inscriptions and the way in which they are used to ensure women remain excluded from 'masculine' spaces such as boxing.

Before beginning my analysis, I would like to qualify what I mean when I speak of 'masculine' and 'feminine' behaviours or existences — terms that form a large part of this debate. Working from the frameworks developed by Simone de Beauvoir, I use these terms not to indicate some inherent essence or quality that is mapped onto the bodies of men and women as part of their biological assignment but, rather, to demonstrate the way in which constructed gender-identification systems are used to limit and police the lived experiences of the sexes.11 It is my contention — and there is nothing revolutionary in this — that the coding of these two gender-based descriptions provides a major foundation, and limitation, to many men's and women's lives. Boxing is often described as a 'masculine' and thus, 'male' activity because it is associated with what society deems 'masculinist behaviour' — that is, violence and aggression — while 'femininity' is traditionally associated with passivity, weakness and lack. This is despite the large bulk of work done by feminist theorists to counteract and destabilise these constructions of female and male experiences. The two are used interchangeably throughout the mainstream debate on boxing to argue for and against women's inclusion and will be used as points of reference throughout this paper. I begin with an interrogation of critical 'readings' of the female boxer and an outline of the bio-political history of the female body with regard to the issue of sexual equality versus sexual difference as it applies here, before turning back to the specifics of the NSW-based ban and its effects on the State's female boxers.

The Theatre of the Flesh: Reading Male and Female Bodies

While boxing is considered to be an abhorrent act of violence by some, it is fair to say that most spectators gain pleasure from watching a boxing match. An entirely physical interaction between two people of the same sex, the sport can be viewed as a somewhat erotic display, with its homoerotic undertones and intense emotions that — combined with dance, courtship and spatiality — come to symbolise a disrobing of social mores in favour of an innate expression of physicality and desire. If one sees dancing as an erotic activity for couples, then so too is boxing. It is bodies against bodies — sweaty bodies at that — inviting a stickiness of smell and the expulsion of raw emotions, unfettered by restraint or social confinement, to invoke a notion of the body at its most primal peak.

As Mischa Mertz affirms in her book Bruising — A Journey Through Gender (2001), the only space women have traditionally held in boxing is that of the passive, smiling, G-string clad, high-heeled (and thus demobilised) 'girl' who parades around and around the ring clutching a series of cards to display the round number of the match.12 The 'round girl', as she is known, is like the boxer; part of the entertainment and spectacle of the theatre of the flesh, providing contrasting 'feminine' relief from the intensely 'masculine' and sweaty performance that takes place within the ropes. Her sexual performance and attractiveness is asserted over her physical capabilities, emphasised by her heels and bikini and her deferred involvement from the action within. She stands as object, in stark contrast to the male fighters, positioned in time and space to uphold the cultural dualism between man/woman.13 The 'round girl' is a series of contrasts: softness against hardness, vulnerability against strength and passivity against activity.

The male boxer at his finest represents the epitome of masculinity. He is 'Man'. He is a thoroughbred, primed for prowess and power, a sporting body that actively engages in a spectacle that involves, not surrounds him. While an object in so far as he is watched, he also occupies the position of subject through his participation and the expression of his desires and, indeed, his subjective self, as one-half of the nucleus of the bout. While he may be ridiculed outside of the arena for his social interactions or his level of intelligence (a notion that seems to have developed on account of the massive blows the boxer receives to the head) he is, in the ring, the master of his body and — providing he is not knocked out — of his own destiny. The female boxer, by contrast, is seen as a perversion of bodily subjectivity or as part of an erotic performance navigated by ridicule or fetishism. Either way, by participating in an activity reserved for the expression of masculinity, the female boxer violates the stereotype of 'Woman' and thus cannot be taken seriously; she is a parody, like a man in high-heels, a monstrous cartoon of the real and 'masculine' activity that occurs within the ring. While a male boxer's biology is defined purely by his power and strength, the female boxer's is contrasted almost entirely by her lack; that is her lack of phallus, and therefore her assumed lack of power, masculinity, force, aggression and so on.14 On the cultural front, the female boxer is literally boxed in by her biology, namely her capabilities for reproduction — essentialised from the point of view of man and the notion that the female represents Nature. For if we are to believe the traditions passed down to women through the history of patriarchal discourse, 'it is in maternity that woman fulfils her psychological destiny; it is her natural “calling”, since her whole organic structure is adapted for the perpetuation of the species'.15

In contemporary terminology, the sexual division between men and women is partly defined by the notion that 'aggression' is 'male' and 'passivity' is female, two notions that lend themselves to a policing, and as a consequence, disciplining of bodies.16 However, as boxer Mischa Mertz and psychologist Lynne Segal argue, women can be, and indeed some women are, as aggressive and violent in their behaviour as men.17 It is equally true that from an early age, women are made aware of obstacles to, and the confinement of, their corporeal specificity and the expression of their own desires, based on the 'basic modalities of feminine body comportment'.18

Women are also subjected to greater social condemnation of habits specifically defined as 'male' — swearing, shouting, excessive drinking and physical fighting — in or outside of the ring. Men, by contrast, are almost expected to engage in these ritualistic aggressive displays (creating alienation among those men not attracted to these pursuits). For the woman who boxes these pressures have come to influence patriarchal dictates on the 'natural order' of feminine behaviour, working to preclude her from any activity outside of what is deemed normal within these parameters.19 Thus, 'femininity' becomes a weapon against lived experience, confining a woman's body to particular modalities that enforce restrictions on certain activities by virtue of what society deems possible for women to do. This has been charted in the 'sexual difference' debate, which I now consider.

A Perverse Parody

In discussions on boxing, a number of arguments have surfaced which recall what is commonly known as the 'sexual equality' versus 'sexual difference' debate.20 Put differently, there will always exist, both in and out of academic circles, the tendency to debate what is and is not natural for men and women to 'do', based on the differences of the male and female anatomy and the ways in which 'femininity' and 'masculinity' are encoded upon sexed bodies.

One response to the differential powers and capacities of men and women in the context of public life is to claim that, comparatively, women are biologically disadvantaged compared to men, namely through the restrictions (interestingly not the possibilities) of women's capacities for reproduction. As de Beauvoir wrote in her groundbreaking text:

Woman has ovaries, a uterus: these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature … He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance.21

Working from this analysis, it can appear critical to demand a further degendering of reproductive differences between the sexes through advances in technology and medical science. But, as Moira Gatens affirms in Power, Bodies and Difference (1992), this style of social reform achieves little in the way of breaking down gender stereotypes, concurrently leaving the 'rectification of the remaining determinations of women's situation to the increase in control over nature; that is biology', thus castigating women to the status of 'transcended' male subjects.22 The lived experience of women's body image, as Margaret Whitfield maintains in her study of Luce Irigaray, would be 'forced into a conceptualisation and socialisation to which it does not correspond'.23 As critics of de Beauvoir were quick to point out, to leave the emancipation of women in the hands of science — traditionally a male domain in its own right — will not solve the 'problem' of women's bodies.24 Rather, it can only serve to reinforce the social and cultural problems of women's bodies, confining them to the omni-present status of 'Woman' and further entrenching them in the oppressive dualistic structure dominated by 'Man'.

An alternate response, then, to the question of corporeal specificity is to argue that women should not aspire to be 'like men', a claim made by many who oppose women's place in boxing, whether feminists or from other political persuasions. On the one hand, this argument can be specifically masculine and almost misogynous if used inappropriately, representing a deep hatred of women's bodies and a fear of losing phallic power by way of penetrating historical differences between men and women. Certainly as one of the male characters in Girlfight says, on learning he must fight Diana, 'this will be the end of me. I will be ridiculed and made a laughing stock'.25 On the other hand, and in response to this negative outlook, there is the notion of 'reversed corporeal specificity' used by feminists who advocate the affirmation and celebration of women's bodies — rather than the denigration — for their ability to recreate and nurture. In its extreme form, this view argues that the specific capacities and specialties of women's bodies create an essential difference between the sexes, where women can be seen as essentially peaceful, caring and nurturing and not attracted to 'brutal' sports such as boxing.26 In all, these theorists argue — whether in pro- or anti-feminist voices — that there is a sexual difference between men and women that should be retained, and not eroded by the likes of scientific and technological intervention.27

Yet both of the responses outlined above cannot and do not escape the paradigm which understands the body as a given biological entity which either has or does not have particular ahistorical characteristics and capacities. Like the very arguments which augment a biological mapping of what men's and women's bodies do and can do, such notions confine the sexes to certain corporeal specificities, thus limiting their physical experiences.28 To this extent then, the 'sexual equality versus sexual difference' debate remains steeped in the dualistic and binary frameworks of body/mind, nature/culture.

An alternative view of bodies and power is to refuse the dualistic structures that articulate the issue of sexual difference — an approach that is often applied by queer theorists and which I believe is crucial to this debate.29 Specifically, it is to return to the Foucauldian approach that claims a history of the body in a bid to examine and understand the ways in which diet, environment, lifestyle and activities vary historically, and the way in which this impacts on capacities, desires and physical form.30 In this way, we can see that the body of a woman who occupies the role of lover/wife/mother/homemaker is invested with certain desires and wants that are different from say that of an Olympic athlete or in this instance, a boxer. In this case it is clear, as Gatens affirms, that biological commonality fails to account for the specificity of two bodies that are subject to change, not only at the physical level, but also at the level of form, capacities and desires. She says:

It is important to create the means of articulating the historical realities of sexual difference without thereby reifying these differences. Rather what is required is an account of the ways in which the typical spheres of movement of men and women and their respective activities construct and recreate particular kinds of body to perform a particular kind of task.31

If gender categories are not tied to sex, either causally or expressively, then gender is a kind of social assignation that can penetrate beyond the binary limits imposed by the dichotomies dividing the sexes. As Judith Butler states in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), gender would be a kind of 'cultural/corporeal action [requiring] a new vocabulary that institutes and proliferates present principles of various kinds, re-signifiable and expansive categories that resist both the binary and substantialising grammatical restrictions of gender'.32

It is a view that is utopian in vision but which can mark the start of the passageway toward re-definitions of both women's and men's corporeal liberation. In paving the way to fight, women are conquering spaces from which they have been traditionally excluded. Boxing is one of the last altars of the forced cult of the celebration of maleness and whether female fighters think of their pursuit in this manner (most of them do not) or simply just as an enjoyable physical pursuit, women's boxing can touch upon Foucault's pursuit of bodies defined not by history but, rather, by presence.33

Fighting Back: Reclaiming Women's Bodies

Back in the ring it is the practicalities that concern our female boxers. For the past ten years or so, Australian professional kickboxer Holly Ferneley and her trainer George Plellis have been lobbying the NSW Government to amend the legislation that prevents one of the world's top fighters from legally fighting in her own home state. In a letter to her local MP, The Hon. Andrew Refshauge, dated 15 February 2000, Ferneley wrote:

On the entire planet I am now the only athlete who is recognised World Champion of a sport that is prohibited to me by government law … Furthermore, as a professional athlete living within a State where I am prohibited from practicing my sport, I am restricted from attracting sponsorship or earning an income from participating in professional boxing or kickboxing promotions. … It is my opinion that a person should not be restricted from practicing their art because they happen to have been born a female.34

Last year Ferneley, with the help of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, challenged the NSW ban on boxing in the Federal Court, under section 42 of the Sex Discrimination Act. She failed. In handing down his judgement, Justice Murray Wilson told the court, without a hint of irony, the implicit facts: 'She is not registered because she has the disqualification [my italics] of being born female'.35 For Ferneley, this 'disqualification' has left her feeling 'humiliated and depressed'. As she told journalist Ellen Connolly: 'it depresses me as it makes me feel that as a woman, I am unfit to make decisions about my livelihood. I am a world champion, yet the prohibition against me makes me feel that I and my sport are invalidated'.36

While a 'loophole' in the current legislation allows women to kickbox and box in NSW providing the activity is classified as martial arts and not the sports' true names, Ferneley and her colleagues remain disadvantaged by the NSW Government's sanctioned sexual discrimination simply because the government deems their bodies to be 'inappropriate' to the sport. Due to the ban, they are unable to gain sponsorship, endorsement, regular matches or funded training opportunities, all of which are available — as part of the accession in sporting achievement — to their male counterparts.

The ban also ensures that women boxers do not receive media exposure, as evidenced by a recent Fox Sports decision to withdraw its planned coverage of the women's undercard fight of the Anthony Mundine-Lester Ellis bout in Melbourne on July 15, 2002. Ferneley was due to fight Edith Ellis; however, Ferneley pulled out of the fight after learning of the broadcaster's decision to cancel the coverage, claiming she would not support the promotion of the station if it did not support her.

Responding to the episode in the Sydney Morning Herald on July 6 2002, Fox Sports programming director Craig Dobbs said the station did not 'benefit from showing women's boxing'. He said: 'what we find with women's boxing is that it receives negative feedback from a whole raft of people [including] women and people who don't like boxing full-stop'.37

In the past year or so, there has been increasing media interest in the plight of women boxers — particularly those in NSW — alerting readers and viewers to the discrimination endured by these athletes. In a sporting culture which trades exposure concurrently with success, women boxers and the public in general must continue to lobby government bodies for a legislation on boxing which allows female athletes to reach their full potential. Indeed, for a state that prides itself on its sporting prowess, it is quite absurd that we should have a world champion in our midst who is not legally allowed to practise or compete in her sport.

Final Blows

Women's exclusion from boxing is largely based on archaic notions of what constitutes female and male identities and, thus, feminine and masculine behaviours. Certainly the NSW law, as it stands, fails to take account of the historical evolution of both male and female bodies and the evolving and diverse assignation of traditional modes of gendered experience, compounded by the two-way sex-distinction. The battle remains one of corporeal specificity; that is, socially constructed notions of what women (and men) should and should not do with their bodies, governed and regulated primarily by an overwhelming majority of male parliamentarians. The question for women boxers determined to stay in the game is not 'why?' but instead, as I come to ask myself in this paper, 'why not?'

This paper has followed a general objective to open the debate on women's exclusion from the boxing arena and to provide suggestions about some of the historical and contemporary considerations that govern the boxing ban in NSW. I do not pretend that it is an exhaustive discussion of the issues at hand — far from it. But what I will say is that the fight, as it were, to keep women either in or out of the ring is not confined solely to the parameters of 'sexual equality versus sexual difference' but points instead to another issue — the inherent crisis of femininity and masculinity. It seems to me that boxing is a direct challenge to what is still defined as male/female bodily experience. I am not suggesting boxing is a feminist pursuit. I for one can but barely understand the physical attraction. But, as is evident in this latest debate over the public rights of women, it is here again that we see the State playing a decisive role in regulating a hegemonic heterosexual masculinity. Women's exclusion from the sport can only be read as an exclusion from full citizenship.

The challenge for the boxer then, will be not to conform and play the game by the rules of machismo and the patriarchal brandings of women's bodies, clad in G-strings and brief bras. If women are to gain any equal footing at all in this sport, it must be on their own terms and not on those of the 'old boys' who run the show. Without this, the question will forever be asked: are these women trying to gain ground in a 'man's' world by taking control of a 'man's' vehicle of power or, are they simply cartooning 'men's games'? If boxing must exist, then it is crucial that women have the same rights to the sport as men, just as it is crucial that women have the same access to education, the right to vote and so on. Without this, women's bodies remain steeped in the dichotomies that, it would seem, continue to shape our world.

Notes

Special thanks to Mitsie Kent at Womensport and Recreation NSW Inc .
1 Mischa Mertz, Bruising – A Journey Through Gender, Picador, Sydney, 2001, p 23.
2 Richard Dyer, 'Don't look now — the male pin-up', Screen, vol 23, no 3-4, Sept-Oct, 1992, p 71.
3 Arthur Tunstall in 'Women's boxing disgraceful', the Age, April 23, 1998, p 5.
4 See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Jonathan Cape, London, 1949, or turn to the work of French feminists such as Luce Irigaray, Monique Witting and Helene Cixous.
5 Girlfight, dir Karyn Kusama, perf Michelle Rodriguez and Jamie Tirelli, script Karyn Kusama, dist Screen Gems, 2000.
6 The law in full can be found at the Administrative Decisions Tribunal website: http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/adt/nsf/pages/index (accessed 29 May 2001).
7 See Karen Ezekiel, 'Female Boxing in NSW', report delivered to Womensport and Recreation NSW on behalf of the School of Leisure, Sport and Tourism Studies, University of Technology, Sydney, 2000.
8 Michael Cleary quoted in Ellen Connolly, 'Wild cat fights for her rights', Sydney Morning Herald, November 9 2001.
9 Section 62(D) of the NSW Boxing and Wrestling Control Act (1986) clearly states: 1 A female person of any age shall not take part in any amateur boxing contest; 2 A person shall not hold or promote an amateur boxing contest in which a female person is a contestant.
10 See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. by Robert Hurley, Penguin Books, London, 1978.
11 de Beauvoir, op cit, pp 20-46.
12 Mertz, op cit, pp 35-54.
13 de Beauvoir, op cit, pp 13-57.
14 Dyer, op cit, p 71.
15 de Beauvoir op cit, p 501.
16 Mertz, op cit, p 2-6.
17 Ibid, p 2-3; Lynne Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men, Virago Press, London, 1990, p 266.
18 Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990, pp 51-70.
19 de Beauvoir, op cit.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid, p 15.
22 Moira Gatens, 'Power, Bodies, Difference' in Margaret Barrett and Anne Phillips (eds), Destabilising Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, Polity Press, Cambridge 1992, p 129.
23 Luce Irigaray quoted in Margaret Whitfield, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, Routledge, London and New York, 1991, p 153.
24 While de Beauvoir is still hailed as one of the founding mothers of feminism, her work has been criticised for perpetuating women's oppression through its failure to adequately question and deconstruct the discourses of patriarchal frameworks. See Elizabeth Wurzel, Bitch (1998) and Hester Eistenstein, Contemporary Feminist Thought (1986).
25 Kusama, loc cit.
26 Mertz, op cit, pp 51-2.
27 Segal, op cit, p 135.
28 Gatens, op cit, p 129.
29 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, London and New York, 1990; and, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, University of California, Berkeley, 1990.
30 Foucault, op cit, p 152.
31 Gatens, op cit, p 130.
32 Butler, op cit, p 112.
33 Foucault, op cit, pp 152-3.
34 Holly Ferneley, 'Letter to Andrew Refshauge' February 15, 2000, cited in Ezekiel, op cit, p 15.
35 Murray Wilson quoted in Connolly, op cit, p 2.
36 Holly Ferneley quoted in ibid.
37 Craig Dobbs quoted in Jessica Halloran, 'A tough fight for recognition' in Sydney Morning Herald, July 6 2002, p 5.

Originally published in McWilliam, Stephenson and Thompson (eds), Voicing Dissent: Journal of Australian Studies no 76, St Lucia, UQP, 2002.