Two Analyses of Gender from Ethnographic Field Data on the Sport of Mixed Martial Arts

I examine data from a two year ethnographic study on the sport of mixed martial arts (abbreviated MMA) to contribute to the sociological understanding of gender. The structure of this dissertation is in the form of two stand-alone articles that include their own conceptual frameworks, methods sections, analyses, and conclusions. I preface these two articles in chapter 1 by providing contextual information on mixed martial arts as a sport and its usefulness for the study of gender, providing greater details of the ethnographic study than entailed in the chapters following, and broadly overview both articles. In chapter 2, I examine how definitions of men's violence in the sport of MMA are transformed or "keyed" by different institutional actors as a "real fight" and a "contest" and demonstrate how these findings extend Risman's (2004) theory of gender as a social structure. In chapter 3, I show how the men's training in the MMA gym resembles a "gendered embodiment cycle" which culminates in a public performance of masculinity and also note how gender is embedded in each phase of this cycle. In chapter 4, I offer some general thoughts about what a study of MMA tell us about gender, review implications for specific findings in each chapter, and discuss the possibility for findings to inform other types of social inequality.