Music and the Affective Production of Violence in MMA
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2651850 |
|---|---|
| Authors | W Donnie Scally (0000-0001-5357-8322, Film Independent, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 34-54 |
| Publication date | 2023-10-22 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Extreme Anthropology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2535-3241 • E-ISSN: 2535-3241 |
| Publisher | University of Oslo Library (PUBLISHER • NO) |
| DOI | 10.5617/jea.10247 |
| OpenAlex | W4387859281 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 23 |
As widespread physical pursuits and popular entertainment forms, combat sports inform and constrain social understandings of violence. Recent research has discussed martial artists' positioning of their practice vis-à-vis violence and the production of 'martial arts' as a category referencing, but not defined exclusively by, violence. For combat sports-an overlapping, competition-oriented category-violence occupies a place of tension. They attract spectators through presentation as violent blood-sports, but competitors and spectators necessarily also understand them as regulated performances. Popular music plays an important role in contextualizing combat sports as conforming to a socially sanctioned model of violent spectacle through walkout music played prior to matches, a form that references other sportive and staged productions of violence for entertainment. Music simultaneously defines combat sports as violent spectacles and constrains them as sports, controlled abstractions of violence with aesthetic goals. Drawing on analysis of videos of walkouts at mixed martial arts events, this article details popular music's roles in defining and constraining combat sports. The walkout is examined as an affective vibrational phenomenon that varies through specific iterations and media, acquiring, amplifying, negating, or altering sometimes contradictory meanings, and lending emotional weight to the ideologies represented. Throughout these transformations, the walkout serves to position the MMA match as a socially permissible sportive contest that draws on aesthetic references to an imagined model of unsanctioned violence. Image: Haribhagirath, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Aesthetics · Art · CONTEST · Entertainment · Ideology · Martial arts · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spectacle · Visual arts · Law · Martial Arts: Techniques, Psychology, and Education · Psychology · Social Psychology · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts · Sports, Gender, and Society
The Sounds of Spectators at Football
On Musical Mediation
Body and Soul
Music and Sound in Toyama City Up-close and from Afar
Six Illuminated Videos
‘The man in the middle’
Violence
Edgework and Mixed Martial Arts
Playing to the Crowd
Producing Pain
Sonic Bodies
Musical feelings and affective politics
The New Symbols of European Football
Ultimate Fighting and Embodiment
Two Concepts of Violence
The Autonomy of Affect
Habitus as Topic and Tool
Reframing the 'Violence' of Mixed Martial Arts
The Vibrations of Affect and their Propagation on a Night Out on Kingston's Dancehall Scene
Affect
Music and the materialization of identities
The Turn to Affect
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |