Gender inequality in Olympic boxing: Exploring structuration through the online resistance to weight category restrictions

Contrary to the popular imagination, women’s boxing is not a new sporting spectacle or discipline. As Hargreaves (1997) points out, there is strong historical evidence of women’s involvement in prize-fights and pugilism in the eighteenth century, particularly in Britain, where the modern codified version of boxing developed. This is not to suggest that the place of women in these early origins of boxing was equal to that of men; much as within the contemporary picture, men dominated the organisation, participation and spectatorship of such events. Importantly, as the sport diffused around the globe, the narratives of working-class, heroic manliness which were so neatly embedded within the ‘manly art’ resulted in the stories of notable women pugilists, such as bare-knuckle fighter Elizabeth Wilkinson being largely removed from history (Thrasher, 2012).