UC Riverside

Women’s mixed martial arts (WMMA) is among the fastest growing sports in the world. Long existing on the margins of combat sports, women are now routinely punching, kicking, kneeing, elbowing, and strangling opponents into submission in front of sold-out crowds in the United States and around the world, as women’s “cage fighting” has suddenly become a very lucrative business for combat sports promoters. Despite this, there is currently scant sociological literature on WMMA. Who are these new female subjects? In what ways are they challenging and reproducing gender? And to what extent should we characterize their participation in this new sport as empowering? My dissertation addresses these questions through a critical ethnography of WMMA. Drawing from more than four years of ethnographic fieldwork, content analysis of WMMA media, and 40 semistructured interviews with professional WMMA athletes, I offer the most thorough sociological account of WMMA to date and assess WMMA’s potential as a site for the empowerment of women. I find that although women’s participation in combat sports offers potential to challenge patriarchal constructions of gender and influence feminist social change, this potential is not currently being realized in WMMA. Rather, women’s experiences in WMMA only seem to strengthen their beliefs in “natural” sexual difference and male superiority, as well as instill in them an ideology of individualism that blinds them to social inequality. I argue, therefore, that women’s participation in WMMA does not produce outcomes consistent with feminist conceptions of empowerment. I conclude by discussing the implications of my research for women’s empowerment in sport and call for a reconceptualization of empowerment that centers intersectional concerns with capitalism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy.