Throwing the Fight: Accomplishing Femininity through Intimate Partners in Women's Mixed Martial Arts

• In Event: 4154 - Gender Relations in Contemporary Sport

Abstract

Women athletes face a unique paradox with respect to their personal and professional lives: as athletes, they are expected to be strong, fit, and aggressive, while as women, they are expected to be vulnerable, small, and submissive—the so-called, “female athlete paradox.” Women combat sports athletes live a heightened paradox, as their fighting abilities offer potential to disrupt the patriarchal gender order and resist women’s physical and symbolic subordination to men. I conducted semi-structured interviews (N = 40) with professional women’s mixed martial arts (WMMA) athletes to understand how they understand and practice gender in relation to the paradox. The findings suggest that heterosexual WMMA athletes engage in a purposeful strategy of partnering with hypermasculine men who can physically dominate them in order to accomplish hetero-femininity—a process I term, “throwing the fight.” Far from challenging the patriarchal gender order, these women actively work to reinforce it. I conclude by discussing how this use of intimate partners may apply to other cases of identity paradox.

Author

• Justen Hamilton, University of California-Riverside