Cage Fighting like a Girl: Exploring gender constructions in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)

Weaving, Charlene

doi:10.1080/00948705.2013.858393

Cited by 32 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…For Rousey, this authentic self is branded through inspirational and motivational posts that prompt a sense of shared connection via the challenges she and other women must conquer on the pathway to success. From a working-class background, Rousey portrays herself as a “powerful woman in action” (McClearen, 2015; Weaving, 2014), or the antithesis of what she refers to as a Do Nothing Bitch (DNB). Rousey's self-styled journey can help us to see how self-disclosure functions as a form of affective labour that is reliant on women cultivating affective bonds and relationships as a response to increased casualisation and uncertainty of traditional work structures (Banet-Weiser, 2015, p. 57).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Female athletes' self-representation on social media: A feminist analysis of neoliberal marketing strategies in “economies of visibility”

Toffoletti

Thorpe

2018

Feminism & Psychology

130

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Existing research into the depiction of female athletes has indicated that while they remain under-represented across traditional and online media outlets, social media is a potential tool for female athletes to redress this lack of coverage, and even contest and rework normative gender and sexual identities in sport. This paper challenges such arguments by offering a feminist thematic analysis of how five international female athletes are using social media to present their sporting and feminine selves within a neoliberal post-feminist moment characterised by individual empowerment and entrepreneurial subjecthood. Adopting a feminist critique of neoliberalism, and critically engaging Banet-Weiser's gendered “economies of visibility”, our findings demonstrate that, in a social media environment, female athletes are adopting new strategies for identity construction that capitalise on tropes of agentic post-feminist subjecthood to market themselves, including self-love, self-disclosure and self-empowerment. This paper advances the emerging field of inquiry into athlete social media usage by focusing on the ideological workings of neoliberalised gender discourse not only in the crafting of contemporary sporting femininities in digital spaces, but in recasting feminism as an individualised endeavour firmly located in the market.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Female athletes' self-representation on social media: A feminist analysis of neoliberal marketing strategies in “economies of visibility”

Toffoletti

Thorpe

2018

Feminism & Psychology

130

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Secondly, and far more widely noted, has been the tendency for men (or women themselves) to resist or counteract the gender-subversive potential of women's MACS practice in numerous ways. Such resistance can come in the form of passive or overt opposition to participation [e.g., Lafferty & McKay 2004;Hollander 2009] but more commonly involves modes of practice and/ or representation which reify, rather than challenge, hierarchal gender relations [Hargreaves 1997;Paradis 2012;Channon and Jennings 2013;Weaving 2014]. In this latter respect, the ways in which practitioners 'do' gender is of particular importance in mediating the potentially transformative consequences of women's integration into an otherwise ostensibly 'masculine' cultural sphere.…”

Section: Martial Arts Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Often, female fighters' embodiment of femininity is considered somewhat oppositional to, or even incompatible with, their development of fighting skills [Halbert 1997;McCaughey 1998;Guérandel and Mennesson 2007;Kavoura et al 2015]; it can also be framed as symbolic of the limited extent to which MACS practices can challenge wider social formations of (hierarchal) gender difference [Mennesson 2000;Velija et al 2013;Paradis 2014;Weaving 2014]. In this sense, the extant feminist literature on women in MACS, with its overarching commitment to exploring how female practitioners can challenge or subvert women's subordination, has often tended to reaffirm what Jayne Caudwell describes as the general tendency among wider feminist sport sociology to read sportswomen's femininity as 'duped' [Caudwell 2006: 155].…”

Section: Martial Arts Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

'Pink Gloves Still Give Black Eyes': exploring 'alternative' femininity in women's combat sports

Channon

Phipps

2017

Martial Arts Studies

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This article considers the gendered significance of women's participation in combat sports, with a specific focus on the performances of femininity by female combat athletes. Against lines of argument which posit that women's enactment of femininity is the result of restrictive, coercive, and ultimately conservative cultural pressures, respondents in two separate studies suggested that a purposeful, selective enactment of femininity, when understood in combination with their fighting ability, signified an important challenge to orthodox understandings of gender. As such, our data suggests that manoeuvring within normative cultural parameters of gender may, ironically, help to stimulate change in its structure of meanings, given that the feminine performances of these fighters ultimately posed symbolic challenges to cultural constructions of ('normal') women as inevitably weaker and inferior athletes compared to men. We therefore advocate that scholars with an interest in exploring the subversion of gender remain mindful of the possibility that such subversive impulses might occur via the appropriation, and re-signification, of some of its more orthodox norms.

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“…2 And Vaccaro, Schrock, and McCabe (2011) reveal the “backstage” emotion work necessary to maintain a confidant exterior and cope with the fear of entering a cage fight. Most recently, Weaving (2014) has explored the fine line that women must tread through in an examination of the UFC’s marketing of Ronda Rousey, the most popular female fighter, and Mierzwinski, Velija, and Malcolm (2014) use interviews to understand women’s experience in the MMA gym. Both offer important steps toward answering the call for greater engagement with the experience of women in MMA (Paradis 2014).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Tales from the Mat

Green

2015

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

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Based upon five years of observant participation, I examine how participants justify their engagement with the controversial but increasing popular practice of mixed martial arts. Several themes emerge: necessity ("it is a violent world"), sociobiological discourse, emulating the exotic, spiritual teachings, alienation from consumer society, and the body as a project. These themes suggest that this pain-filled-practice is more than simply a site of exercise or sport, and in fact reveals complicated, gendered narratives about the broader social lives and struggles of the men who participate in the practice. I argue that the ambiguously defined field and the feeling of being out-of-place encourage identity exploration. This becomes an important part of the allure as the participants craft stories that provide meaning for the physical training. I conclude with reflections on how meaning is constructed in embodied cultural forms and on the value of these often-ignored forms for making sense of social life.

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Cage Fighting like a Girl: Exploring gender constructions in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)

Cited by 32 publications

References 8 publications

Female athletes' self-representation on social media: A feminist analysis of neoliberal marketing strategies in “economies of visibility”

Female athletes' self-representation on social media: A feminist analysis of neoliberal marketing strategies in “economies of visibility”

'Pink Gloves Still Give Black Eyes': exploring 'alternative' femininity in women's combat sports

Tales from the Mat

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