Join Jennifer McClearen and Julie Kedzie for a virtual event celebrating the release of McClearen's new book Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFC on March 18 at 4pm CDT. Victoria E. Johnson will moderate the Q&A.
Register here: https://bit.ly/Fightingvisibility
About the book:
Mixed-martial arts stars like Amanda Nunes, Zhang Weili, and Ronda Rousey have made female athletes top draws in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). Jennifer McClearen charts how the promotion incorporates women into its far-flung media ventures, and she investigates the complexities surrounding female inclusion. On the one hand, the undeniable popularity of cards headlined by women add much-needed diversity to the sporting landscape. On the other, the UFC leverages an illusion of promoting difference—whether gender, racial, ethnic, or sexual—to grow its empire with an inexpensive and expendable pool of female fighters. McClearen illuminates how the UFC's half-hearted efforts at representation generate profit and cultural cachet while covering up the fact it exploits women of color, lesbians, gender non-conforming women, and others.
Learn more here: https://go.illinois.edu/s21mcclearen
About Jennifer McClearen:
Jennifer McClearen is a feminist media scholar whose research examines the representation and production of difference in popular media with a specific interest in sports and consumer culture. She probes the ways networked sports media circulates discourses of gender, race, sexuality, and nationality through the lenses of feminist theory, cultural studies, and humanistic media studies. Dr. McClearen is an assistant professor of media studies in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin where she is also an affiliated faculty member with the Center for Sports Communication and Media and the Center for Entertainment and Media Industries.
About Julie Kedzie:
Julie Kedzie is a graduate from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing MFA Program and is working on a memoir about her experiences as a professional Mixed Martial Arts fighter. She is currently an analyst and color commentator for Invicta Fighting Championships.
About Victoria E. Johnson:
Victoria E. Johnson is Professor of Film and Media Studies and African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She writes about the cultural history of U.S. television by examining its popular geographic mythologies, representations of race and place, and sports media. Her books include
Heartland TV: Prime Time Television and the Struggle for U.S. Identity (NYU Press) and
Sports TV (Routledge, 2021).
Heartland TV was awarded the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award in 2009. She is Associate Editor of
Television & New Media and co-editor of University of Illinois Press’s series,
Studies in Sports Media.
