Uncaged: Mixed Martial Arts, Ultra-Realist Criminology, Violence and the Ethnographic Lens.

• In Event: Deviant Leisure and Consumer Culture

Abstract

Criminology has recently experienced something of a sporting turn, positioning sport as a setting and a field which might usefully supplement and enhance Criminological theorizing (e.g. Groombridge, 2016). Occasionally, criminology has turned to sports and pugilist permits and considered the role and place of the legality of consensual violence. For the most part, criminologists position the sporting arena as one in which performances of legitimate forms of activity, deviance (and sometimes outright lawbreaking) can tell us something more of the social order, of ‘resistance’, of embodied excitement, of viscerally, embodied habitus (Waquant, 2004) and of the genesis of risk taking and rule breaking. This paper takes a different approach. Using insider ethnography as total participant, it seeks to use MMA to look deeper than the existing criminological surface readings and arrive at all more nuanced

consideration of late-modern violence and its consumption. In using the case of MMA, it seeks to use an ultra-realist lens (Hall and Winlow, 2015) to consider how this form of entertainment can tell us something of the peculiar relationship contemporary Western, neoliberal, consumer society has with commoditized violence and offer more in depth and holistic consideration of this form of deviant leisure.

Author

• James Treadwell, Birmingham City University