With the exception of Western boxing, martial arts and combat sports (MACS) have not featured very often on the pages of Sport in History.Footnote1 At the same time MACS from Shōtōkan karate to Brazilian jiu-jitsu to mixed martial arts (MMA) are very popular movement cultures, with every minor town in the UK and elsewhere in the West spotting at least a couple of MACS gyms, dojos or other training venues for these fighting arts. With some of their protagonists like Conor McGregor, Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury having turned into celebrities, MMA, especially via the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) format, and heavyweight boxing regularly draw huge pay-per-view television audiences in the UK and abroad.
More recently, MACS have also attracted significant scholarly interest from historians, cultural studies experts, sociologists, sports science scholars and other academics in the UK. Paul Bowman of Cardiff University has been a pioneer in popularising the research of the Martial Arts Scholars network through the peer-reviewed Martial Arts Studies journal as well as an ongoing series of very insightful Podcast and YouTube interviews with its members.Footnote2 More recent scholarly developments on the European continent include the publication of the Journal of Martial Arts Research (JOMAR) of the Martial Arts and Combat Sports commission of the German Society of Sports Science.Footnote3
Because humans have bodies, body movement cultures, including MACS, have been a constant of cultures and civilisations throughout history. They are universal practices that cut across boundaries of geography and time. However, despite their ubiquity and universality, MACS have taken very diverse forms in different historical and national contexts. The examples covered in this special issue are Western and French boxing (Savate), Japanese judo and Bushido martial arts, Thai Muay Thai and MMA. But there are of course many more MACS, from ancient arts like Indian Kalari to modern inventions like Israeli Krav Maga, all of which have served myriad functions in their cultures and societies of origin and diffusion.
The contributions to this special issue all reflect that MACS can play an important role for the construction of masculine identities and in attaching symbolic importance to objective biological differences. They show that MACS are often assigned a heightened symbolic importance for masculinities in relation to other gender, sexual, ethnic and intersectional identities. MACS as a theme of scholarly inquiry are of contemporary relevance because of the recent re-emergence of a violent masculinity. This ‘toxic’ or ‘hard-man’ masculinity arose in connection with an anti-feminist and anti-LGBTIQ+ activism and a right-wing extremist and racist nationalism. Martial and combat sports often act as vessels for this hostile ideology, with the current Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) notably serving as a route for ‘alt-right’ radicalisation. Some MMA fight clubs provide a platform for far-right extremists to promote their ideology and recruit new members. MMA allows far-right extremists to relate their training regimens to the culture and history of martial and combat arts and sports to suit their racist aims. At the same time, martial and combat arts and sports in Western society have in many places become more inclusive of women, ethnic minorities, refugees and LGBTIQ+ communities. This current context which coincides with the backlash against movements like Black Lives Matter through the rise of nationalist populism in many places around the globe makes the special issue especially timely.
The novelty of this special issue lies in its comparative and interdisciplinary focus on masculinities in MACS and the diversity of sources and approaches used by its authors. Its contributors include historians and anthropologists, a literature scholar and semiologist, a cultural studies expert, and a sports scholar. With the exception of Amanda Callan-Spenn’s paper on the British judoka Sarah Mayer, which won the best PGR paper award at the 2019 British Society of Sport History (BSSH) Conference at Westminster University and which provides an excellent thematic fit, the other contributions result from a specific scholarly context. This was a research project and workshop on ‘Masculinities and Martial Arts: East, West and Global South’, organised and led by Lynda Boothroyd and Kay Schiller and sponsored by and held at the Institute of Advanced Study of Durham University in December 2018. The aim of the gathering was to identify what is exceptional and generic about masculine identities in MACS and in what circumstances they offer themselves as models for either ‘toxic’ or inclusive masculinities. Some of the results are published here.
Opening the special issue is Sukrittaya Jukping, a social and cultural anthropologist and women’s and gender studies scholar. Through an analysis of contemporary media sources, Jukping shows how the traditional martial art of Muay Thai is instrumentalised by Thailand’s current ruler General Prayudt Chan-Osha, who came to power through a coup, to highlight his regime’s strength and stability. In what is an excellent example of ‘toxic’ masculinities, Chan-Osha performs the role of a martial arts hero vis-à-vis the hyper-femininity and supposed softness, weakness and corruptibility of his main political rival, Thailand’s first democratically elected female prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, a former beauty queen. In this context, Muay Thai serves the function of emphasising traditional gender roles of masculine power and feminine subordination in Thailand.
In contrast, while the story of Sarah Mayer, a British actress and socialite, performer and judoka in 1930s Japan, at first sight appears to be one of female empowerment, one gets the impression that this was an episode of fake female inclusion. In what in many ways is a companion piece to Jukping’s, the historian Amanda Callan-Spenn retraces the Japanese journey of the first foreign woman coached by the highest-ranking Judo masters, including Kanō Jigorō, the founder of the sport. Remarkably, Mayer was rapidly promoted to a black belt. While she was clearly a very talented martial arts practitioner and did much for the spread of Judo to women, her acceptance by her Japanese hosts seems to have had a lot to do with the country’s diplomatic interests, including an invitation to host the 1940 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, which however were cancelled due to the second Sino-Japanese war.
The historian Oleg Benesch’s article is a veritable tour-de-force of Japanese martial arts history from the early modern Edo period to the present. It includes a further exploration of the context of Mayer’s journey in the late imperial period which was characterised by the tension between nationalism and internationalism as embedded in Japan’s international diplomacy and the promotion of its culture abroad. Central to Benesch’s paper is his exploration of the ‘spiritualisation’ of the Japanese martial arts and their linkage to ideas of self-cultivation as a reaction to the opening of the country to the West in the 1850s and 1860s. Originally, these were movement cultures not fundamentally different from Western sports whereas, ironically, the ideas of self-cultivation were to a large extent Western imports themselves. As Benesch points out, the late nineteenth-century emphasis on the ‘Japanese Spirit’ led to the Japanese construction of a particularly masculine sense of uniqueness and superiority which excluded women and foreigners and other marginalised groups. Despite the erosion of entrenched masculinist and nationalist structures, these remain powerful agents in the country whose capital will host the 2021 (rather than, as originally planned, the 2020) Summer Olympic Games.
The relationship of one Western combat sport, boxing, to masculinity is the topic of Dave Scott’s article. By delving into Western history and philosophy from Greek antiquity onwards, the amateur boxer, literature scholar and semiologist Scott first paints in broad strokes how and why the boxing ring has been conceptualised as a masculine space. In what then turns into a meditation on boxing and literature, Scott shows how for many writers in the twentieth century boxing became a metaphor for the modern human condition which expressed a variety of potentialities, from a form of vicarious and undirected resistance against capitalist consumer society, to its problematic role for racial advancement in America, to boxing’s (homo-)eroticism, to the sense of exhilaration it provides for both fighters and spectators. Importantly, Scott stresses, the example of women appropriating the sport as part of feminist liberation demonstrates that masculinity need not be understood exclusively as a male domain. The boxing ring in turn, a ‘theatre of energy’ and masculine space, where violence and aggression are acted out following clear and unambiguous rules, can and should also no longer be regarded as a male preserve.
A combat sport which in some of its manifestations is already fully gender inclusive is the focus of George Jennings and Sara Delamont’s article on Assaut Savate in the UK, in which the authors combine anthropological observation and textual analysis. Working with John Urry’s conceptual frame of mobility, Jennings and Delamont show how Savate (French boxing) is an outlier among MACS, in that all forms of machismo and male privilege, discrimination against women and sexualization of female athletes are frowned upon in this combat sport. Not only that: What was originally developed as a martial art for men, is now widely led practised, led and written about by women. As the authors show, some of what has become a thoroughly engrained culture of gender inclusivity seems to be due to Savate being a middle-class pastime, with many savateurs and tireurs hailing from the ‘golden triangle’ of London and Oxbridge and sharing liberal and cosmopolitan views, with only slow diffusion to less affluent parts of the UK.
The special issue closes with a contribution by cultural studies scholar Paul Bowman which focuses on the media construction of masculinities in mixed martial arts (MMA), specifically UFC. Bowman focuses on the centrality of the MMA-media nexus in relation to MMA’s main attraction as a combat sport that is supposedly closer to the reality of street fighting than any other MACS. With this media invention comes MMA’s association with ‘toxic’, ‘hard-man’ forms of masculinity, as defined by a macho rejection of complex ‘feminising’ thoughts and emotions. The main takeaway of Bowman’s article comes from his analysis of a television show featuring MMA fighters in the Northeast of England, in which artist and cultural commentator Grayson Perry presents a much more ambivalent image of martial arts masculinity which oscillates between hardness as a façade and its complete breakdown in view of socio-economic realities. Bowman shows that because toxic masculinity lives off its media constructions, other less one-dimensional and more self-reflexive representations of what it means to be a man could be easily within reach within the world of MMA and MACS more generally.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Kay Schiller has published widely on German cultural history and the history of sport. He currently serves as editor in chief of Sport in History.
Notes
1 See e.g. the special issue 31.4 (2011) edited by Martin Johnes and Matthew Taylor on Boxing, History and Culture.
2 See https://mas.cardiffuniversitypress.org/#:~:text=About%20this%20Journal,work%20in%20the%20emergent%20field. and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdcGhPhHamDuLIsc6NPVSYg (both accessed June 14, 2020).
3 See https://ojs.uni-bayreuth.de/index.php/jomar (accessed June 14, 2020).