Ultimate Fighting Championship and the present and future of women's sports Mixed martial arts stars like Amanda Nunes, Zhang Weili, and Ronda Rousey have made female athletes top draws in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). Jennifer McClearen charts how the promotion incorporates women into its far-flung media ventures and investigates the complexities surrounding female inclusion. On the one hand, the undeniable popularity of cards headlined by women add much-needed diversity to the sporting landscape. On the other, the UFC leverages an illusion of promoting difference—whether gender, racial, ethnic, or sexual—to grow its empire with an inexpensive and expendable pool of female fighters. McClearen illuminates how the UFC's half-hearted efforts at representation generate profit and cultural cachet while covering up the fact it exploits women of color, lesbians, gender non-conforming women, and others. Thought provoking and timely, Fighting Visibility tells the story of how a sports entertainment phenomenon made difference a part of its brand—and the ways women paid the price for success.
Visibility matters in contemporary societies; online, in the media and in the public eye. But who is seen and how? Are women still seen through a male gaze? This book explores the politics of looking and being looked at, and the relationship between actual and virtual worlds, for example in sport, art and cinema.
This Handbook examines the study of failure in social sciences, its manifestations in the contemporary world, and the modalities of dealing with it – both in theory and in practice. It draws together a comprehensive approach to failing, and invisible forms of cancelling out and denial of future perspectives. Underlining critical mechanisms for challenging and reimagining norms of success in contemporary society, it allows readers to understand how contemporary regimes of failure are being formed and institutionalized in relation to policy and economic models, such as neo-liberalism. While capturing the diversity of approaches in framing failure, it assesses the conflations and shifts which have occurred in the study of failure over time. Intended for scholars who research processes of inequality and invisibility, this Handbook aims to formulate a critical manifesto and activism agenda for contemporary society. Presenting an integrated view about failure, the Handbook will be an essential reading for students in sociology, social theory, anthropology, international relations and development research, organization theory, public policy, management studies, queer theory, disability studies, sports, and performance research.
The National Basketball Association reaches a global audience via a multiplatform strategy that leverages its uncanny ability to connect fans to all things NBA. Steven Secular brings readers inside the league’s global operations and traces the history of the NBA’s approach to sports media from its 1980s embrace of cable through the streaming revolution of the twenty-first century. As fans around the world stream games and other league content, NBA teams incorporate foreign languages and cultures into broadcasts to boost their product’s appeal to audiences in Brazil, China, and beyond. Secular’s analysis reveals how the NBA continues to transform itself into a wildly successful media producer and distributor more akin to a streaming studio than the sports leagues of old even as its media partners and sponsors erase any notion of sports as a civic good. A timely look at a dynamic media landscape, The Digital NBA shows how the games we love became content first and sport a distant second.
Operate Your Rifle Like a Pro U.S. Army Official Manual is a comprehensive guide that covers all aspects of rifle operation, from basic handling to advanced marksmanship techniques. Written in a clear and concise manner, this manual serves as a valuable resource for military personnel looking to enhance their shooting skills. The text is accompanied by detailed illustrations and diagrams, making it easy for readers to understand and apply the concepts discussed. This manual is a must-have for anyone looking to improve their proficiency with a rifle. The book is written in a straightforward and instructional style, reflecting its primary purpose of providing practical guidance to soldiers in the field.
Most television channels, websites, mobile applications, and video games dedicated to sports reveal a stark underrepresentation of female athletes even though girls and women avidly participate in athletics. Feminist scholars indicate that the paucity of media coverage of women in sports reflects a cultural disinterest in women's athletic bodies compared to men's--a discourse dependent on pervasive gendered notions about women's physical inferiority. The array of media platforms for consuming sports and sports-themed content collectively reaffirms athletics as a dominantly masculine domain. Curiously, media scholars who study difference argue that one of the cultural features of new media technologies is the ability to provide more diverse representations than ever before. Streaming sites, social media, blogs, and other digital and web-based programs provide the capacity to customize and easily distribute content for niche or previously ignored audiences--including minoritized groups. Scholars have yet to analyze how some media organizations leverage new media technologies to revise discourses of women's physical inferiority in transformative ways. Converging Media and Divergent Bodies: Articulations of Powerful Women in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) examines how the mixed-martial arts promotion produces and circulates representations of female fighters throughout the mixed-martial arts (MMA) promotional organization's transnational transmedia empire. The UFC media brand includes Pay-Per-View fights, promotional spots, television specials, a reality TV show, video games, documentary webisodes, and a subscription-based streaming website. The diversity of UFC content and platforms is indicative of the broader trend of converging media--a contemporary feature of media culture where audiences can consume, circulate, and produce media in multiple ways. Converging media allows a proliferation of media content generated from the top down or the bottom up and gives marginalized identities, such as women in sports, greater visibility. Weaving textual analysis with ethnographic methods, I argue that the UFC introduced female fighters in 2013 as an innovative sports media convergence strategy that imagines difference (including gender, race, sexuality, class, and nationality) as central to its brand identity. The UFC's approach is novel in sports media and is built on a burgeoning marketing ethos that believes increasing the type of representations available, via new media technologies, appeals to previously disregarded segments of the sports media market (i.e. women and/or fans of women's sports). The organization is transforming some of the longstanding cultural assumptions about women's sports and their fans by promoting female fighters and marketing to female fans. At the same time, difference becomes an ambivalent discourse that fluctuates between essentialism and homogeneity in a customizable marketing formula. The very notion of gendered difference, and difference more broadly, becomes flattened through market forces. Converging Media and Divergent Bodies resonates beyond the study of sport or media to theorize how cultural, technological, and economic forces influence revisions to our understandings of the gendered body in contemporary society. Converging Media and Divergent Bodies is an interdisciplinary project that draws upon feminist studies, media studies, sports studies, and cultural studies to consider the UFC as a cultural entity that operates within a contemporary social, political, and economic context. UFC media is complex in terms of form, including platform, genre, and content, and in terms of significance, such as cultural, social, and economic. I draw upon the cultural studies project to consider UFC media as impacted by various contemporary conditions. I recognize that the production, representation, and reception of female fighters operate in a particular context that includes technological innovation, changing rituals of consumption, neoliberal logics, burgeoning discourses of women's physicality, and the increasing visibility of difference. This particular context is important for forming my in-depth readings of specific articulations, or moments, of convergence. Thus, I combine semi-structured interviews with critical textual analysis to connect the broader context to my readings of UFC executives marketing across platforms, of images and color schemes framing women on specific platforms, and of UFC bloggers creating and circulating discourses of women's fighting as both producers and consumers. This interdisciplinary study illuminates the contested space of women's physical participation in converging media culture while simultaneously surfacing tremors in longstanding ideologies of the gendered body.
This new volume from Martin Bowman examines the closing years of the Second World War, as the tide turned against the German and Axis forces. It includes riveting first-hand accounts from German fighter pilots caught up in some of the most dramatic night time conflicts of the latter war years.Viewing Bomber Command's operations through the eyes of the enemy, the reader is offered a fresh and intriguing perspective. Set in context by Bowman's historical narrative, these snippets of pilot testimony work to offer an authentic sense of the times at hand.
A Full-Color History for Civil War Enthusiasts, History Buffs, and Anyone Interested in the Saga of the Irish in America! The Union’s Irish Brigade, the Civil War’s most famous fighting outfit, built an unusual reputation for dash and gallantry having fought throughout the war, from First Bull Run in 1861 to the Confederate surrender and Appomattox Court House in 1865. Here is the gripping true story, replete with stunning full-color illustrations, of all Irish regiments from Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York serving under the direction of the Brigade’s most famous commander, General Thomas Francis Meagher. This meticulously researched text features complete and detailed accounts of the Brigade’s battles and skirmishes, from Bull Run to Yorktown to Peach Orchard to Malvern Hill to Antietam to Petersburg—to name a few. This powerful, authoritative volume captures the heart and tireless effort of the heroic men who rescued the Union from defeat time and time again—enthralling reading with authentic accompanying illustrations that will fascinate everyone from the biggest history buffs to the occasional layman interested in the history of Irish-Americans or the Civil War.
“Disability rights activist Alice Wong brings tough conversations to the forefront of society with this anthology. It sheds light on the experience of life as an individual with disabilities, as told by none other than authors with these life experiences. It's an eye-opening collection that readers will revisit time and time again.” —Chicago Tribune One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent—but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people, just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, From Harriet McBryde Johnson’s account of her debate with Peter Singer over her own personhood to original pieces by authors like Keah Brown and Haben Girma; from blog posts, manifestos, and eulogies to Congressional testimonies, and beyond: this anthology gives a glimpse into the rich complexity of the disabled experience, highlighting the passions, talents, and everyday lives of this community. It invites readers to question their own understandings. It celebrates and documents disability culture in the now. It looks to the future and the past with hope and love.
A questioning of the belief in the power of LGBTQ visibility through the lives of queer women in the rural Midwest Today most LGBTQ rights supporters take for granted the virtue of being “out, loud, and proud.” Most also assume that it would be terrible to be LGBTQ in a rural place. By considering moments in which queerness and rurality come into contact, Visibility Interrupted argues that both positions are wrong. In the first monograph on LGBTQ women in the rural Midwest, Carly Thomsen deconstructs the image of the rural as a flat, homogenous, and anachronistic place where LGBTQ people necessarily suffer. And she suggests that visibility is not liberation and will not lead to liberation. Far from being an unambiguous good, argues Thomsen, visibility politics can, in fact, preclude collective action. They also advance metronormativity, postraciality, and capitalism. To make these interventions, Thomsen develops the theory of unbecoming: interrogating the relationship between that which we celebrate and that which we find disdainful—the past, the rural, politics—is crucial for developing alternative subjectivities and politics. Unbecoming precedes becoming. Drawing from critical race studies, disability studies, and queer Marxism, in addition to feminist and queer studies, the insights of this book will be useful to scholars theorizing issues far beyond sexuality and place and to social justice activists who want to move beyond visibility.
