Bolognina gym

This article describes the social organization of the ‘Tranvieri’ boxing gym in Bolognina, a working class Bologna neighbourhood that has seen rapid change over the last 20 years due to the closure of factories and arrival of immigrants, especially from the Maghreb. The population of the gym has changed accordingly: currently, about two-thirds of those attending the gym as a leisure centre are children of immigrants. I have studied the practices of everyday life, the ‘techniques of the body’ of these young boxers born in Italy but without citizenship, who frequent the gym daily after vocational school or work and attending to family responsibilities. For these young men, boxing is not a solution to the frustrations inflicted by a social world they perceive as indifferent, if not hostile, towards them; rather, it offers them a chance to be represented within that world as something other than merely excluded. As scholars have shown, boxing is a male world: women are perceived as extraneous to the gym and, although two or three women practise boxing at Tranvieri, female boxing is generally met with disapproval. The tension between the boxing world and the world of women is also exhibited in the conflict between trainers, who wish to strictly control the athletes in terms of diet, schedules and sexual practices, and the boxers’ mothers, wives and girlfriends.