[ARETE] Review of Fighting Invisibility

[Duncan Jamieson]

All,
Please find below and attached Adrian Markle's review of Jennifer
McClearen's *Fighting Invisibility: Sports Media and Fighting in the UFC.*
Thanks
Duncan



*Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFC *by
Jennifer McClearen

Reviewed by Adrian Markle



In February 2013, Ronda Rousey strode into the cage at the Honda Center in
Anaheim, California, to fight in the first women’s MMA bout in UFC history,
headlining UFC 157 over former UFC champion Lyoto Machida and former Pride
and Strikeforce champion Dan Henderson. After her win, Rousey headlined
five more pay per views before her retirement, becoming the then highest
paid and most popular fighter in the UFC. Since Rousey’s explosion in
popularity, many other female fighters also gained significant visibility,
with more than two dozen women headlining events since UFC 157. In the UFC,
perhaps unexpectedly considering its reputation as aggressively
hyper-masculine, female athletes appeared to be gaining parity with male
athletes. Jennifer McClearen’s *Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and
Female Athletes in the UFC *analyses the realities of being a visible
female UFC fighter, and the ways in which that appearance of equality might
be misleading.

            The introduction discusses some of the book’s central concepts:
visibility; branded difference; and contract labor. The first chapter,
“Developing a Millennial Sports Brand,” provides a history of the UFC and
their brand development in the twenty-first century, including their
digital and transmedia marketing; their desire for a global audience; and
their marketing of the diversity of their competitors’ racial, gender, and
sexual identities. The second chapter, “Affect and the Rousey Effect,”
focuses on Rousey and her impact on the sport, especially with regards to
the conceptual and practical effects of empowerment. The third chapter,
“Gendering the American Dream,” discusses the UFC’s strategy of marketing
“difference”; the story of the first female flyweight champion and the
first Native American UFC champion Nicco Montaño (who was cut from the UFC
roster during the writing of this review); the particular experience of
lesbian athletes in the UFC; and the “cruel optimism” of the fighter’s
dream. Chapter Four, “The Labor of Visibility on Social Media,” looks at
social media engagement as labor; the relationship between social media
engagement and real-life opportunity; and racial and gender inequalities of
online engagement. And the fifth chapter, “The Fight for Labor Equity,”
focuses on the UFC’s compensatory structure, the athletes’ attempts to
unionize, and the organization’s response to those unionization efforts.
There is also a coda, which is about the athlete’s love for their sport and
for each other.

            Each of these chapters is compelling and presents a detailed
and interesting analysis of the way in which the visibility these athletes
have does not always provide the advantages and security that might be
expected. Increased visibility does not necessarily equate to increased
pay, to increased job security, or even to increased popularity. High
profile fighters can still struggle financially. Champions are still
stripped of their titles for questionable reasons. Divisional mainstays are
still seemingly let go for challenging the organization. While these issues
are looked at primarily through the lens of gender, *Fighting Visibility*
also includes significant analysis of experiences of race and sexuality, as
well as an overall excellent articulation of contemporary sport branding
and economics. Early on, McClearen uses the word “ambivalent” to describe
her findings, which speaks to *Fighting Visibility*’s best qualities: its
analysis is thorough and its interpretations are nuanced. It does not
oversimplify. To that end, the book also sometimes reaches for examples
beyond female mixed martial artists to great effect; anecdotes centering on
male MMA fighters Cain Velasquez, Drakkar Close, and Kajan Johnson add much
to our understanding of the sport’s issues, as does a section that
discusses tennis legend Serena Williams.

            That being said, there are a few exclusions that may have added
value here: former Strikeforce champion Sarah Kaufman’s campaign for
five-minute rounds, which directly affected the Carano-Cyborg fight; and
the particularities of the UFC’s relationship with Invicta (arguably being
the only organization they have ever cross promoted with, by virtue of
allowing Cyborg to fight there while under UFC contract). There were also
one or two areas where a claim may not have been quite justified—the
differences in resources devoted to the *Revolution *and *Jessica Andrade
Emerges (JAE) *promotional videos are initially framed as resulting
from *Revolution
*being about two conventionally attractive, straight, white, American
women, and *JAE* being about a lesbian woman from Brazil, rather than the
fact that the former video was made for a major championship fight and the
latter for the promotional debut of a woman with (at that time) few notable
wins. But these issues are not numerous or significant enough to detract
from the overall quality of the book, which is excellent.

            *Fighting Visibility *challenges the concept of visibility as
inherently or wholly positive or valuable, and it illustrates how the
marketing of diversity may undermine the very experiences it appears to
endorse. And beyond that, McClearen provides us with an insightful and
informed account of the experiences of female mixed martial artists in the
UFC at a pivotal time in the development of their sport, its culture, and
its perception.




Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past

Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.
Professor of History
Book Review Editor
*AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature*
Ashland University
Ashland, OH  44805
USA
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