Anna S. Dr. Brasch

While the practice of boxing in German-speaking countries only began in the late 19^th and early 20th centuries, knowledge and talking about boxing are to be set much earlier from the mid-18^th century. Since then, it has undergone significant transformation that cannot be explained solely by the changes in the sport itself. This is where the proposed talk comes in: It aims to trace the history of knowledge of boxing in German-speaking countries, following recent discourse-analytical approaches in cultural studies. In a first step, the emergence and development of the German-language boxing discourse will be shown. Based on this, in a second step, the elements of the discourse, namely the archive (Foucault) on which the discourse draws, as well as its regularities such as its basic discourse semantic figures (Dietrich Busse) or its discourse paradigms will be carved out. In this way, the – metaphorically speaking – ‘grammar’, the epistemic conditions of speaking about boxing at different times in the German-speaking world become visible.

Boxing has still hardly been researched in German-speaking countries, both in the field of sports history and from a cultural studies perspective. The proposed talk aims to present partial results of my habilitation thesis “Boxen. Literarisierungen eines kulturell verdichteten Symbols in der Moderne und ihre historisch-epistemischen Bedingungen“ („Boxing. Literalizations of a culturally condensed symbol in modernity and their historical-epistemic conditions”), that I submitted to the University of Bonn in December 2023.