Race, gender and MMA fandom – imagining Asian masculinities in the online forum of the UFC fan club

The growing visibility of male Asian Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fighters and the cultural affinity between martial arts and Asianness call for reassessment of dominant racial and gender stereotypes. This study examines online UFC fans’ discursive formulation of four dominant scripts surrounding Asian masculinities and mixed martial arts (MMA) fighting–the othering script, the inferior script, the martial artist script and the hypermasculine script–which contradict each other internally and externally with the cagefighting bodies of male Asian fighters. While fans often construct male fighters’ Asianness as a source of athletic inferiority and otherness, they also celebrate these fighters’ achievements to act upon UFC’s hypermasculine script of MMA. The heteronormative underpinnings of these accounts, however, render the ‘selective authorisation’ of Asian masculinities problematic. A new conception of normative manhood independent of toxic hate, physical domination and heterosexuality is needed to envision genuine emancipation for marginalised and subordinated masculinities in sports.