Over the first twenty years of the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s (UFC) history, the mixed-martial arts (MMA) promotion adamantly excluded female athletes and upheld sports media’s time-honored tradition of ignoring and undervaluing sportswomen. Yet, in the early 2010s, Ronda Rousey burst onto the MMA stage and convinced the UFC to include women, which ushered in a new fervor for female athletes in a male-dominated cultural milieu. The popularity of women in the UFC might suggest that female athletes in combat sports are breaking the barriers of a notoriously stubborn glass ceiling. However, ... More

Over the first twenty years of the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s (UFC) history, the mixed-martial arts (MMA) promotion adamantly excluded female athletes and upheld sports media’s time-honored tradition of ignoring and undervaluing sportswomen. Yet, in the early 2010s, Ronda Rousey burst onto the MMA stage and convinced the UFC to include women, which ushered in a new fervor for female athletes in a male-dominated cultural milieu. The popularity of women in the UFC might suggest that female athletes in combat sports are breaking the barriers of a notoriously stubborn glass ceiling. However, as the first academic book analyzing the UFC as a sports media brand, Fighting Visibility urges advocates of women’s sports to consider the limits of representation for cultural change and urges caution against the celebratory discourse of women’s inclusion. Part cultural history of the UFC as a media juggernaut and part cautionary tale for the future of women as sports laborers, Fighting Visibility argues that the UFC’s promotion of diverse female athletes actually serves as a seductive mirage of progress that enables the brand’s exploitative labor practices. The UFC’s labor model disproportionately taxes female athletes, particularly women of color and gender nonnormative women, despite also promoting them at unprecedented levels. Fighting Visibility complicates a prevalent notion among sports scholars, activists, and fans that the increased visibility of female athletes will lead to greater equity in sports media and instead urges us to question who ultimately benefits from that visibility in neoliberal brand culture.