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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.

Chapter 2 examines how and why the UFC entered the business of girls and women’s empowerment. To do so, the chapter considers what representation mattering feels like and how the promotion used popular feminist discourse to facilitate positive feelings of empowerment. Ronda Rousey and other female UFC athletes generate an affective resonance with fans, but also with current and aspiring female UFC fighters. Branded difference’s emphasis on the empowered women becomes a strategy for attracting female fighters to the promotion by promising that visibility will yield opportunity without delivering on those claims for the majority of these athletes. Instead, “if she can see it, she can be it” remains a hollow but effective sentiment for attracting female fighters to the sport.