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This article presents a biographical narrative of Christy Martin, a former world champion boxer who survived being stabbed and shot by her trainer/husband. Rooted in a sociological imagination, this biographic research chronicles Martin's boxing career and its entanglements with gender-based violence. The boxing industry has a widely acknowledged, yet under-reported, problem with men's violence against women. This article aims to illustrate that women's boxing should be critically examined for the ways in which it functions both as a site of and a sanctuary from gender-based violence. Within this paper, I draw from media coverage of Christy Martin's boxing career, over 700 pages of transcripts from the subsequent criminal trial, an interview with Martin, as well as my own research in women's boxing, including work with survivors of domestic violence.

This article returns to an earlier discussion on `sport and space' that began in a 1993 special issue of the International Review for the Sociology of Sport. In this article I initiate a discussion and debate that aims to move spatial inquiry beyond a focus on `place' in order to more clearly link the relation between identity and the spaces through which identity is produced and expressed. Reframing the focus to include a broader cultural analysis enables sport sociologists to more closely examine the geography of social relations. In particular, this article considers how relations of gender, sexuality and race are produced, negotiated and contested in social space. This discussion is largely situated in the work of French theorist Henri Lefebvre and contextualized in the recent `spatial turn' in sport sociology.

This paper spotlights the sporting lives of young people who live in 'Redcrest', a public housing community in the Niagara region of Canada. We report on data culled from neighborhood-centric documents (municipal data, planning council reports, media coverage) and ethnographic fieldwork (interviews, community mapping, go-alongs) collected over eight months with 14 young people. This paper also offers a critique of Robert Sampson's work on neighborhood effects and draws on the theoretical insights and urban scholarship of Henri Lefebvre, Loic Wacquant, and the work of postcolonial scholar Frantz Fanon, who further understandings of racism as a spatial relation. At the center of this research are narratives that highlight that public housing projects, negative stigma notwithstanding, can be good places to live. The results highlight the various contradictions and tensions experienced by young people living in Redcrest, specifically their experiences with neighborhood stigma, racism and Islamophobia, and how this impacts their sporting lives.

This article highlights the use and importance of action research in creating a new positive body image program. The purpose of the larger action research project was to design, test, and implement a positive body image program by working with a core group of diverse stakeholders from an exercise facility. Stakeholders included older adults (aged 55+), people with physical disabilities, and those with cardiovascular disease or risk factors, populations rarely included in the body image literature, particularly in program design. The resulting program was built to teach members of the facility about body image (e.g. its definition, causes, and influences), positive body image, and how to manage their own body image experiences and be critical of the Western beauty ideal. The project is outlined with emphasis on the development of the program along with the researcher's reflexive notes and participant feedback. We also highlight the strengths and challenges of using action research in the development of a positive body image program with suggestions to improve this process for future action researchers. This research highlights the importance of using action research in order to engage participants who are not typically involved in the knowledge production process of body image program development.

This collection explores how feminist knowledges work as interventions in physical cultures and recognizes the considerable contribution of feminist theories and methodologies in understanding the power relations implicated in embodied movement. Our introductory piece weaves together questions about the gendered formation of physical cultures (across leisure, sport, the arts, tourism, well-being, and various embodied practices) with key issues raised by contributing authors, from disciplinary perspectives to theory-method approaches. Exploring questions of digital and physical cultures, more-than-human relations, post- and decolonial ways of knowing, and contemporary onto-epistemologies, this feminist collection aims to contribute to the movement of ideas within and across physical cultural studies. Bringing together diverse perspectives around our common focus we entangle physical cultures with a range of gendered problematizations and interventions that produce different ways of knowing, imagining and doing feminisms.