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The introduction considers the increased visibility of female athletes in MMA--a phenomenon enabled by a 21st century media context that increasingly seeks out representations of difference, including gendered, racial, and sexual difference, on a variety of media platforms. Sports media brands are now beginning to align with other media entities to promote diverse representations as a method of increasing viewership, which makes branded difference a lucrative branding and marketing strategy. This chapter cautions, however, that the increased visibility of difference in the UFC ignores a labor model that allows the brand to profit on its diverse athletes who fight for low pay and few benefits as independent contractors in a gig economy.

Chapter one establishes the organizational context that facilitated the integration of diverse female athletes into the UFC brand. A “millennial sports media brand,” such as the UFC, deploys branding and marketing strategies characteristic of the millennial generation while simultaneously courting fans from this same demographic. In fact, the UFC might have faded into obscurity in the mid-2000s had the brand not begun experimenting with digital platforms and social media. The UFC enthusiastically embraced digital media, began actively seeking global audience demographics by representing fighters from around the world, and integrated a “we are all fighters” brand maxim, an ethos that understands diversity as something every fighter and fan possesses. Each of these approaches combine to create a millennial sports media brand ready to promote and exploit diverse female athletes.

The third chapter of Fighting Visibility investigates how the UFC incorporates diverse female fighters into discourses of meritocracy and the American dream. While sports media has long embraced the myth of the American dream in its storytelling, narratives and human-interest stories about pugilists rarely feature women as the central protagonists and pursuers of that dream. Branded difference in the UFC alters this discourse to include women of diverse nationalities, ethnicities, and sexualities. The revisions to include women of color and lesbians in the dream discourse entice an expendable labor force willing to sacrifice their health, wellness, and livelihood to pursue their UFC dreams, which proves yet again that making women visible in sports media does not automatically yield equity.

The fourth chapter of Fighting Visibility analyzes interviews with female UFC fighters to consider how they navigate social media in their jobs. Building followers online, engaging with fans, and promoting sponsors as micro-influencers is an undercompensated and often invisible form of labor that leverages a gendered tax on female athletes, particularly those who do not perform the traditional forms of femininity that are more valued in popular culture. Female fighters freely undertake this aspirational labor because they hope the exposure online will convince the UFC to promote them or that their efforts to engage fans will appeal to sponsors. Instead, visibility on social media remains an unwritten and unpaid bullet point on the UFC fighter job description that often fails to deliver the assumed benefits that athletes seek.

Chapter 5 delves into the unionization efforts by former UFC fighter Leslie Smith and the fighters’ association she cofounded, Project Spearhead. Smith has legally challenged the UFC’s classification of fighters as underpaid independent contractors--a classification that makes these athletes a relatively inexpensive and expendable investment for the UFC. The chapter considers potential solutions for gendered labor inequity in sports media by centering political visibility as a viable avenue for illuminating labor inequalities and improving workers’ rights within the UFC. While a union might benefit all fighters, those who stand to gain the most from a fighters’ union are White women and women of color because historically the most disenfranchised identities recuperate the most rights when unions collectively advocate for the equal treatment of all workers.

The conclusion of Fighting Visibility meditates on the tensions between love and violence in MMA and its largest promotion. Rather than framing MMA as an inherently violent pursuit, the coda upholds consent and mutual respect as essential values that differentiate combat sports from violence. Athletes enter the cage with mutually agreed upon rules when they consent to the competition. They also sign contracts with the UFC in good faith that the promotion will uphold their commitments to its athletes. Thus, the real violence in the UFC is labor practices that violate the trust the athletes place in them while the promotion exploits the fighters’ love for MMA and willingness to labor for the sport’s visibility. Neoliberal labor practices are the central form of violence that should be eradicated in combat sports.

This chapter continues the examination of how martial arts differ from violence by delving into the symbolism attached to sport fighting. Here, this section investigates the significance of seemingly small gestures such as handshakes and fist bumps, treating them as play markers that separate the mat or the ring from the outside world. The rich symbolism of play markers run alongside an inversion of the meaning attached to strikes: in the outside world a punch devalues, whereas in sport fighting it signals respect for an opponent’s abilities. In this sense, sport fighting differentiates but also walks a fine line between the form and the function of violence. This consideration of significance in martial arts practice includes an investigation of martial arts and combat sport’s vexed relationship to real violence.

This chapter examines the relationship between risk and physical play, distinguishing between danger—that is, external conditions—and risk as the experience of those conditions. Here, through reference to sport fighting and other so-called extreme sports, the section presents risk as a means of managing dangerous circumstances rather than unleashing them. The pleasures of risk-taking can offset the fixations of a culture of fear. However, the treatment of risk in American sports is paradoxical: high-level competitive sport risks players’ physical well-being, while remaining risk-averse as to outcomes. Risk, then, like vulnerability, is value-neutral, and requires a consideration of its circumstances: here, consequence and blame.