Fighting Identity: An Ethnography of Kickboxing in East London

This book is an immersive ethnographic account of how fighters at a Polish-owned Muay Thai/kickboxing gym in East London seek to reject prior identity markers in favour of constructing one another as the same, as fighters, a category supposedly free from the negative assumptions and limitations associated with prior ascriptions such as race, class, gender and sexuality.

It explores questions of subjectivity and identity by examining how and why fighters sought to disavow identity, which invo...