Afterword: The Art of Boxing

The afterword returns to the figure of the twentieth-century boxer Muhammad Ali—the same athlete who opened the book. The chapter considers the appropriation of Ali’s life and figure as subject matter in the work of contemporary Black queer artists, for whom Ali embodied the potential to subvert the political, the racial, and the sexual identities assigned to him. Looking especially closely at the work of the contemporary black photographer Lyle Ashton Harris, the afterword brings the historical arguments of Heavyweight into the present by considering how contemporary representations of boxers offer powerful moments of rupture between the assertion of a corporeal black masculinity defined by physical prowess, patriarchy, and heterosexuality, and the reality of sexual politics.