Narratives of despair and loss: pain, injury and masculinity in the sport of mixed martial arts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".