Discourse Community Proposal

In this blog post, I will be proposing my discourse community of choice, which is one that is impertinent to my blog topic, but one that I am apart of in my everyday life, which is the community of the Boxing Gym. I have been boxing competitively since age 13 and trained out of the world famous DLX boxing gym while I was living in Vegas, so I can confidently say that this is a topic that is pertinent to my life and one that I have experience and knowledgeability about.

Image via BoxeoMundial

In the world of organized sports, I feel as though the sport of Boxing has a very interesting culture behind its communities. Compared to other sports, Boxing almost has a kind of “Lawlessness” to it, yet the communities are very closely knitted together, which is something I’d like to explore in later posts. To begin, a Boxing gym is considered a discourse community for many reasons. Boxing gyms typically are comprised of less than 45 people at a time, are inclusive of its members, ranging from people of all ages and levels of fitness and experience. There are expert members and inexperienced members, ranging from professional fighters, former world champions, amateur competitive fighters and even just people who come to the gym for the sake of fitness. All are working towards a common goal as well– Improvement. Whether this is improving health, or improving yourself for the next upcoming competition, we show up to the gym for the purpose of bettering ourselves. The original documents that this community puts out and produces include Fight Logs: Hand-written or digital documents where coaches track a fighter’s rounds, sparring partners, and performance notes. Weight Logs: Strict tracking sheets used by competitive boxers and coaches to monitor weight cuts, hydration levels, and progress leading up to a fight. Custom Training Routines: Specialized workout plans detailed on dry-erase boards or clipboards outlining specific workouts. These are a few of the original documents put out by my discourse community. As far as communication is concerned, this can happen exclusively via a few methods, in person congregations and meetings, such as simply showing up to the boxing gym or meeting with coaches for one-on-one conferences, or digital forms of communication via social media group chats, individual messaging among other gym-mates, the coaches, etc. In particular, I find a few things interesting about this discourse community. Going back to the topic of the “lawlessness” I mentioned about the sport of boxing, when compared to other organized sports, boxing is incredibly brash and different in the way the community interacts with each other. The way we speak, the way we train, and the way we treat eachother is something exclusive to the discourse community and is incomparable to other sports, and therefore is why I’d like to explore its values, language, and history and how many discourse communities in these Boxing gyms are the way they are today.

Image via The Denver Post