Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFC

Abstract

In writing Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFC, Jennifer McClearen brings together her positionality as a feminist media scholar and as an athlete practicing martial arts for fourteen years within a community that includes MMA fighters and fans. Her research takes into account the surprising inclusion of women in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) while also exploring how UFC functions as a millennial sports media brand. Central to McClearen's study is her concept of “branded difference,” denoting the marketing strategies used to brand particular UFC fighters on the basis of their visible and articulated differences of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality.Branded difference marked a significant shift for UFC, which, upon its launch, marketed itself as a means of testing an athlete's masculinity across various martial arts. Brutality was promoted as a key attribute, and while much has changed since its founding in 1993, UFC still sees brutality as a characteristic of elite athletes in its competition. Yet, in an effort to expand their target audience, UFC sought to appeal to millennials as a large, upcoming segment of consumers for sports entertainment. McClearen details the necessary qualities of a millennial sports brand, primarily a need to create connections with an audience that is digital, global, and diverse.In chapter 2, McClearen directs her analysis to the phenomenon of UFC fighter Ronda Rousey, a former Olympic medalist in judo. She uses affect theory to examine Rousey's emotional impact on audiences, beginning with a brief reflection on her own experience at a UFC event in Brazil. She cautions, however, that the seeming empowerment of women through mixed martial arts is more complex than it may appear. UFC chose millennial women as a target audience and leveraged branded difference to create a responsive fandom for fighters like Rousey and Liz Carmouche, her first UFC opponent. Undeniably, inclusion is a socially significant value in today's media culture, as UFC marketing experts saw in their outreach to Latinx and African American audiences before launching the women's fighting divisions, which ran counter to the longstanding ethos of UFC as a test of masculinity. McClearen effectively argues throughout the book that UFC president Dana White shifted his perspective with the realization that Rousey could display femininity and belligerence simultaneously.UFC uses the slogan “we are all fighters” as a means of branded difference. The slogan was first used on a t-shirt for a fundraiser following the Pulse tragedy in 2016. Proceeds were donated to LGBTQ+ organizations in Las Vegas, where UFC is headquartered. The slogan readily embraced any fighter and any audience to which it is applied as a promotion. McClearen argues that by its inclusivity, “we are all fighters” compels an emotional connection with fans as well. Nonetheless, the category of difference is evacuated when it is universalized.In UFC's dispatching of the American Dream as a metaphor for the success of the female fighters in their ranks, McClearen notes that branded difference works best when it coincides with ways those fighters are “just like us”: Jessica Andrade might be a lesbian who grew up poor in Brazil, but she is also ambitious and determined. The promotional messages posit that when our values are the same, they are more significant than our cultural differences. That UFC fighters Andrade and Liz Carmouche both identify as lesbians feeds back into UFC's desire to connect with gay and lesbian fans as well as millennials who are tolerant of and may advocate for gender diversity.McClearen conducted interviews with nine female UFC fighters to research the role of social media in sharing news and developing fandoms in order to gain visibility, as they hoped to be selected to fight for the UFC. The labor of promotion, then, is shifted from the UFC to the fighters, an additional burden for uncontracted athletes. Interviews and evidence from social media research indicate that the fighters who gain most from their social media presence are those who successfully perform “the athletic labor of (White) femininity” (127). The emotional labor that women face as a result of harassment on social media is addressed as well, with fighters expressing varying degrees of tolerance for the inappropriately sexualized and abusive messages they receive.Fighting Visibility demonstrates that female fighters are encouraged to imagine opportunities for professional success through UFC despite several significant ways in which these athletes are exploited. UFC positions the success of Ronda Rousey as something for both athletes and fans to emulate, following the notion that “if you can see her, you can be her.” Yet McClearen's research shows that Rousey's success is exceptional and only portrayed as typical, rendering opportunity a likely facade.