Finding Honour in Precarity: Taking Control of Violence in Mixed Martial Arts

The rapid growth in participation in mixed martial arts (MMA) over the past decade has been variously applauded and problematised. Drawing on a four and a half year ethnography at an MMA gym in Melbourne, this paper aims to locate this growth, especially with boys and men, within a broader political-economic context shaped by the logic of neoliberalism. The relative instability and precarity that has served to undermine traditional avenues in which masculinity is grounded, creates a contemporary context where participation in MMA provides the opportunity for boys and men to enact a form of productive masculinity. The MMA gym is a space where, through practicing and controlling violence, men, in the absence of hegemonic possibilities, embody a type of compensatory masculinity that is hyper-individualised, and represents an idealisation of entrepreneurial opportunism promoted and structurally reinforced by the State.