Violence and constraints in combat sport

Abstract

There is much that is claimed to be wrong with the professional sport of mixed martial arts (MMA). Yet with a narrow focus on violence and injuries in MMA bouts, paternalistic bans and moralizing critiques have typically obscured the core features and normative difficulties of MMA. In contrast, this chapter seeks to characterize more fully the precise nature of combat sport violence, as well as the uniqueness of MMA as a distinctly hybrid combat sport. As the most interdisciplinary of all combat sports, MMA often appears to outsiders as akin to ‘street-fighting’, and thus inherently more violent than other combat sports. But this is to misunderstand both sport violence and MMA. Violence in head-to-head sport – and, especially, in combat sport – is not reducible to instrumental attempts to injure or incapacitate an opponent. Indeed, in the case of MMA the difficulties lie not in the ‘martial arts’ but rather the many skilled ways in which those arts are creatively mixed in the course of competition. In fact, it is precisely the complex hybridity of MMA that poses challenges to devising constitutive rules that make the sport both relatively safe for its practitioners and sufficiently interesting as a martial art.