Social Avatars and Future Boxing Identities

Abstract

In 2020, video footage of Franchón Crews-Dezurn’s weave being forcibly removed from her head during a championship boxing match went viral on social media. A month later Deontay Wilder became an internet meme on account of the excuse he gave (the weight of his ring walk costume) for his first professional loss. In response to the incidents, Crews-Dezurn reclaimed ownership of the viral moment, patenting the hashtag associated with the clip and building a merchandising and branding campaign focused on challenging gendered narratives about Black female bodies and hair. A month after his incident, Wilder collaborated with AFROPOLiTAiN magazine in a photoshoot depicting him as an African king. We apply a reading of social avatars and futurism to these case studies. We argue perceptions of social avatars, as they pertain to both boxers, queer the hegemonic readings of their gendered and racial bodies.

Keywords:

• Boxing; Social Avatars; Futurism; Crews-Dezurn; Wilder

Introduction

Through a critical analysis of two Black professional American boxers, Franchón Crews-Dezurn (World Super Middleweight Champion) and Deontay Wilder (former USA Olympian and WBC Heavyweight Champion), we argue that control and management of the digital artifact (the social avatar) is crucial to understanding how gender is performed and represented online. In the case studies presented we demonstrate the emancipatory potential of individuals rejecting the identities projected onto them through their enactment of futurism, or counter-realities that already exist. We extend the theories developed in our previous work on boxing¹ to consider the transformative and repetitive potentials of gendered identity performances in the digital sphere. Social media, such as Instagram and Twitter, enable users to perform, present, and negotiate their identities online.² The hierarchical structures within society, that disproportionately impact women and BIPOC, can be flattened through the networks individuals establish in online spaces, the roles they perform online, and the opportunity these platforms provide for individuals to build their brand, promote their work, and curate their content.³ However, these platforms are far from egalitarian. Hierarchical technés of racism play out within these spaces⁴ and whilst they create a domain for communities and individuals to express their identities with greater agency, they also create an additional ‘terrain of struggle, with competing demands for power’ that have long existed within traditional forms of media.⁵ The transformative power associated with a social avatar is inextricably linked to questions of repetition, counter-realities, and engagement with futures that have already happened. We study boxing bodies and the performance of social avatars through the lens of intersectional feminism. Intersectionality is central to understanding how the real and virtual identities of our selected case studies are embedded in layers of discriminatory practices, histories and attitudes. Crews-Dezurn and Wilder navigate discrimination not only on the basis of race, class and gender but also in how boxing itself is built upon hierarchies that privilege particular identities over others.⁶ For example, Crews-Dezurn’s positionality in boxing is ridiculed and scrutinised not just because she is a Black woman in a principally white, male-dominated space, but also because her performances of femininity, in and through the sport of boxing, unsettle dominant ideas of womanhood.⁷ Adopting an intersectional framework for our analysis enables a deeper consideration of the nuanced, complex and multi-layered levels of opposition and threat to subjecthood that particular individuals experience in the public domains of boxing and social media.⁸

We analyse Crews-Dezurn’s performance of self during and after her fight with Alejandra Jiménez (on January 11, 2020) and her use of social media platforms to perform the social avatar of ‘Heavy-Hitting Diva’ and to generate community in women’s boxing. We do this via socio-visual analysis of Crews-Dezurn’s Instagram and Twitter platform, paying specific attention to her own profile activity, including retweets between January and September 2020. We also draw attention to interviews with Crews-Dezurn conducted by boxing journalists and YouTubers during this time period. Crews-Dezurn has a verified public Instagram account under the alias @thehhdiva. She presents herself on this profile as a ‘public figure’ and ‘1st Undisputed World Champ SMW’ (SMW refers to her weight category: Super Middle-Weight). At the time of writing, Crews-Dezurn has posted 2887 times and she has a following of 45,000. This profile also links to her fashion design and stylist Instagram account titled @thehhdezearned – a word play on her ‘heavy hitting alias’, her married name ‘Dezurn’ and the fact that she presents herself as being #selftaught. This account includes 565 posts and has a following of 1174. Finally, we consider the activity of Crews-Dezurn’s Twitter – which was central to her interactions with negative commentary on her January 2020 performance. This profile presents Crews-Dezurn as a professional athlete. Posts are her own and at the time of writing she has a following of 9621.

We argue that Crews-Dezurn applies a sophisticated interplay between the constraints and possibilities of performing self in and through boxing. We explore how the incident with Crews-Dezurn’s hair, in her fight with Jiménez, opens up readings of the perception of Black female bodies in boxing. Moreover, we question what Crews-Dezurn’s understanding of self as product in a competitive marketplace demonstrates by way of responding creatively and lucratively to the stigma and archetypes that govern women’s boxing. Crews-Dezurn makes manifest her body’s significance and potential as ‘cultural capital’.⁹

The study also considers Deontay Wilder’s social avatar as performed and presented on Twitter and Instagram. Data analysis was restricted to the period between February 22, 2020, and October 9, 2021, as these dates coincided with the period between Wilder’s loss to Tyson Fury in their second fight in 2020, and his loss to Tyson Fury in their third fight in 2021. At the time of writing, Wilder had 3.5 million followers across both platforms, and Fury had 8.5 million across his two accounts. The bout between Wilder and Fury in February 2020 was staged at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas. It was witnessed by a sell-out crowd of 15,816 fans, was purported to have sold 800,00–850,000 pay-per-views, and is believed to have been illegally streamed by between 10 million and 20 million people. The fight generated significant interest beyond those individuals and audiences that already followed the fighters on social media. Between the two dates, the hashtag #WilderFury2 was posted 31,354 times on Instagram and an estimated 313,300 times on Twitter. To refine and make manageable the data analysis, posts were deemed pertinent to this study when they contained one of three images of Wilder.

Image one is a shot of Wilder during his ring walk on the evening of February 22, 2020, at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. Wilder is captured, in partial profile, from the sternum up, dressed in an elaborate black, red, and gemstone ring costume. The costume, designed by Los Angeles duo Cosmo’s Glamsquad, reportedly cost Wilder $40,000,¹⁰ and was described as ‘warrior couture’ by the designers.¹¹ The second is an image of Wilder’s face recoiling from the impact of one of Fury’s punches, mid-fight. Again, in a partial profile, Wilder’s face is caught in an animated posture, mid-spin, away from the camera. Wilder’s eyes are barely open. His jaw is slack, and his bottom lip hangs loose and appears to be glistening with blood. The first two images are attributed to photographer Isaac Brekken and were selected due to their popularity in posts and stories published online by traditional news outlets immediately after Wilder’s defeat.

The third image again captures Wilder in a partial profile shot. This time, with his right side of the body facing the camera, Wilder is captured from the waist up, fists clenched just below his chest, his face turned skywards, eyes closed and mouth open. His facial expression suggests the image was captured mid-scream. Wilder wears a Lafalaise Dion cowrie shell headpiece, a Wood House Army beaded necklace, a Neon Zinn shoulder accessory (draped over his right shoulder), and a piece of white cloth with black geometric patterns wrapped around his waist and over his left shoulder. The magazine describes the garment as ‘African Cloth’.¹² The cloth resembles that of Bogolan print. The third is the cover image of the sixth issue of AFROPOLiTAiN, taken by J.D. Barnes. It was selected as it was the first still image published by Wilder online following his defeat to Fury in 2020. In presenting these three images of Wilder, we contend that they constitute versions of Wilder’s social avatar. As will be demonstrated below, our reading of the term avatar differs from typical understandings of the term.

Uri McMillan argues that despite the word avatar being Hindu in origin and pertaining to a mythological meaning, the word was co-opted in 1985 and applied to define ‘virtual persona’.¹³ Definitions of avatars have been established through the practices of technology companies, specifically the video games industry, and through scholarship on video games and social media. Within these definitions an avatar is understood ‘to denote a graphic representation of a person – a human-like figure, usually controlled by a person via a computer’;¹⁴ to act ‘as “reliable proxies for mediated face-to-face engagements” in a “wider array of media forms and platforms”, including text messaging (SMS) and social media like Facebook’;¹⁵ and to function as ‘prominent digital objects that humans engage in digital discourse. Avatars are interactive, graphic, and social representations of users in digital spaces […], from screen names or social network profile photographs to complex three-dimensional bodies in video games’.¹⁶

Within these definitions, an avatar is understood to be a digital artifact produced and controlled by a user to navigate their engagement with virtual worlds, be that gaming, messaging platforms, or social media. For Asimina Vasalou et al., avatars are ‘a pictorial representation of the body’¹⁷ and it is through their customisable features and creativity that users are able to construct and perform their online identity. For Vasalou and Johnson, these digital artifacts are distinct from photographic representations.¹⁸

We contest popular definitions of online avatars as distinct from photographic representations of people and argue the need to develop a more comprehensive definition of avatar. Crucial to the definition of avatars presented above, and the difference between other forms of visual representation such as photographs, is the proposition that ‘A chosen photograph inevitably depicts real life happenings and objects’ while an avatar user can engage in fantasy representations and depictions using digital tools to ‘carefully [tailor] the image they want to project to others’.¹⁹ Within Vasalou and Johnson’s analysis, there is a failure to acknowledge the ability of users to manipulate photographs and for photographs to contain aspects of fantasy and careful tailoring. To illustrate this point, we make reference to performance studies scholar Philip Auslander,²⁰ who recruits the example of Ykes Klien’s (1960) ‘Leap into the Void’, to challenge understandings of visual representation. Leap into the Void depicts Klein leaping, unprotected, from a second-floor window. Famously, the image is a composite of two separate shots, a manipulation to depict an event that did not really happen (Klein did not leap unprotected from the window). Auslander uses the image to trouble the binary between documentary photography as a representation of the reality of an event/person, and theatrical photography as moments staged solely for the purpose of being captured as an image. Under the category of theatrical photography, Auslander references artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Cindy Sherman, who photographed themselves as others (Duchamp as Rrose Selvary), or other versions of themselves (Sherman). The binary, challenged by Auslander, speaks to a similar binary present in readings of avatars and photographs, that the photograph is a visual representation of the real and the avatar is a digital manipulated artifact, a fantasy or theatricalised visual representation of a person’s online profile. We use the term social avatar in a way that deliberately encompasses photographic representations of individuals and not exclusively to discuss pictorial representations of bodies. The distinction between avatars and photographs presented by Vasalou and Johnson is reductive and limiting. The photographs individuals post online have the potential to be manipulated to an equal, if not greater, extent than non-pictorial representations. Through the use of filters, editing software, or staged photoshoots, individuals have access to a significant degree of creativity in how they present their online persona.

As Banks and Bowman argue, extant scholarship on avatars suggests the relationship between user and avatar to be parasocial, a ‘one-way, non-dialectical, unilaterally controlled [connection that] exists in the user’s mind’.²¹ However, Banks and Bowman accept that avatars ‘increasingly take on independent agencies and act toward players, revealing relations that in many ways mirror human–human social relationships’.²² David Brunskill notes, ‘the term avatar has been firmly hijacked and expanded in definition to include one’s personal manifestation in a virtual world – the image you create for yourself, as well as the psychological character or persona you present to others’.²³ Brunskill states that ‘social network platforms allow users a previously unavailable level of personal image control and a blank screen for the projection of aspects of their personal identity in novel and powerful ways’.²⁴ We draw upon the work of Banks and Bowman, and of Brunskill, to argue that avatars have the potential to function through social relations and are not limited to parasocial relations. Brunskill introduces the term social avatar to acknowledge that on social network platforms, individuals self-select favourable material to represent themselves through a cumulative process which ‘effectively creates a socially-derived and socially-driven, composite online image’.²⁵ We develop the term social avatar as a way to understand the multifaceted and multidimensional ways in which avatars function in digital spaces.

We define the social avatar as the digital versions of selves that are created and are circulated online, and through which users and, importantly, others create, edit, and curate to perform their own social identity and to generate performances of the identities of others. Within our definition, a social avatar incorporates the digital artifacts (produced through applications like Bitmoji and others) that would typically be understood as avatars. Also included are photographs of self uploaded and shared by a user to perform their own identity. However, we also expand the definition of the social avatar out towards memes and viral content that is produced, uploaded, and shared about someone else, where these memes or viral content include a claim of likeness to or a performance of identity of the target individual. Social avatars are fabricated through a creative process. They enable individuals beyond the user represented as a proxy in the avatar to re-invent portions of an individual’s identity and can lead to shifts in personal identity. Social avatars, therefore, are future-facing. Wilder’s social avatar embodies a futurism akin to that proposed by Allen-Paisant, for it is a future not waiting to be created but one invested in ancestral intimacies, and is a fugitive practice exploring ‘forms of otherwise living and imagining which have already existed’.²⁶ Crews-Dezurn and Wilder perform future genders as a ‘counter-reality that already existed’.²⁷ Building upon McMillan’s work with avatars, we argue social avatars possess an ‘agile ability to comment back on identity itself, to subvert the taken-for-granted rules for properly embodying [Black identity]’.²⁸

Media focus on professional boxing has increased exponentially in the last decade, primarily through the growth of promotional companies such as Matchroom, viewing platforms and Broadcasters (DAZN, Sky Sports) and social media channels, including a plethora of YouTube channels and podcasts dedicated to generating boxing related content on a weekly – or sometimes daily – basis. Moreover, social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram mean boxers have a creative space of their own for developing brand identity and expressing their individuality in and through boxing. Boxing is still widely recognised as a male-dominated sport. Media focus on male boxers reflects a longstanding popularity of the spectacle of boxing and interest in how sport narratives and personalities have been shaped to garner public interest historically. However, the development of professional women’s boxing during the last decade, instigated by the legitimisation of the sport since its inclusion in the London 2012 Olympics, has, for the first time, included a serious commitment from boxing promoters and broadcasters to get ‘eyeballs on the sport’.²⁹ ‘When the eyeballs come’, as Joe Markowski (Executive Vice President for boxing platform DAZN) puts it, ‘people are entertained and amazed at what these athletes do’.³⁰ Selling women’s boxing, then, is as much to do with supporting female athletes as it is to do with overturning the popular assumption that female bodies are not designed to fight.³¹ To do so, promoters of women’s boxing rely heavily on narratives of female empowerment and popular feminist trends that celebrate future projections of female expression and identity. Recruitments of these narrative trends can be vacuous and are typically unsuccessful at responding meaningfully to the repetition of oppositional, misogynistic, and discriminatory discourse brought about by the expansion of women’s boxing on traditional and social media platforms. Indeed, whilst focus on the successes and accomplishments of female boxers has increased and support for the sport is developing rapidly, public opinion on female boxers captured in the press and on social media platforms indicates that many female boxers are still subjected to the myopic viewpoint put forward by American writer Joyce Carol Oates in 1987: the female boxer, according to Oates, ‘violates’ the stereotype of nurturer ‘and cannot be taken seriously – she is parody, she is cartoon, she is monstrous’.³²

Fxckthathair I want the belts

The type of criticism and derision incited by watching women box is evident in the media build-up and immediate aftermath of the fight between Crews-Dezurn (The Heavy Hitting Diva) and Alejandra Jiménez (La Tigre). When Crews-Dezurn defended her WBC and WBO Super Middleweight titles against Jiménez, Jiménez won the bout by split decision and initially became the new WBC and WBO Super Middleweight champion of the world. However, the fight would later be determined a ‘no-decision contest’, and Jiménez was stripped of the titles due to her testing positive for a known banned substance thought to be a performance-enhancing drug (PED). Prior to the controversial aftermath, the unconventionality of the bout between Crews-Dezurn and Jiménez attracted attention in sports media and amongst boxing and non-boxing fans on social media platforms for three reasons: (1) Jiménez was questioned as a legitimate opponent for Crews-Dezurn; she was attacked for her purported lack of femininity (her voice deemed too masculine) and for her apparent larger physical size (she had formerly fought at heavyweight). Comments such as ‘I’m sure she was born a biological male’³³ put forward by boxing manager Steve Tannebaum, fuelled public critique of Jiménez’s body and performance of self. The hostile undertone during the build-up to the fight saw individuals challenging Jiménez’s authenticity as a permissible Super Middleweight boxer and as a woman. (2) Following the results of a failed drugs test, sanctioning bodies were forced to investigate allegations of cheating put to Jiménez, and the additional risk of injury that might have occurred if Jiménez was using PEDs. (3) The public commentary centred around the displacement of Crews-Dezurn’s wig during the fight at Alamodome, San Antonio. For the purposes of exploring Crews-Dezurn as social avatar, we focus on the latter of these three reasons why the bout between Jimenez and Crews-Dezurn generated an unusual amount of media interest in the US and UK.

Towards the end of the 9^th round, Crews-Dezurn raises her gloved hand towards her hair as if to either adjust her wig or check that it is still in place. The cumbersome nature of thick leather boxing gloves encasing the boxer’s hand makes it difficult for Crews-Dezurn to determine whether her hair is intact. Shortly after the moment Crews-Dezurn places her glove on her hair, the referee calls a timeout, sending Crews-Dezurn back to her corner. Crews-Dezurn is met by a female member of her team who adjusts her hair. Accompanying this action is a verbal exchange between Crews-Dezurn and the female corner person, which is inaudible. However, we do hear the referee say ‘that [the wig] is not going to stay’.³⁴ Following the first punch in the last few seconds of this round, Crews-Dezurn brings both gloves back up to her hair – this time as though to hold her wig in place. As she comes back to the corner, she looks to the women who had previously helped her; Crews-Dezurn’s coach Barry Hunter asks: ‘you want that [the hair] or you want the […] titles?’³⁵ We do not clearly hear a response from Crews-Dezurn – ‘her gesture towards Jimenez and the centre of the suggests that she wants the titles - she wants to fight'. But as she sits on the stool set in the corner of the ring, she glances left to her husband (and member of her corner team) Glenn Dezurn Jr. Immediately after Hunter’s question, he instructs the woman in her corner to ‘get that sh*t off her head’.³⁶ The woman’s blue gloved hand reaches over the top rope of the boxing ring and begins to pull Crews-Dezurn’s wig, which is still partially attached to her hair underneath. Her head pulling backwards, Crews-Dezurn exclaims loudly ‘No!’, and as her gaze moves down towards the ring canvas, Glenn Dezurn Jr. puts his hand on her arm in a gesture of reassurance. Simultaneously, Hunter taps Crews-Dezurn across the face, yelling: ‘Look up! You want that or you want the belts?’.³⁷ Glenn Dezun Jr puts his hand on Crews-Dezurn’s head. Pointing her gloved hand towards Jiménez, Crews-Dezurn declares: ‘I want the belts’.³⁸

The initial hesitation from Crews-Dezurn dissolves, as does the overt emotional and physical distress of having her weave pulled from her head. As she walks out of the corner to the centre of the ring she smiles; the bell rings and Crews-Dezurn throws a punch that instantly connects with Jiménez’s head. The boxers engage in a powerful exchange of heavy punches in this final round and as the bell rings, Crews-Dezurn walks to her corner where her wig is placed back on her head. It is immediately thrown back off by Hunter repeating ‘get that sh*t off her head’.³⁹ Prior to the decision being announced, the woman in Crews-Dezurn’s corner ties some black material around her head before Jiménez’s hand is raised in a narrow-defeat victory. A female interviewer for the broadcaster DAZN concludes her interview with an ecstatic Jiménez – the new Super Middleweight champion of the world – and putting the microphone to Crews-Dezurn she states ‘it was a hard, hard fight’.⁴⁰ Crews-Dezurn responds thanking her opponent, declaring ‘I’m not a sore loser. I said I wanted to give San Antonio and the fans around the world a show [laughing] and I hope you guys were entertained […] I fought from the bottom to get to the top […] hey, we was snatching wigs in the […] ring’.⁴¹ These comments punctuate a thorough review of her performance wherein Crews-Dezurn talks explicitly about where she felt she fell short in not getting the win. However, public response to the bout mentioned very little about the athletic display put on by Crews-Dezurn and Jiménez. Instead, most of the commentary focused solely on the less than 1-minute fight footage, in which Crews-Dezurn ‘gets slapped and has her wig ripped off’,⁴² as sports editor John Hitchinson reports it.

Immediately after the fight, Crews-Dezurn is met backstage by an interviewer for popular YouTube channel FightHype. During a brief 1:47 minute exchange, the interviewer opens by suggesting that Crews-Dezurn ‘put on a performance that everybody’s going to remember’.⁴³ An emotional and tired Crews-Dezurn responds that she is ‘grateful’, and that even though she lost, she ‘started from the grassroots and became a world champion’ and will ‘work [her] way back’ there.⁴⁴ Turning the focus to the ‘crazy moment’⁴⁵ in which her wig was removed from her head, Crews-Dezurn responds with laughter and the following statement:

I’m epic, I’m epic. I do everything big. Look, Beyonce, this is homage to her. Beyonce fell down the steps and whipped her hair. A bitch wig fell off in the ring and I fought hard to the end and that’s what real champs do.⁴⁶

Concluding the interview, Crews-Dezurn declares ‘this is what women’s boxing is’.⁴⁷

Embracing the incident, Crews-Dezurn demonstrates an understanding of the complexities of self-making for women in boxing. Rather than disregarding this moment or playing it down, Crews-Dezurn claims it as core to her boxing identity – and as a powerful opportunity to challenge the dominant visual representation of women’s boxing. Her laughter indicates embarrassment at the ordeal but in affirming that this type of problem could happen to any ‘diva’ at any time, Crews-Dezurn aligns herself with Global superstar Beyonce, confronting the type of shame and ‘anti-black hair sentiment’ that has ‘existed for centuries’.⁴⁸ Furthermore, Crews-Dezurn’s response to this incident and the backlash that followed sees her actively resist the restrictive double bind that female boxers have been caught between since the beginning, and the very recent evolution, of boxing. Boxing has demanded the suppression of femininity at all costs.⁴⁹ However, within the last decade, female boxers have started to publicly acknowledge and complicate simplistic readings of their performances. Pushing back against historical perspectives that binarise female participation in boxing as being either at risk of objectification or empowered through the very physical and embodied nature of the sport has become a modus operandi for female boxers. Indeed, we have argued previously that mainstream boxing favours promoting a particular type of female body in boxing (white, athletic, and docile). Being a Black female boxer in a hegemonic and historically racist industry, then, means that Crews-Dezurn is not only having to resist expectations of embodying ‘a utopian conjunction of gender identities’, she is also having to navigate additional layers of structural and representational inequality.⁵⁰ In the process of (re)claiming the viral hair mishap, which saw a plethora of critiques and attempts to humiliate Crews-Dezurn via Twitter and Instagram taunts (including from celebrities such as Snoop Dog and Laila Ali), Crews-Dezurn showed an alternative potential for social media, using her own posts to oppose the restrictive gaze inscribed onto her body. For Crews-Dezurn, Twitter and Instagram became her primary tools – not solely for retort but also for establishing and nurturing networks of support that would instigate discourse in which she (and other female boxers) can come to ‘know the present and invent the future’ of boxing.⁵¹

Troubling the Gaze: The Heavy-Hitting Diva

Just three days after her loss to Jiménez, Crews-Dezurn hit back against a host of public mockery, branding, and merchandising the hashtag #fuckthathair. Two weeks later, Crews-Dezurn uploaded a video post to her Instagram account detailing cotton t-shirts she had printed, featuring this same hashtag and the phrase she spoke in the ring that night: ‘I want the belts’. Also printed on the t-shirts is an avatar of herself with bright orange afro hair parted to one side, signaling her signature partial head shave. The avatar wears sunglasses with DI on the right lens and VA on the left and is framed by the text ‘The Heavy Hitting’. The post was captioned ‘They have arrived’ and accompanied by the hashtags #theythrowshadeIgetpaid and #Nevertakemypower. In several post-fight interviews, Crews-Dezurn has explained how ‘#fuckthathair I want the belts’ not only positions her alongside other ‘divas’ who have experienced flaws in their performance (Beyonce), it also speaks to overcoming any kind of fear, shame or obstacle holding someone back. #fuckthathair I want the belts symbolises a practice in which errors or glitches are embraced and thereby encourages a different type of resilience. In (re)claiming and celebrating a moment that has otherwise been narrated as shame-inducing or used to undermine Crews-Dezurn’s athletic ability, Crews-Dezurn uses her slogan and avatar to represent the transcendental nature of both the practice of boxing and the performance of self online – both of which offer potential for identities to be shaped and (re)made. Crews-Dezurn’s branding highlights what McMillan refers to as the radical and unique potential of ‘avatar production in the construction and deformation of black female subjectivities’.⁵²

Selling these t-shirts meant that through her avatar and slogan, Crews-Dezurn’s self-branded message about vulnerability and courage transferred from the virtual and began its work in the world, moving outside of boxing and taking up new meaning. Through this business and branding move Crews-Dezurn reached out to, and resonated with, those who bought the t-shirt and expressed their support for her via comments, tweets and circulating her hashtag. She also resisted the shame and ridicule projected on to her by using the viral attention directed towards her as a means of opposing the straightforward objectifying gaze of her Black female body. In embodying and performing the self-making sport of boxing,⁵³ Crews-Dezurn perpetually counters violent systematic oppression inflicted upon Black female bodies. But she takes this a step further through her practices of constructing ‘heavily mediated and exoteric performances’ online, carving out additional space in which she can produce ‘agile’ and ‘expressive self-staging’.⁵⁴

Crews-Dezurn’s online performance and activism invite and encourage other female boxers to draw attention to their qualities of individuality, complexity and contradiction that are frequently missed, undermined, or ignored in visual and narrative representations of the ‘movement’ of women’s boxing.⁵⁵ During lockdown, Crews-Dezurn created an Instagram trend entitled ‘Knockout Challenge’ that also went viral. The challenge saw female boxers moving and practicing their sport and through a slick edit, switch from their sporting personas to an alternative expression of self. Many of these videos featured female boxers shifting from ‘fighter’ to expressing their femininity through makeup and clothing, calling attention to a ‘both/and’ rather than the ‘either/or’ gendered performance formulated by Oates and demanded by boxing’s gatekeepers.

Inventing the Future: Waiting for the World to Catch Up

Alongside her boxing peers and young members of amateur boxing communities, Crews-Dezurn made space to explore and express her identity in and through boxing. In doing so, she and others continue to actively address the simplistic, restrictive representational bind that female boxers have been betwixt historically. Moreover, Crews-Dezurn has shown social media to be a successful means of opposing the lack of complexity and nuance demonstrated in how female boxing identities are mapped and (re)mapped in media. Taken a step further, Crews-Dezurn’s creativity online and in and around the boxing ring is (re)defining possibilities of how female boxers are perceived, offering up ways in which they can counter the limitations imposed on how they operate in the sport. In August 2022, Crews-Dezurn posted a still image to her Instagram account, which features her standing in an empty boxing gym holding her black leather gloves and head guard. She wears a (re)fashioned cropped pink t-shirt that features her ‘DIVA’ avatar in the centre. Gazing outwards and upwards towards what looks like a window or view of outside the gym, Crews-Dezurn captions the post ‘Waiting for the world to catch up’ followed by a world and Black queen emoji. An additional caption reads ‘Hit link in my bio grab some HHD Merch’. The image demonstrates Crews-Dezurn’s ability to look beyond the gendered and racialised constraints in boxing and to look above and towards alternative possibilities in the not-too-distant future. Establishing her fluid and multi-layered production of the ‘Heavy-Hitting Diva’ avatar, Crews-Dezurn has developed a business opportunity to stand out in the heavily competitive market of professional boxing. In the examples we have shown, Crews-Dezurn’s avatar is a tool for accessing, and moving across and within, the ‘distinct and seemingly entrenched aesthetic categories’ that underpin the professionalistion of women’s boxing.⁵⁶ Contra Oates’s simplistic formulation of the female boxer as ‘monster’ or ‘cartoon’, Crews-Dezurn’s self-making and self-branding through her virtual avatar production, and her live performances of the ‘Heavy-Hitting Diva’, are opening space in which she and other female boxers have the capacity to (re)imagine and invent future possibilities for female boxers.

Wilder: Warrior God, Caricatures, and Afro-Diasporic Time

The three images of Wilder considered for this paper present starkly contrasting representations of his identity. If the first offers a visual representation of contained ferocity and dominance, the second suggests that of exposed fear and imminent defeat. Image three alludes to a connection to or channeling of something greater than Wilder, and something beyond heteronormative gendered norms and expectations. It is not the image of the conquered. In comparing the afterlife of these images, we consider the differences between how an individual engages with social avatars and modified representations of self to how others receive, interpret, and project meaning onto the bodies and images of others. We argue images one and three represent versions of Wilder’s masculine identity that he actively crafted and shared with the world. The symbolism embedded within the fashion choices in these two images demonstrates a connection to multiple spatiotemporalities, alluding to the complex and nuanced reading Wilder has of his own gendered identity.

The outfit in image one references different historic time periods and cultures whilst simultaneously exhibiting futuristic and fantasy qualities. From the crown and full face covering to the breastplate and shoulder and arm guards, the costume resembles aspects of that worn by the fourth-century Savaran forces of Persia, the samurai warriors of premodern Japan, and the Roman legion.⁵⁷ The use of masks and face coverings by these warriors was designed to protect the combatant and strike fear into his opponent. But Wilder’s costume also draws upon the aesthetics and histories of Madis Gras, where masks enabled the wearer to transcend daily life and granted certain permissions to engage in deviant behaviour without fear of retribution. In an interview with Curran Bhatia for his YouTube channel, designers Cosmo Lombino and Donato Crowley describe how they began making costumes for Deontay Wilder in 2018 (for the first Tyson Fury fight). By 2019, they state how they were inspired by the last season of Game of Thrones, which was airing at the time,⁵⁸ and Wilder’s desire to be represented like a ‘war god […] a war lord’.⁵⁹ For the fight, Wilder requested an all-black outfit to pay homage to Black History Month.⁶⁰ Behind the image is a collaborative body of work between Wilder and Cosmo’s Glamsquad to fashion a costume referencing multiple spatiotemporal realities and fictions. Wilder was an active participant in this costume’s fabrication as part of his image and identity. However, he did not share images of the costume on his social media accounts following his loss. In the immediate aftermath of the loss, the weight of the costume was blamed for draining Wilder of his energy prior to the opening bell and leaving him too weak to overcome Fury. This excuse was first attributed to Wilder by the sporting press but later corrected as a comment made by Wilder’s trainer. Nevertheless, it led to Isaac Brekken’s image circulating online and being used by sports news outlets and individual users sharing the image alongside claims the outfit was to blame for his loss. It is reasonable to assume that the image Wilder sought to construct of himself through the outfit choice, that of a fantasy and fearsome warrior god, was hijacked and ridiculed following his defeat. The outfit and the image came to represent the antithesis of the identity he wished to portray. The image functioned as a social avatar reimagined and appropriated by others to attack, ridicule, and undermine Wilder’s heteronormative masculinity – to state that he was not ‘man enough’ to carry forty pounds of additional weight (the alleged weight of the costume). Wilder’s unwillingness to post any images of himself in this outfit represents his rejection of this identity being projected onto his body; nevertheless, his social avatar, through this costume and image, lives on beyond Wilder’s immediate control. The social avatar here is far from parasocial.

The use of image two was less widespread than that of image one, but its usage was more problematic on account of the racist tones inherent in the posts. Used by individuals, rather than organisations or outlets, image two captured elements of meme culture where users combined versions of the image with macro text to mock and ridicule Wilder. Rather than the posts attacking Wilder’s masculinity, they attacked his character in a way that is difficult not to read as racist. The image captures a disfigured Wilder. In the shot, Wilder’s lips are exaggerated in size (on account of the camera angle and Fury’s blow to his jaw), with the redness of Wilder’s inner lip prominently on show. The image draws comparisons to the racist coon caricatures of the Jim Crow era. This comparison is further solidified by Twitter user The DeadMan Tweets, who uses the image to compare Wilder to Nigerian comedian Lasisi Elenu, who uses filters to exaggerate the size of his lips and eyes for the video reel skits he posts to his social media platforms. When Twitter users repurposed image two to attack Wilder, they did so to portray him as buffoon, to praise Fury, and to register their glee that Wilder had been ‘shut up for good’.⁶¹ Combined, the use of image two represents an attempt to project onto Wilder a particular reading about his Black and Afro-diasporic masculinity within the North American context, one where there is a degree of delight by some social media users in seeing a body and identity rendered docile. Again, the circulation of image two demonstrates the power available to users to co-opt and edit digital proxies of others in ways that attempt to take control of the social avatar and the performance of one’s identity online. As a public figure, Wilder had no control over how his likeness was captured, disseminated and used by others. Here, Wilder’s social avatar remained beyond his control as others used it to attack his performance of gender and his race.

In the magazine article from which image three features as the cover, the journalist compares Wilder to the ‘tall warrior of dark complexion […] A Native American chief’ who the City of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, is named after. For the journalist, the comparison between Wilder and the city’s namesake is so striking, ‘that you would think one the reincarnation of the other’.⁶² Later in the article, Wilder is asked a question about a recent African ancestry DNA test and the importance that he is linked to the continent of Africa. Wilder responds by affirming his desire to feel connected to the ‘region’, ‘the tribe’, and to be able to set foot on ‘solid ground’ in the ‘motherland’ to understand his ‘foundations’, and to ‘let loose’ and be able to ‘roar’.⁶³ In the article accompanying the image, Wilder speaks of a return to an ancestral home. In doing so, Wilder makes stark and explicit his gendered bodily identity in relationship to colonial histories. It is possible to interpret Wilder’s engagement with Africa as a text, or set of performance practices, rather than as a geo-political location. The image on the magazine cover represents an embodiment of Wilder living otherwise. It is an imagining of that which has already existed in other Black bodies within other spatiotemporalities. In comparing Wilder to a First Nations leader and drawing out the importance of the connections Wilder has to the African continent and his ancestral past, the journalist puts Wilder’s body and identity in a fugitive form, projecting onto him a future that has already existed. But in the embodiment and performance of Africa as text, and through the fusion of different types of symbolism and images (realised specifically through the dress choice), Wilder is reinterpreting and reimagining a history or set of histories. To this end, through this magazine cover, Wilder’s social avatar demonstrates a performance of afro-futurism,⁶⁴ allowing Wilder to reinterpret his relationship with self, the world, and his relationship to the world.

This engagement with futurism is endorsed by Wilder through his participation in the cover image shoot and his promotion of the image on his social media platforms. Wilder posted the image on Instagram on February 29, 2020, and featured it as part of a video post on his Twitter feed on the same day. Wilder captioned the post on Instagram ‘A Warrior Never Backs Down’ and on Twitter ‘An African Giant’. In comparison to image one, Wilder continues to own the identity of a warrior in image three. However, his warrior identity in image three draws less from the histories of multiple regions and multiple pop culture fantasy reference points and more from the histories of the African continent and West Africa specifically. If image one depicts a particular identity built on fear, death, and conquest (seen in the crusader-like attributes of the outfit and the use of skulls), image three builds a warrior identity through the imagery of fertility, femininity, and divinity (as represented using the cowrie shells in the headpiece) and one of emancipatory hope though the performed rejection of progressive teleological narratives of History. At a moment in history where Wilder’s social avatars were co-opted to discredit and undermine his masculinity and race, Wilder pivoted away from proxies of himself he had previously co-created to (re)launch the social avatar depicted in image three. Through an afro-futuristic photoshoot, Wilder unapologetically and unquestionably presented an avatar that demanded the viewer reimagine and reinterpret readings of his racial and gendered body.

Conclusion

These case studies independently work against the limiting constraints of gendered readings of boxing bodies. Crews-Dezurn and Wilder openly experiment with how they choose to perform their identities in and through boxing, drawing attention to – and capitalising on – the creative potential of social media platforms to shape and curate their social avatars as tools for complex and nuanced identities. Both boxers contest readings that are imposed onto their bodies through cruel public commentaries, speaking directly to the process of identify-formation itself as a means of generating alternative inscriptions in/on/of boxing bodies. bell hooks refers to how the active process of ‘looking and looking back, black women’ can see history ‘as counter-culture’.⁶⁵ Though hooks is referring to Black female spectators of film, her formulation of ‘history as counter-culture’, as a powerful and productive means of understanding the present and inventing the future, resonates with our readings of Wilder’s and Crews-Dezurn’s practices of exploring identity through the production of social avatars. We have shown how social media can be a complicated and sometimes hostile space for Black subjectivities – a terrain of struggle, as Banet-Weiser puts it – capable of dismissing particular types of bodies on the one hand and making way for innovative and (re)fashioned expressions of self on the other. Both Wilder and Crews-Dezurn take up the challenge of self-making through boxing and their online social avatars, minimising their respective engagements with criticism and the violent disregard seeking to undermine their creativity, athleticism and important contributions to boxing and its future imaginings.

What we can take from Crews-Dezurn and Wilder is the creative, futuristic potential of engaging with one’s history. For Crews-Dezurn, this means an ongoing engagement with combating the limitations projected onto female boxing bodies and working to (re)configure women’s boxing outside of its relentless binary terms. Knowing this history enables Crews-Dezurn to know herself and design an alternative response. Where Wilder is concerned, his ability to connect with and through multiple spatiotemporalities allows connection to futures that have already existed, and versions of masculinity not prefaced by hetreonormative binaries of progressive teleological narratives.

The social avatar functions differently to extant readings of the avatar alone. It is not parasocial. The social avatar is not solely owned or controlled by the individual for whom it acts as a proxy. Through photographs, memes, and other forms of viral content, the social avatar of well-known personalities functions within a complex and unequal social matrix that invites people to attempt to co-opt the avatar and performances of identity. Here, hierarchical technés of racism are enabled to play out, creating digital terrains of struggle, discrimination, and oppression. Wilder and Crews-Dezurn are able to make use of their social avatar to perform counter-realities and to reclaim ownership of their racial and gendered identities in digital spaces where other agents are happy to project violent and limiting readings onto their bodies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Kate Crews

DR SARAH CREWS (University of South Wales) is a performance and media studies scholar whose research centres on vectors of power as they relate to gender, activism, representation and performance-making practices. Sarah’s recent research projects are concerned with how female boxers are represented in sport and popular media, and how their work challenges stereotypes of female bodies. Sarah is in the process of developing an archive of female contributions to Welsh boxing in collaboration with People’s Collection Wales.

P. Solomon Lennox

DR P. SOLOMON LENNOX (Northumbria University) is Head of Department of Arts at Northumbria University. His research explores the relationships between physical performance practices, theories of performance space and narrative identity. He has published in the area of combat spots, specifically boxing. His work examines the connections between narrative tropes and physical performance practices. He is currently developing work on the power of memetic performance, memetic haunting and activism.

Notes

1 Sarah Crews and P. Solomon Lennox, Boxing and Performance: Memetic Haunting (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020).

2 Harry T. Dyer, Designing the Social: Unpacking Social Media Design and Identity. (Singapore: Springer, 2020).

3 Boghuma K. Titanji et al., ‘Social Media: Flattening Hierarchies for Women, and Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) to Enter the Room Where It Happens’, Clinical Infectious Diseases 74, no. S3 (2022): S222–8.

4 Shaka McGlotten, ‘Black Data’, in No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies, ed. Patrick Johnson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 262–86.

5 Sarah Banet-Weiser, Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 2.

6 Crews and Lennox, Boxing and Performance: Memetic Hauntings.

7 Sarah Crews, ‘Letting Down the Team: Individualism, Selfishness and Kinship in Women’s Boxing’, in Boxing, Narrative and Culture: Critical Perspectives, ed. Sarah Crews and P. Solomon Lennox (Abingdon: Routledge, 2023), 128–47.

8 See Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99; bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (London: Pluto Press, 2000); Aria S. Halliday, Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2022).

9 Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 12.

10 Wesley Morris, ‘Deontay Wilder’s Costume Was Heavyweight Camp’, New York Times, February 26, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/arts/deontay-wilder-costume.html#:~:text=Wilder's%20costume%20was%20designed%2C%20as,astounding%3B%20it%20weighed%2040%20pounds.

11 Jon Boon, ‘BEHIND THE MASK Wilder’s £31k Fury Ring Walk Outfit Made by Designers Cosmo and Donato and Blasted as “Too Heavy” by Bronze Bomber’, The Sun, February 25, 2020, https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/11005363/deontay-wilder-ring-walk-outifit-fury-heavy/.

12 See AFROPOLiTAiN, issue 6, 2020, n.p.

13 McMillan, Embodied Avatars, 10.

14 Ibid.

15 Coleman in McMillan, Embodied Avatars, 11.

16 Jamie Banks and Nicholas David Bowman, ‘Avatars Are (Sometimes) People too: Linguistic Indicators of Parasocial and Social Ties in Player–Avatar Relationships’, New Media & Society 18, no. 7 (2016): 1258.

17 Asimina Vasalou et al., ‘Avatars in Social Media: Balancing Accuracy, Playfulness and Embodied Messages’, Human–Computer Studies 66 (2008): 803.

18 See Asimina Vasalou and Adam N. Johnson, ‘Me, Myself and I: The Role of Interactional Context on Self-Presentation through Avatars’, Computers in Human Behavior 25 (2009): 510–20.

19 Ibid., 514.

20 Philip Auslander, Reactivations: Essays on Performance and Its Documentation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018).

21 Banks and Bowman, ‘Avatars Are (Sometimes) People Too’, 1258.

22 Ibid.

23 David Brunskill, ‘Social Media, Social Avatars and the Psyche: Is Facebook Good for Us?’, Australasian Psychiatry 21, no. 6 (2013): 527.

24 Ibid., 528.

25 Ibid., 529.

26 Jason Allen-Paisant, ‘The Circle – Notes Towards a Topography of Afro-diasporic Time: By Way of Introduction’, Parallax, 27 no. 4 (2021), 363.

27 Ibid., 363.

28 McMillan, Embodied Avatars, 12.

29 Joe Markowski, ‘Katie Taylor vs. Amanda Serrano Press Conference Livestream’, DAZN Boxing, April 28, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc5k-ZvcSFc.

30 Ibid.

31 Crews and Lennox, Boxing and Performance.

32 Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing (London: Bloomsbury, 1987), 73.

33 Phil Jay, ‘Boxing Manager Convinced Alejandra Jimenez is MALE, Predicts Tragedy’, World Boxing News, January 17, 2020, https://www.worldboxingnews.net.

34 Boxing Legends, ‘Franchon Crews Dezurn vs Alejandra Jimenez (11-01-2020) Full Fight’, Dailymotion, January 12, 2020, https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7qitcc.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 TstreeT Controversy, ‘WAR & Wig SNATCHING! Crews-Dezurn vs Jimenez Full Fight Results! NO Sew In? Shields REIGNS Over ALL!’, YouTube, January 12, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1EcfKluGog.

42 John Hutchinson, ‘BOB AND WEAVE Watch Moment Female Boxer Gets Slapped and Has Her Wig Ripped off by Cornerman in World Title Points Defeat’, January 14, 2020, The Sun, https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/10720752/female-boxer-wig-ripped-off-video/.

43 FightHype, ‘“A B*tch Wig Fell Off” – Emotional Franchón Crews-Dezurn in Tears After Upset Loss to Jiménez’, YouTube, January 12, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UQsHkVl0Yc.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid.

48 Chanté Griffin, ‘How Natural Black Hair at Work Became a Civil Rights Issue’, JStor Daily, July 3, 2019, https://daily.jstor.org/how-natural-black-hair-at-work-became-a-civil-rights-issue/.

49 Crews and Lennox, Boxing and Performance.

50 Kasia Boddy, ‘Watching Women Box’, in Routledge Handbook of Sport, Gender and Sexuality, ed. Jennifer Hargreaves and Eric Anderson (London: Routledge, 2014), 254–61.

51 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 115–31.

52 McMillan, Embodied Avatars, 224.

53 See Crews and Lennox, Boxing and Performance.

54 McMillan, Embodied Avatars, 12.

55 FightHype, ‘FRANCHON CREWS-DEZURN GOES IN ON JIMENEZ TESTING POSITIVE, SNOOP DOG “BEEF”, SHIELDS-ALI, & MORE’, YouTube, January 26, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-aqIxIR-fw.

56 McMillan, Embodied Avatars, 225.

57 The aesthetics of the costume conjure images of the Pustighban Royal Guard, an elite heavy calvary corps mostly composed of the seven royal families of Persia. Similarly, the costume speaks to the aesthetic of the samurai warriors of premodern Japan. The crown and full-face covering draw comparisons to the kabuto (helmet), mempo (mask), and sōmen (full face covering).

58 Curran Bhatia, ‘DEONTAY WILDER'S COSTUME DESIGNERS SPEAK OUT AFTER BEING BLAMED FOR WILDER'S LOSS TO FURY IN REMATCH’, YouTube, March 5, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ5xczgRFNo.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid.

61 @Mikeekpo, Twitter, February 23, 2020, httpps://twitter.com.

62 AFROPOLiTAiN, issue 6, 2020, 68.

63 Ibid., 72.

64 See Beverley Wallace, ‘2020 New World Order’, Dialog: A Journal of Theology, 59, no. 4 (2020): 309–12, for a discussion of afro-futurism.

65 hooks, Black Looks, 131.