This article explores the carnal dimensions of existence through ethnographic research in a mixed martial arts club. Mixed martial arts (MMA) is an emergent sport where competitors in a ring or cage utilize strikes (punches, kicks, elbows and knees) as well as submission techniques to defeat opponents. Through data gathered from in-depth interviews with MMA practitioners and participant observation in an MMA club, I elucidate the social processes that are integral to the production of an MMA fighter habitus . I examine how body techniques are learned and become attached to the identity of mixed martial arts fighters. Using Crossley’s concept of reflexive body techniques, I examine how MMA fighters engage in body callusing through use of reflexive body techniques thereby allowing them to withstand the rigors of the sport.

The political and legal theory of Giorgio Agamben, specifically his concept of homo sacer, can be usefully deployed to understand the regulation and treatment of sex offenders. It is argued that the sex offender can be conceived of as a non-citizen or bare life — the homo sacer — and that this elucidates the degrees of violence and forms of abjection visited upon sex offenders in western societies. Through the institution of laws aimed at protecting communities from sex offenders, specifically community notification and civil commitment laws, there is the production of a ban, whereby the sex offender is displaced into a lawless space — a camp. In this `camp', the sex offender is subjected to GPS electronic monitoring, surgical/chemical castration and various other forms of sovereign violence at the hands of professionals and anti-paedophile vigilante groups. This article shows that in the exertion of sovereign power, where the sex offender is placed in the ambiguous terrain of the camp, there is a restoration of order and maintenance of the sacred.

Considerable attention has been paid to the experiences of pain and injury in the sociology of sport literature. In this vein, this paper probes the experience of pain and injury as it pertains to masculinities. This paper documents the specific ways that, on the one hand, athletes conform to masculine ideals through attempts to assume ideal states of embodiment and withstanding pain associated with participation in sport, while on the other hand, through debilitating bodily injury, athletes actually fail to materialise masculine ideals associated with participation in sport. Drawing from an ethnography of mixed martial arts (MMA), this article documents the embodied experiences of pain and injury among MMA fighters. Based on 45 interviews with professional and amateur MMA fighters as well as field notes, this article elucidates the ways fighters interpret their bodily injuries, how this impacts upon masculine identities, and how injuries affect their conformance to the normative masculinity of MMA. This paper focuses on the narratives of despair and loss as it pertains to particular moments in the careers of MMA fighters.

This article describes the sensory experiences of fighting through an ethnography of mixed martial arts (MMA). MMA is an emergent sport where competitors in a ring or cage utilize strikes (punches, kicks, elbows, and knees) as well as submission techniques to defeat opponents. This sensory ethnography involves, inter alia, the documentation of the rhythms pertaining to the cadence of drills, the flow of sparring and grappling sessions, the attunement of bodies to other bodies through touch, the beat of music accompanying training sessions, the smell of sweat and flatulence, and the throbbing pain that is registered through taste. This article relies on 45 in-depth interviews with mixed martial art fighters and participant observation over a four-year period.

This paper draws on a series of 45 interviews with recipients of social assistance between the ages of 16 and 24 to offer a critical assessment of the language of ‘risk’ and ‘resilience.’ After briefly tracing the development of this vocabulary and approach in youth research, this paper argues in line with existing critiques (Kelly 2000, te Riele 2006, France 2007) that neither risk nor resilience is an appropriate way of coming to understand young people's past, present, or future lives. Moreover, the authors argue that the language of risk and resilience commits a form of ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu 1999, Frank 2002, Zizek 2008) against young people whose lives are presumably captured and finalized by this conceptual language. Instead, the authors propose that, when dealing with young people and the future, a focus on narrative and the ‘desirable futures’ interviewees envision for themselves is a more humane, and in many respects a more fruitful way of approaching the study of young lives.