“A brilliant, humane, and critically attentive book.”–Les Back, Goldsmiths, University of London

“What is work? Trimbur’s exquisite ethnography reveals postindustrial New York as a socially and spatially segregated landscape shaped by disappearing jobs for–and relentless criminalization of–modestly educated people of color. By developing their bodies as worksites and instruments, the boxers Trimbur describes enact complex understandings of the contradictory struggles to remix their labor with the external world. These sobering insights give me hope.”–Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

“This book is a gem. Incisive, deeply principled, and acutely observed, it yields nothing to the idea that Gleason’s Gym should be seen as an exotic place. The product of extensive fieldwork, Trimbur’s writing overflows with insights into work, sport, masculinity, and above all ‘the realization of the colonial model within the metropolitan heartland.'”–Paul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic

“Come Out Swinging is an extraordinary work of ethnography and theoretical reflection in the tradition of DuBois’s understanding of double consciousness, Sartre’s realization of ‘the fight, ‘ and Fanon’s insights about the transformative force of engaged practice. The first emerges from Lucia Trimbur’s double training in sociology and African American studies, which she brings together with unusual grace and skill as she draws out the contradictions of a society premised on narcissistic models of power in which those who rule dictate conditions over the very bodies of the dominated. The social reach of the white female and male amateur boxers who live out their fantasies of physical strength to match their political and social location illustrates and echoes American power relations in ways that strain traditional clichés about the intersections of class, gender, race, and sexuality. Trimbur’s provocative, poignant, and often brilliant reflections enable the reader to see beyond what is at first seen. The unexpected, constantly transformative dimensions of human relations are brought to the fore in a genuine portrait of what it means to bring the human element, wrought with contradictions, to the study of a social world paradoxically based on brutal compassion. This is a must-read for scholars and general readers interested not only in the complexity of sports in postindustrial society but also in what it means to fight for one’s humanity under rapidly changing conditions of identity and meaning.”–Lewis R. Gordon, University of Connecticut and Rhodes University, South Africa

“Read this book for old times and new times. You will learn about the bodily disciplines and human practices, some surprisingly intimate, of boxing culture, but also about how a working-class sanctuary of racialized masculinity, the boxing gym, has been engulfed by postindustrial social and economic relations. A book about boxing and the perplexing inequalities and cultural inversions of the late-modern age, Come Out Swinging powerfully shows the unique ability of ethnography to shed light on and connect the macro and the micro.”–Paul E. Willis, author of Learning to Labor

“In this rich and engaging book, Lucia Trimbur invites her readers into the everyday world of Gleason’s Gym. With its beautifully rendered observations and conversations, along with its lively style, this is a terrific book that does a marvelous job of revealing the complexities of the postindustrial landscape.”–David Grazian, author of Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs

Lucia Trimbur is assistant professor of sociology at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice and at the CUNY Graduate Center.

COME OUT SWINGING

THE CHANGING WORLD OF BOXING IN GLEASON’S GYM

By Lucia Trimbur

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15029-1

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………xiList of Prominent Participants………………………………………xvPreface…………………………………………………………..xviiChapter One: Survival in a City Transformed: The Urban Boxing Gym in
Postindustrial New York…………………………………………….1Chapter Two: Work without Wages……………………………………..16Chapter Three: Tough Love and Intimacy in a Community of Men……………39Chapter Four: Passing Time: The Expressive Culture of Everyday Gym Life….63Chapter Five: The Changing Politics of Gender…………………………89Chapter Six: Buying and Selling Blackness: White-Collar Boxing and the
Cultural Capital of Racial Difference………………………………..117Epilogue………………………………………………………….142Methodological Appendix: Ethnographic Research in the Urban Gym…………149Notes…………………………………………………………….155References………………………………………………………..181Index…………………………………………………………….193

CHAPTER 1

SURVIVAL IN A CITY TRANSFORMED: THE URBANBOXING GYM IN POSTINDUSTRIAL NEW YORK

OVER THE PAST FOUR DECADES, NEW YORK CITY’S SOCIAL,economic, and political structures have transformed dramatically, andthe word “postindustrial” is used to describe these changes. “Postindustrial”is used in a number of contexts, and the trends that it capturesare subject to myriad interpretations by scholars, policymakers, and socialcritics. As a result, the term is contested and not without discursive,political, and ideological problems. However, “postindustrial” can be auseful way to mark the decline in manufacturing and the acceleration ofthe FIRE economy—finance, insurance, and real estate—in urban centersand some of the resulting social and cultural conditions and structuresof feeling among city residents. This chapter, “Survival in a City Transformed,”provides a sketch of the postindustrial landscape of New YorkCity, in which Gleason’s Gym and this ethnography are situated. The firstpart of the chapter examines postindustrial restructurings and some ofthe accompanying social and cultural changes, such as the eliminationof welfare entitlements, the expansion of crime control, and the ascensionof consumer capitalism. The second part looks at how postindustrialrestructurings affected urban boxing gyms in New York City. I arguethat Gleason’s Gym survived the vicissitudes of the new postindustrialeconomy by incorporating some of its features, such as the turn to multiculturalismand diversity, the shift to cosmopolitanism and aggressive advertising,and the focus on the body and emergence of the fitness industry.

POSTINDUSTRIAL ECONOMIC AND SOCIALRESTRUCTURINGS

New York’s Labor and Housing Markets

In studies of the labor market, the postindustrial points to a specific economicrestructuring that began in the late 1960s in which metropolitancenters that manufactured goods began to focus more heavily on retail,financial, and corporate services. That is, the postindustrial registers areorganization in which reliance on industrial capital was replaced byreliance on the FIRE industries. As industrial operations scattered to theglobal south, which offered lower taxes as well as less regulation, unionorganizing, and collective bargaining, cities in the Northeast and theMidwest lost a devastating number of jobs, turning them into rustbeltregions. Though many urban economies suffered from this process ofdeindustrialization, New York City was disproportionately affected. Thechanges New York City endured were more exaggerated and the growthof services quicker and more extensive than in other cities. Between1965 and 1989, the number of manufacturing jobs in New York fell from865,000 to 355,000, causing a rapid rise in unemployment. Workerswho lost manufacturing jobs had a difficult time finding employment ofcomparable remuneration in the new service economy and had few opportunitiesfor upward mobility.

While Fordist models of production were on the decline, new modesof accumulation gained ascendancy. New possibilities for global tradeand direct foreign investment, innovations in technology and its uses, advancesin transportation, and the growing power of multinational financeand telecommunication firms shaped the postindustrial economy. In herwork on the globalization of economic activity, Saskia Sassen suggeststhat cities such as New York emerged not only as places where capitalis coordinated but also as production sites. The production of financialgoods and services requires what she calls “dispersal” and “concentration”;because some economic practices are decentralized, others mustbe more centralized. For instance, as jobs moved from US metropolitancenters to peripheral low-wage areas, more coordination was necessaryin central business districts. Sassen explains, “The more dispersed a firm’soperations across different countries, the more complex and strategic itscentral functions—that is, the work of managing, coordinating, servicing,financing a firm’s network of operations.” A new class of professionalsto do this managing, coordinating, servicing and financing soon formed.

Concentration and dispersal restructured the labor market and changedthe nature of work in urban areas. Workers bifurcated into “core” and”contingent” laborers. Core workers are executives, consultants, managers,and a range of specialists who manage capital. Contingent workers,or unskilled laborers in personal services, support the economic activitiesand personal lives of core workers. The experiences of work andthe financial compensation of the two groups stand in sharp contrast.Core workers enjoy higher salaries, better benefits, and more job securitythan contingent workers and, as a result, the former have access to morepossibilities for wealth accrual, such as investment in stocks, bonds, andmutual funds. Contingent workers engage in low-wage and unstablework: typically labor that has been subcontracted or that is part-time,seasonal, and temporary. Though this flexibility reduces costs, it createsjob insecurity and instability, benefit losses, and a reduction in investmentin human capital.

While the postindustrial economy promised new possibilities of profitand accumulation, wealth was unevenly distributed across society. Theowners and managers of capital disproportionally benefitted from theeconomy’s splendors and a polarization of income financially distancedcontingent workers from core workers. An earning gap between manufacturingand nonmanufacturing, retail services and corporate services, andthe outlying boroughs and Manhattan increased the gap between poorand rich. Service jobs of contingent workers paid far less than did Fordistmanufacturing jobs, and the remaining manufacturing jobs became low-wageand low-skill. Unionization rates plummeted and the power ofremaining unions to negotiate reasonable contracts diminished. Further,the new economy presented tremendous obstacles to career advancementand social mobility for contingent workers. On the whole, low-incomeservice jobs caused contingent workers to labor more and make less.

New York City’s economic restructuring disproportionately affectedblack and Latino residents and created a racialized and gendered divisionof labor. In the postindustrial economy, black and Latino workerswere excluded from the best-paid jobs. With their circumstances compoundedby employers’ preferences for Latino workers, women, and evenwhite ex-prisoners over black workers without criminal records, blackmen faced difficulty even securing low-wage employment. When theydid obtain work, black men were paid below living wages. Poverty ratesskyrocketed and produced new forms of racial inequality. Under-andunemployment continue to burden workers of color. In 2004, 72 percentof black men in their twenties who had not completed high school didnot have work, while 50 percent of black high-school graduates couldnot find a job. Today the division of labor in postindustrial New Yorkis split predominantly among white men (and, to a lesser extent, whitewomen) in professional and management positions, black women andLatino men and women working in clerical or service jobs, and Asianand Latino workers laboring in the remaining low-income manufacturingpositions.

The racial inequalities in the service economy reproduced themselvesspatially in the form of residential segregation. The new economy requiredspace for expanding businesses, hospitals, and universities while agrowing class of core workers in postindustrial growth sectors producednew markets for luxury condominiums and Manhattan loft space.Urban areas previously zoned for industry were repurposed and developedas office and residential quarters. The pace of gentrification acceleratedand real estate speculation escalated. Much of the city’s real estatewas gobbled up by the rich, decimating the number of affordable housingunits for working individuals and families. The housing market in areasof New York with large numbers of black and Latino residents—namelythe Bronx, northern Manhattan, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, andcentral Brooklyn—collapsed. Alex Vitale writes:

Throughout the 1980s, the city’s spending on homelessness-related serviceswas directed toward providing emergency shelter and social services. Only asmall amount was spent on creating new affordable housing for those on publicassistance or working for low wages. At the same time, however, billionswere spent on tax incentives and direct subsidies to encourage the developmentof high-rent commercial buildings and luxury housing, which often displacedlow-income housing and low-skilled jobs. This unequal developmentdestabilized many middle-class communities through the twin problems oframpant disorder emanating from the growing underclass and gentrificationpressures coming from the new, extremely wealthy professional class.

Such spending priorities precipitated a housing crisis that continues toaffect families of color, who are more likely to live in overcrowded anddecrepit housing than are white residents.

Social Entitlements and Crime Control

Postindustrialism not only restructured the labor and housing marketsbut also redefined the relationships among capital, workers, and the state.The market gained enormous power in the economic and social lives ofNew York City residents just as the state began shirking its responsibilitiesfor providing social entitlements. A system of governance promotingcorporate deregulation, social-welfare cuts, and law and order policiessupported the postindustrial economy. Contrary to the priorities of stateintervention created under twentieth-century industrial capitalism, thissystem of governance relies on discourses of “personal responsibility,”which look to the market and individual initiative rather than structuralcontext or social conditions to solve social problems and inequalities.Welfare reform, which began under President Reagan and was refinedunder President G.H.W. Bush, culminated in President Clinton’s 1996Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act andobliterated three-quarters of a century of social welfare for the poor.Logistically, by annihilating Aid to Families with Dependent Children(AFDC), an outgrowth of earlier mother and widow pension programs,and creating Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF ), the lawimposed time limits on social assistance, required clients to work in low-wagepositions, and slashed compensation. Ideologically, it attackedthe disenfranchised and marginalized, especially the poor of color, andblamed them for their circumstances. It also buttressed a postindustriallabor market that needed low-skill and low-wage workers to fill servicepositions. In doing so, it created a group of vulnerable workers who wereavailable to capital for exploitation, a racialized process.

Welfare reform was just one part of a larger conservative attack onthe poor of color, especially urban youth, and dovetailed with a newfocus on law and order, particularly crime control. “Tough on crime”legislation and practices abolished rehabilitation, for the most part, andfixated instead on an array of new penalties, such as three-strikerules, truth-in-sentencing laws, victim impact statements, sentencing guidelines,and “zero tolerance.” The emerging crime complex instituted longersentences than ever before and expanded the number of nonviolent actsconsidered criminal, which exploded the prison population even as crimerates dropped. Between 1970 and 1982, the US prison population doubled,and between 1982 and 1999, it tripled. The prison industry in theUnited States costs roughly $35 billion and employs more than 525,000workers, more than any Fortune 500 company other than Ford Motors.It confines more than two million people and forces nearly five millionadditional individuals under custodial supervision, such as parole, probation,and work release. Most of these men and women are low-skilled, low-incomeblack and Latino and have been charged with low-level drugtrading and consuming, even though, as Michelle Alexander documents,drugs are used and sold at comparable rates across race lines.

Consumer Culture and the Rise of Urban Fitness

As the structure of the economy and governance changed, consumer culturein the US grew rapidly. Whereas many scholars focus on the FIREindustries to understand New York’s transformation, others look at howpostindustrial spaces and capital provided resources for new forms ofcultural production. What were once wastelands and sites of decay andabandonment turned into premier locations for redevelopment and culturalattractions. In an attempt to lure consumers possessing amounts ofwealth unparalleled in history into spending large sums, cities promotedrenewal projects and invested in upscale leisure activities, hotels, conventioncenters, restaurants, shopping malls, theaters, and the revitalizationof downtown and waterfront areas. At the same time, newly commodifiedcultural objects and subjects proliferated and expanded their reach inthe global marketplace. With more disposable income and better accessto mass-produced and mass-marketed goods, individuals and families enjoyedunprecedented levels of consumption. In New York, a thrivingcultural economy provided billions of dollars in the forms of jobs andrevenue and today employs almost as many people as finance and medicinedo. It is undergirded by diversity, multiculturalism, and advertising.Richard Lloyd explains:

In contrast to theories of the city as trending toward increased homogenizationand sanitation in response to the demands of new residents, diversity hereis taken to be a central principle of urban authenticity, and the definition ofdiversity typically proffered by local artists gives value to the illicit and thebizarre. For an admittedly small but disproportionately influential class oftastemakers, elements of the urban experience that are usually considered tobe an aesthetic blight become a symbol of the desire to master an environmentcharacterized by marginality and social instability.

Cultural producers sold their products and entire lifestyles by capitalizingon cultural fascinations with authenticity.

An expanding urban fitness industry, of which Gleason’s Gym was apart, catered to consumers eager to imagine new possibilities for theirbodies. In a postindustrial social order, gender expectations became unstableand ever more fluid. As masculinity, in particular, decoupled fromwage labor, generating anxiety in the process, sports and body cultureprovided men with a knowable and concrete means to identity formation.47 With Title IX legislation, women had more opportunities in sportthan ever before. They experimented with new ways of fashioning theirbodies and looked to athletics and urban fitness as a way to try on novelgender configurations and expressions. For both men and women,the body became the site of “work.” It also became a profit-generatingcommodity that encouraged continual purchases. Programs for healthylifestyles and products for bodily perfection promised consumers techniquesto improve themselves and advertisers avenues to generous revenuestreams.

Over time, working on the body was infused with morality. Just asthe Calvinist quest for wealth was a marker of morality in an earlier era,the postindustrial disciplined body promoted the control necessary tosupport the ideals of consumer capitalism. While this new body cultureincluded some New Yorkers, it excluded others, especially the poor, andreinforced an ideological divide that blamed the disadvantaged for theirstructural position. Shari L. Dworkin and Faye Linda Wachs suggest:

In short, consumer culture provides continual absolution to privileged bodiesthrough these “small successes” and the self-satisfactionof participation in a set of identity-validating middle-classand upper-middleclass lifestyles. Docile bodies fare differently.Stigmatized as immoral, lazy, and poor citizens, docilebodies are presented as failing to follow the prescriptions attended to by thereaders. The structural constraints are rendered invisible as it is implying aquestion of “making time” or the right choices.

These bodily consumptive imperatives, postindustrial governance, anddiscourses of personal responsibility connected. The primacy of personal-responsibilitynarratives in health and fitness economies perniciouslysupported neoliberal ideologies and practices that rendered invisible thegovernment’s contribution to structural circumstance and, more important,to serious health disparities.
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