My work explores womanhood and the internal and external pressures that shape it through the motif of women boxers grappling with each other. The poet Adrienne Rich described the relationships between women as “the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet” and I explore these potent relationships through drawings, paintings, and sculptures that investigate the intensity of women’s relationships to one another. I became interested in this imagery after looking at sports photography of women’s boxing. Each photograph collapses the flurried movement of the fight into a single moment and the gesture created by the fighters’ bodies reveal the subconscious assumptions of the viewer. The fighters’ offensive and defensive posturing convey aggression and vulnerability that invites the viewer to imagine the relationship between the competitors.

These fights call to mind the many ways in which a woman must fight to assert her personhood in the face of social repression that seeks to limit bodily autonomy and self-determination, as well as the ways in which women can be complicit in the oppression of other women. At the same time, the ambiguity of the relationships depicted invites the viewer to do their own work in creating meaning and reflecting on their own reactions and biases related to gender, race, and class.

The history of boxing in America is one of race and class, originating among working class, white immigrant ethnic groups - Irish, Polish, Italian - then among Black and Hispanic groups as the former assimilated. This led to an association with uncivilized brutality and primitiveness in the eyes of the ruling class. As a result, boxing was uniquely unsuitable for women; a woman faced her social status as a “real woman” questioned, which we still see today in professional sports with invasive public interrogations of successful women athletes’ biological sex. The author Joyce Carol Oates once said that “boxing is for men, and is about men, and is men” and in my work I explore how the idea of boxing’s immutable masculinity affects our perception of women boxers.