The Seduction of the Fist Fight: Deviant Leisure, Conflict Sports and the Lure of Organised Violence

• In Event: Deviant Leisure and Consumer Culture

Abstract

Physical violence in a sport or leisure environment has always elicited strong polarised reactions from an audience. Traditionally, criminology has viewed the organised violence of sport within the limits of legal boundaries such as implied consent between willing combatants (see Groombridge, 2016). However, by drawing on broader sociological and philiosophical traditions we can seek to understand violence (and in particular, the pugilism of the fist fight) as a multi-faceted form of action.

This paper looks at the relationship between violence and desire in contemporary conflict sports. Drawing upon cutting-edge theoretical concepts such as the pseudo-pacification process (Hall, 2007), and the passion for the real (Zizek, 2005); in conjunction with more established criminological concepts such as the seduction (Katz, 1990) and carnival (Presdee, 2000) of crime, a preliminary understanding of violence in consumer society emerges. By focusing on the contradictions of violence and the consumption of violence within a broader social and cultural context of late-capitalism, consumer culture, and social insulation; a more nuanced theorisation of violence and desire that considers both the foreground crunch of the punch within the background structures from which it emerges.

Author

• Victoria Silverwood, Birmingham City University