PCA Presentation Abstract

My paper proposal for the Popular Culture Association 2012 Conference was accepted yesterday.  Here is the abstract of all of my fellow nerds to peruse.  On the agenda for the remainder of the week:  interview with Heather Bassett, training inspiration and a product review of Vale Tudo shorts that will include a discussion regarding ball sacks...because I am super classy like that.  

Just after presenting a paper on Frank Miller last year at the PCA.

Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, asserted on several occasions that women will never fight in any venue he owns.  Now that White has accumulated nearly every Mixed Martial Arts promotion in the world, women’s MMA is in danger of extinction.  The 2012 Olympics will feature the inaugural women’s boxing competition.  Although many are overjoyed by the inclusion of women, officials are deliberating whether to require the female fighters to wear mini-skirts in the ring. 

This presentation reveals how women who participate in fighting sports are marginalized through discourses of sexual difference and ideology.  Women are immediately subjugated through description through the qualifier ‘female’ or ‘woman’ fighter while their male counterparts are simply fighters. 
The intent of this essay is to examine feminist debates on materiality and the body, but primarily to see the ways in which the bodily experiences of women have helped to redefine discourses on femininity. 

While many theorists prefer to fight on paper about theories of subjectivity or the transcendental subject, I intend to look at the actual source of the negotiation of meanings, the fighters, and examine the ways that resignifications are occurring.  Toril Moi, Judith Butler and other feminists provide a methodology to understand the discursive female body.