Interview: Jenn McClearen, author of "Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFC"

This week Jessica Luther interviews media scholar Dr. Jenn McClearen about her book "Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFC." They discuss the conflict of the representation of women in the UFC with the exploitation that those same women face in the sport. They also talk about the complicated effort to unionize UFC fighters and how to love women's sport and the UFC by illuminating the ways they needs to change.

This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.

Transcript

Jessica: Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. Jessica here. Today, before we get into the interview, which I'm very excited about. I wanted to remind all of our listeners that we'll be returning to regular programming in July. In the meantime, we hope you all are enjoying this first month of school. Today. I am very excited to welcome my friend, Dr. Jenn McClearen, to Burn It All Down. Jenn, who are you? And what do you  do? 

Jenn: Hi, thank you so much for having me. I am thrilled to be on Burn It All Down. I am a huge fan. So, I am an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the department of radio, television, and film.

Jessica: And you have recently written a book.

Jenn: And I recently wrote a book, called Fighting Visibility: Sports, Media, and Female Athletes in the UFC, which is what I'm here to talk about today.

Jessica: Yes. But before we actually get into the book, I want to hear a little bit about your relationship to sports. I love to ask people this. So, did you, or do you play sports? Are you a big sports fan? How would you describe your relationship to sports? 

Jenn: That's a really interesting question, because I feel like as an academic who studies sports media, I feel like a lot of us are start out with these childhood stories of sports and how we became fans at a young age, how it shaped our identity, how it created connections with our communities and our families. And I'd been in a lot of situations where I'm around other sports media scholars or sport scholars in general, and that generally seems to be the origin story. For me, I was loosely interested in sports as a kid and growing up, and I would never have described myself as a fan until later in life.

The way that I came to sports and then also sports media was I started training martial arts about 15 years ago, and at the time when I first started I wasn't really necessarily watching mixed martial arts or any sort of competition around martial arts. But I started training a new martial art when I started grad school at the University of Washington, I started in Brazilian jujitsu. And that particular martial art is one of the base arts of mixed martial arts. So at that point I started watching UFC, and that was around 2012. So, it was just before the UFC introduced women. And I was in grad school and I decided that, you know, I had an interest in women's physicality and embodiment in the media. And it mapped on really well.

So I kind of became a sports media scholar a little bit by accident, in then I didn't go to grad school for it. But much like other people, because it happened later in life, and I didn't start out in the academy wanting to do that, but just because it happened later, it happened a lot of ways in how we get interested in sports is through our own personal experiences a lot of times, or just the community around fandom. And then after that, I definitely grew my sports fandom even broader because obviously I got interested in so many things around it.

Jessica: So you said there that you're interested in embodiment and the media. Will you just explain that really quickly? 

Jenn: What I was first interested in, what first drew me to grad school is how we understand our bodies through media. So, a very simple and common example of that is what I was interested in at the time is the way in situations where women were physically threatened in media, and the way that male physicality and male threat in the media was exaggerated and that women were portrayed oftentimes as incredibly weak. So, that's one example of how images on screen can tell us something about our bodies. And for me, what happened is I grew up in a very conservative, traditional, white, middle-class family in the south. And so there are certain scripts of femininity that are learned culturally and certain scripts that are of white femininity that are learned through the media that give you a particular understanding of your body and what your body can do.

When I first started in martial arts, for example, I didn't really throw convincing technique. The first instructor that I had had very low expectations for women and didn't train us in the same way that they train men. And so the ways that I understood my body mapped onto the ways that I understood representations that I was seeing. And then what happened was I went and started training in a new gym where a lot of the instructors were women and they set the bar much higher for me. And so I started performing techniques in ways that were much more in line with what I was actually capable of doing. So, I was really interested in this interplay between how we understand our bodies oftentimes through images.

And so that's how I ended up studying representation and the body and how all of the interesting theorization and understanding of the body and physical movement, a lot of that is in sports literature. And so once I got to that set of literature I realized, wow, this is the conversation I want to be in. These are the people that I want to be reading. And that's what really charged my interest. 

Jessica: That was a total selfish question on my part. Like, back when I was doing history, I was writing on the history of the body and how the English in the 17th century thought about the body as ideas of we're changing around that. So, you've written this wonderful new book, Fighting Visibility: Sports, Media, and Female Athletes in the UFC. Obviously you had a connection as a fan to the UFC, but why? Why write a whole book on this in particular? 

Jenn: So, as I said, at the time that the UFC first introduced women I was at a point in my grad school career where I needed to choose a dissertation. So part of the answer to this is very pragmatic in that I was able to map on some of the things that I was interested in and looking at something that was really novel and new, which is what we're all sort of compelled to do as academics. We want to be the first writing on something because we're pressured to do that. And so around late 2012 is when the UFC first signed Ronda Rousey, and the UFC said, hey, it's going to be a six month experiment in women's MMA. We're going to see how it happens. Before that they said never, never, never. We're never going to include women in the promotion for traditional sexist reasons of women can't, you know, hold their own, or are uninteresting to watch, or people don't want to watch women get beat up – all of those things.

And I'd been watching MMA for about a year, and I was very skeptical. I thought they were going to do a terrible job. I thought they were just going to sexualize all their fighters and it was going to be, you know, lingerie, mud fighting type of exposure. [laughter] And so I went into it obviously with eyebrows raised, and what I found really interesting…And part of it is because I had very low expectations for sports media in general, for reasons that we all know about, especially your podcast listeners and how you talk about it on Burn It All Down. So, I was kind of impressed with the emphasis that they placed on other aspects of the women's identities. They chose Liz Carmouche to be the first opponent of Rousey. Carmouche is an out lesbian and they emphasized that in their promotion of her. And she's a former Marine, and she's not stereotypically attractive in the ways that the media would often characterize women.

And it was very...The first fight was electrifying. I mean, you could feel it, even though I was watching it on TV, it had this resonance of being really important and really impactful. And I thought, wow. Okay. Why is this? Why now? Because there had been other impressive fighters; Gina Carano is one of them, that came along before Rousey, that could have been the first woman in the UFC

Jessica: Is that the Star Wars woman?

Jenn: Yeah. [laughs] That’s the Star Wars woman. 

Jessica: The controversial Stars Wars woman!

Jenn: Of critical acclaim for other reasons.

Jessica: The Mandalorian star that is no longer, I think, on the show.

Jenn: No longer on the show. She has some very interesting politics. But yes, she was originally an MMA fighter before she got into Hollywood. So, she could have been the first, but it wasn't the right time. And so what I was really interested in, because part of my work really digs into not just a particular sports context, not just a particular sports organization, but what is the cultural context, the perfect cultural storm that would allow this to happen in an organization that is known for being a bunch of meatheads, known for being very stereotypically hyper-masculine. Why would they do it now? Why was Rousey the gateway to it? And what were the culminating factors that created this perfect storm?

And interestingly – again, it’s all comparative, so I have very low standards – but if you compare it to some other sports, they really are investing in their women's divisions in ways that other sports are not. And some of the things that they're doing are, you know, kind of promoting women in similar ways. All the rules of MMA are similar for men and women. The round times are the same for men and women, and they were purposeful about that. And they said that. And so I was like, oh, they're doing a good job and their marketing team is really thinking about, how do we invest in women? How do we promote women? Which is surprising, but is how they're working. 

Jessica: Right. And so I thought before we actually get into the argument of your book, it would be helpful for listeners, especially ones who aren't that familiar with UFC or MMA, can you explain how pay works in the UFC? Like, how does a fighter actually make money as a fighter?

Jenn: Fighters in the UFC and all of MMA are independent contractors, which means they are not salaried employees. So, if you are talking football or you're talking soccer and major leagues or NFL, or even WNBA and NWSL, all of those leagues have salaries for their players. And in the UFC, there's not a yearly salary. So you're only contracted for a certain number of fights. So traditionally, if you're a new fighter coming in, you're contracted for maybe three fights, but the UFC is under no obligation to actually book you for three fights. And even though it's a contract, the contracts are very lopsided. And so the fighter is obligated to fight for those three fights, and also when they sign that contract they're not allowed to fight anywhere else. 

Jessica: Wow.

Jenn: And so it really limits their opportunity within MMA, because they're not allowed to fight for another promotion at the same time. So it's a fuzzy line with independent contracting, right? Because usually if you're an independent contractor, that means you can work for several different organizations at once because you're not employed by one in particular.

Jessica: Yeah. That's what I do. That's literally what I do. 

Jenn: Exactly. Exactly. So in the UFC, you don't have that capacity, so you can only fight for the UFC, and because they virtually have a monopoly because they are the largest MMA promotion in the world, they have the most money, they have most visibility in terms of where they're broadcasting. They broadcast globally through either various agreements that they have around the world or through pay-per-view. And the UFC makes a lot of money, but the fighters actually are responsible for more than let’s say an NFL player would be for getting ready for a particular fight. So, if an NFL player is working for the NFL or their team, then they have trainers that are included, they’re not taking that out of their salary. They have doctors, they have specialists, they have recovery teams. So, if their muscles are really sore, then they can go and get massages through the team. You know, things like that.

In the UFC, fighters are responsible for all of that themselves. So their coaches and their trainers, all of the fight preparation, the fighters themselves bear the burden of paying for that. So when you see a fighter come in and let's say that they make $50,000 for their fight, it might sound like a decent amount of money if you make $50,000 a year in the United States. I mean, of course it's not fantastic, but it's not abysmally low. But when you take into account the fact that they have to take somewhere around 10 to 15% out of that for their coaches and their trainers, and then 10 to 15% out for their management, and then any sort of other preparation that they need, any recovery that they need – year round insurance is not covered by the UFC. There's only an accident type insurance for the fight itself. But if you get injured outside of a UFC contract, then you have to pay for that yourself with your own insurance.

So, all of that eats away at that actual $50,000. So what happens then is that it's kind of a gig economy model and that the UFC can make a lot of money and they don't bear a lot of the risk because the fighters can be very expendable and the fighters themselves are taking on the risk of the gig economy because they're having to navigate, they're having to hustle to get fights. They're having to take care of their families and their family's insurance out of their own income that they're making, rather than getting it from the company. And it makes it so the revenue share for fighters, while we don't have an exact number because until recently the UFC wasn't publicly traded so we didn't have access to those numbers – and we still don't at this point – but it's somewhere around 10 to 20% of the revenue goes to fighters. Whereas if you look at major sports leagues, it's closer to 50% or around 50%.

So, what obviously the book is looking at is a glossy surface and representation of women that seems like we're making a lot of headway in terms of how women are represented and in combat sports, unlike they've ever been before. But behind it, I also dig into how these inequalities are impacting women in particular. 

Jessica: Yeah. So the book is titled Fighting Visibility, and in the intro you write, “This book offers a cautionary tale for the future of women's sports by questioning the presumption that visibility is a panacea for gender inequity in sports.” And then a little later in the book – I just love this quote so much – you write, “Just because the visibility of sportswomen feels good, it doesn't mean the positive feelings produced outweigh the cost of that visibility.” Can you just unpack visibility here? Like, it's the title of your book. Why is this such an important concept for us to understand when we're thinking about these women that fight in the UFC? 

Jenn: So with I think progressive circles of society, for a long time we've been focused when we think about media on this idea of representation. “Representation matters.” And if we're thinking about women, we also use the phrase, “If she can see it, she can be it.” So we have this idea culturally that in order for progress to happen in the media we need more women represented, or we need more people of color represented, or we need more people with disabilities represented – whatever the representation that we're seeking, we need more of it, and we need better representations. And while I think that that's true to a degree, I think sometimes we overestimate the change that's going to occur from just seeing women in sports visible, because what happens is we assume that it's those women that are benefiting from the visibility and it's other women benefiting from the visibility.

But when you actually look at the power structures in sports media more broadly, if you look at who the executives are, if you look at who the sponsors, the brands that are making the most money off of these things, if you look at all of that, they're benefiting to a much greater degree than women are. And in an organization like the UFC, which does exploit their fighters, male and female fighters, but what it does is it gives the impression that they're doing a great job in terms of representation that they've given women access and opportunity, but the cost of the access and opportunity is that these women are exploited in the process. And so what I want to do is try to shift the conversation in sports media more broadly into, yeah, we can care about representation and it does matter.

But let's not stop the conversation there because the more women are becoming like right now, if you look at women in sports media, we're having an uptick in terms of viewership for various leagues. If we look at college basketball this past year, if we look at the WNBA and NWSL, they're getting more exposure. They have more visibility now, but what does that mean once we start looking at, okay, so people are starting to realize we can make money off of sportswomen, but their contracts are probably lagging behind. It's going to take a while because they have to renegotiate and they have to push and they don't have the power in those negotiations. And so it's going to take some time for that to catch up.

What I want this book to do is it is a case study in an organization…You know, I'm focusing on the ways that they're doing well with representing women, but also showing that there's a huge disconnect from the women that are benefiting from that. So I think other sports that focus on women can learn from that because there has to be a parallel readjustment of how much we're paying players. And there's a parallel readjustment for how many women are in decision-making in those organizations. How many people of color are on the boards of those organizations that are helping make these decisions? And so that's really what the heart of the book is trying to do, is to say, let’s just make sure that we're having these conversations at the same time. And when I talk about, you know, representation feeling good, it's such a powerful thing.

Jessica: You talk about crying. You write in the book about your own reaction to some of this, like having a very emotional, physical reaction.

Jenn: Yeah. I have like various moments in sports where I've actually cried what those representations have meant. I talk about one with a commercial around Ronda Rousey that is very much like this, you know, empowerment, overcoming adversity in the gym, which is something that paralleled my own experience because I experienced discrimination as a woman in martial arts, so I understand when Megan Rapinoe spread her wings wide at the last World Cup, I mean, that moment had such an emotional resonance 

Jessica: I have a t-shirt of Megan doing that, because I loved it so much. It works.

Jenn: Of course. It feels good. It feels amazing. And it's because for so long so many of us have, you know, have struggled and have wanted to see sportswomen represented like that. And so when it happens it becomes this incredibly emotional experience that is experienced collectively, which is what I'm talking about in the book. I talk about it in terms of affect, and that's so important and so powerful, but it’s also so profitable. And that's where I want more of us to dig beneath it feeling so good and ask those hard questions about who is benefiting from this and how are organizations leveraging images like that? Like Rapinoe or Rousey or whoever it is, to benefit themselves and their organizations and their power structures. But the question really becomes: is that actually shifting anything in society in terms of the underlying structural ways that sports work? Representations may be shifting, but what about the harder stuff to get to?

Jessica: I think one thing that's really great in the book is you do such a good job with the metaphor of light and shadow, that visibility often functions as like a narrow tunnel of light, and we see these great images of women being represented. But that light then of course creates shadow wherever it is not, and so much of the work that we need to do is to move that light around so that we can see all the exploitation that's hiding in the shadows. I just think that's such a great, effective thing that you do when you're writing when you're talking about this/ I wanted to ask, how does visibility then intersect with what you call branded difference? So like, this seems to be sort of the key of the whole argument, right? Visibility here, and branded difference, and they meet in these women in the UFC. How does that work?

Jenn: Right. So, branded difference is taking this idea…It's taking a couple of different things and combining it. So, when we talk about difference in the academy, for example, there's a lot of theorists who think through this idea of difference, and so it's this way that people become othered because of their identities, and there are power structures within that difference in that intersecting identities are going to have various levels of power in society. And when I talk about branded difference, branded difference works to evacuate some of that discussion of power and how differences are hierarchical, and instead makes difference something that everyone can possess.

And so, for example, what it does is it takes a Black queer fighter and it says, oh, okay, so she's had to overcome some adversity in order to become a UFC fighter. And then it goes over here to this straight white man who had an adversity because he's dyslexic for example, or something some way, and what it does is branded difference then says, so, everybody has their own adversity, everybody has their own differences, and it's important to recognize those differences and say, hey, these differences exist. But it ends up flatlining them and making them the same.

So there's a way that difference becomes, you know, identifiable, visible, because we can visually see this Black queer woman is different. But then her experiences, any sort of adversity she overcomes because of that difference then gets equated with other things. And so there's no then hierarchy of oppression that we would talk about if we were talking about in terms of intersectionality. And so the way that that connects with visibility is branded difference is a strategy. It's a marketing strategy that's used to say, hey, there are different people in this sport, or there are different people in this media organization or other cultural space, but it kind of connects everybody. It has this universalizing discourse that makes everyone then the same and evacuated all the power from it.

And so then media organizations get credit for showing difference because, hey, we have this Black queer fighter, but it actually doesn't do anything to make the challenges that she faces in the organization any better. And it does not recognize the fact that a straight white male fighter is going to have a very different experience and is going to have a much easier time navigating the various cultural spaces of a UFC fighter.

Jessica: Right. So it's doing similar like light and shadow work, where like, look at this, don't look at all of this. 

Jenn: Exactly. 

Jessica: That to me just sounds like a sports media problem. Like, so much of sports media is this narrative of overcoming, right? And I talk about this a lot around gender violence, because especially men who return to sport after being accused, sometimes even convicted of that kind of violence, the way media writes, it is like, he's “overcome adversity.” It's like, no. But it's so…God, we just really love it, in sports in particular. 

Jenn: Yeah. And I have a chapter on the American dream that talks about this. It's about the adversity overcome and it connects this idea of branded difference to how a Navajo woman has adversity that she faces and overcomes, and other fighters…I talk about a couple of Brazilian lesbian fighters and how those are framed, and how it gets equated with these white men that are also, you know, one guy had a house fire and that was his adversity that he needed to overcome – which, you know, of course is real, but it's not the same systemic experience of…His status within the sport isn't threatened in the same way and isn't experienced in the same way. It’s not equated.

But those are the stories that we like to tell in sports. And there's a whole set of literature of thinking about sports films. Sports films are the underdog narrative that overcoming that adversity, it connects so well into this American dream discourse. And so I talk about it within the context of UFC, but obviously it's across sports more broadly. It's the very nature of the thing that excites us so much watching soccer, for example, you know? You have a team that comes from behind and wins in the end and that's the ultimate sports narrative. That's the thing you remember forever. And it's so powerful, and that's why those stories are so seductive.

And it's so easy to shine the light on the winners in those scenarios when we know there's so many more losers, and that's not something that we focus on in sports in general is, you know, when we talk about adversity overcome, those are the exceptional cases. We're not talking about all the times that people don't overcome it. And certainly in the UFC, we see so many stories of overcoming adversity, but you don't see all the fighters that never fight again or have to retire from the sport because they're not making enough money to feed their families. Those are not the stories that we hear. 

Jessica: Because they're not profitable. 

Jenn: Exactly. Nobody wants to hear that. And that's why the book, again, it's beyond the UFC because it's culturally we don't want to hear those stories. Culturally that's not why we watch sports.

Jessica: Right, right. Yeah, exactly. Okay. We were talking at the top of this about how labor or how pay works in the UFC, and you have a whole chapter on unionization, and specifically you talk about a woman named Leslie Smith. So, can you tell us more about the efforts at this point to make labor more equitable in the UFC?

Jenn: So, there's been various efforts to try to unionize fighters, but it's an incredibly difficult thing to do because they're independent contractors. It's a much easier thing to do if you're a salaried employee, there's more protections, it's easier to get it passed through the various channels that you need. And there hasn't been a lot of success, and part of the reason is that fighters are geographically very…They’re all over the world, and they're in various gyms in the United States, and they don't really come together and talk about their wants and needs and to give them any sort of space for collective action. One exception to this was a few years ago, they had an athlete retreat where the UFC brought about 300 different fighters to Las Vegas for a meeting of fighters. They were trying to train them on some social media stuff. They were trying to give them advice on various different things, talk about changes in the organization, a general meeting of the fighters.

And in that, one fighter named Leslie Smith got up and she went to ask a question of a panelist and that panelist was Kobe Bryant. She asked Kobe Bryant how important was the union in terms of being able to advocate for the needs of NBA players? And he said it was essential and it was so important and that it was really important to their ability to negotiate their needs, their salaries, everything. And when that happened, there was kind of this rising sea of people going, wow. Okay, great. We're talking about this. And another fighter was talking afterwards about how there was such a disconnect because they brought in people like Kobe Bryant, they brought in people like Snoop Dog to entertain this group of people. They had all these really impressive brands there. And the fighters, you know, this fighter in particular was saying, we were all sitting there going, there's a lot of money here. Why are we not getting paid more?

And so Leslie Smith at that point, I think by that time she had already initially been doing some unionizing, but she and a couple of other fighters created this organization called Project Spearhead. And the idea was they were going to get people together and they were getting fighters to anonymously sign or confidentially sign authorization cards to form a union. In the process of doing that, she was very outspoken about labor issues in the UFC, about pay issues in the UFC. And then once her contract was fulfilled, she wasn't renewed. This is a fighter had a winning record. She had won her last several fights in spectacular fashion. She's had several very memorable fights in the UFC, and they didn't renew her contract. The way it happened, there was also some sort of, you know, there were several sketchy things that happened around that, that she thought this is a problem.

And so she went to the national labor relations board and her lawyer argued that she'd been retaliated against by the UFC. And she went through this process of bringing up this claim of that, and at the time they initially put it through at the local level of the national labor relations board. Initially, they were going to put it through, and then they got a call from DC, and at the time Trump was in power and there was a Trump appointed director. They basically didn't allow it to go through, and they changed their ruling on it, and so she wasn't able to bring her case forward. And what her case was really going to be able to do is to take to task this idea of independent contracting, because there's actually a lot of labor law reviews that look at this issue of independent contracting and says that they're actually not independent contractors because of some of the ways that the UFC treats them.

So, there's a lot of different things around uniforms and controlling when and where they work that means that they shouldn't be classified as independent contractors because they're actually treated more like employees. And so part of what Leslie was trying to do is to push that through because it would make it easier to unionize. Well, it was the wrong time politically in this country to be able to put that forward. So, she wasn't able to be successful with that, and Project Spearhead hasn't been really successful at bringing enough fighters on board because a lot of them are afraid. 

Jessica: They're right to be afraid. Leslie Smith's story shows them why.

Jenn: Yeah, and her counterpart, Kajan Johnson, was also let go from the UFC after his contract was finished. So, two people that were really vocal about this union effort didn't have contracts renewed. People are scared, and they're in a situation where they don't have a lot of other opportunities. Like, the UFC still pays the best in terms of MMA, because there's also lawsuits right now about the UFC being basically a monopoly and buying up other organizations and driving down pay so there's not competitive pay within these organizations. And so, Leslie Smith is so impressive though. She's such an amazing advocate. She's such an amazing fighter, because she's a fighter in the ring and without, and she's actually finishing her undergrad degree and planning to go to law school and she wants to work in labor issues.

And so she's kind of a bright light in this kind of abysmal story, but the reality is in order for change to happen, I think fighters will have to unionize. And so organizations like Project Spearhead have to overcome the geographical disbursement and also this idea that fighters are lone wolves and an island unto themselves, because they really kind of get into this mindset that they have to strive against adversity and overcome and maybe one day there'll be successful like the other fighters that they see in the limelight, but it's really hard to convince them that unionization would work for them. Also because their careers are so short anyway. So, one fighter told me, “How would this benefit me? It seems like a good idea, but I would do a lot of work and by the time I was done working, I wouldn't be fighting anymore.”

So, there's less willingness because fighters are so expendable and this is part of the problem, is that they're easy to replace and they've treated them like that from the get-go and they’ve treated them like that in COVID, and that if they couldn't fight, you know, if they asked a fighter for a fight during COVID, especially during the initial few months, then they would go to another fighter who would be willing to do it because maybe they needed the income or maybe they weren't as worried about COVID or whatever reasons. So, they were able to fill these cards and they filled them overseas. They broadcast them from Abu Dhabi because they didn't have the same COVID restrictions.

Jessica: Alright, so I would like to end this interview where you end your book, and you actually start your book by telling us that you approach the project ambivalently and then you get to the end and you really talk about this tension that’s at the heart of so much around women's sports. I think gets at a lot of what Kavitha and I were trying to illuminate – maybe we'll stick with the light metaphor – in Loving Sports When They Don't Love You Back, and you interviewed us at one point about the book, and we talked about this then, but I definitely want to talk about it now. I'm going to read you to you at this point, this is on page 167.

“The fact that diverse female fighters now also have the opportunity to agree to unfair contracts and exploitative working conditions in the UFC is no cause for celebration in women's sports. Rather than celebrate, we must instead reconcile love and violence as more women become visible in sports media. Seeing women represented as powerful athletes at the pinnacle of their crafts is exhilarating. Yet, we cannot turn a blind eye to the violence of capitalistic institutions that make their profits on that visibility without fairly distributing that wealth to the athletes themselves.” Then you list a lot of examples of this that we talk about on this show. And so I wanted to ask you, in writing this book and thinking through this book, talking about this book now that it's published: what did you learn about trying to reconcile that?

Jenn: I love that you asked me that question because I asked you the same question when I interviewed you and Kavitha! [laughter] 

Jessica: I got you! I’m just hitting the ball back over the net to you.

Jenn: No, fair enough. Well, part of it I think is in the writing of this book itself, and I would say that – you may have even answered the same way – I think that there's something cathartic about acknowledging that you love something and acknowledging something can be loved and also holding that tension of the fact that it is not treating people equitably, it's enacting a form of violence. And so there must be an illumination, if we go back to what visibility can do, is illuminating those things. It's laying bare the fact that these are these women's experiences. It’s laying bare of the various case studies that you talk about in Loving Sports, how that tension is held there, and take to increase that conversation so that people can do something with that. Now, awareness is a first step. There has to be a lot more done in terms of effort and labor around fixing that. But part of what I wanted to do was to be able to shift that conversation in order to just be able to love it in a different way, because I think that ambivalence is still there and that there was part of me that said I was going to stop watching UFC after I finished this book.

Jessica: I think we talked about that a couple of years ago. Yeah.

Jenn: Yeah. I thought I was going to, and because I wanted to kind of be done with it. And I'm not there yet. Part of it is because I'm still getting more calls to talk about it, I need this stay aware of what's going on. It's kind my job right now. [Jessica laughs] I need to know what's going on in order to be able to highlight, to illuminate, to keep using that metaphor, these things that are not being illuminated in broader culture, and to make more people aware of that. I think that the only way that I can continue to love it is to shine that light on it, because if I'm not doing that, then I'm going to have a huge internal conflict.

You know, if I'm not saying, hey, y’all! Look at this! Because it's not enough to see empowered women, because if they're not really empowered, which I don't think the women in the UFC are, then what is that actually doing? Is it actually fulfilling those things we feel like it's fulfilling? So, I think it's a question we should continue to talk about because, you know, it's very hard. It's very hard to keep watching it. I know we've talked about also some things that you've stopped watching and the reasons why, and I think I totally support people that do that because there's different avenues for…You to stop giving your money to something, you know, that unfortunately is a form of action in our capitalistic society. It's one of the ways that we have to let our voice be heard, I guess, is through paying or not paying, which is problematic and complicated in itself, but is what some people do.

Jessica: Yeah. And I couldn't imagine doing it to women's sports though. Like, that's actually where I get in a lot of trouble, that's where my greatest tension is. Like, we talked about this on the show, when the WNBA came back in the wubble last year, I watched it because I feel like there's a moral imperative to support women, even as I felt there was a moral imperative to not be playing during a pandemic. [laughs] So, and then there's no way to really work next month or the Olympics. And we are going to talk about this a bunch on the show, because I know I'm going to watch Simone, like, I'm not going to not watch Katie swim in the pool. I just can't do it. I feel like I have to still, as much as I believe that women's sports are not as fragile as we often talk about them in the greater society. It's still a precarious situation a lot of the time. I think they’re resilient, but I don't know. Oh, it's hard, Jenn! Fix it!

Jenn: I know it's hard, it’s so hard. [laughter] And one thing that we don't really have time to get into, but maybe at some point we can talk about, is how women's sports is framed as a cause in order to support that cause you have to watch it.

Jessica: And not critique it. I do think there's a lot of pressure to...And we're seeing this even with the W because it's been around for so long at this point, it's like our veteran league, and there's a bunch bigger media. They tend to have a lot of these kinds of conversations in a way that are good, I think. But yeah, it's a cause, so you can't critique it then.

Jenn: Yeah. The sports innovation lab is doing a project – I don't know if you're aware of this – called the fan project, where they had fans of women's sports submit their data on Twitter, on Facebook, on I don't know what other platforms, because they're basically using that data to advocate that women's sports is something that people will watch. You know, great project. I understand the impetus behind that, but you know, of course as a scholar I want to think more critically about the structures that enable that. And so I did it, and I'm very curious about what the results are going to be and how they're going to frame it, but they very much framed it as a cause. It's this cause that you have to lend the visibility that you're generating for them as evidence that it's worth being invested in, because unlike men's sports we won't just get automatic investment. Women's sports need proof that it's investible. And so I just…Within a capitalistic society where activism is framed as within commercialism, and the way that you are an activist is contributing your dollars. I mean, it's a very complicated system that I also participate in. Like you, I'm going to keep watching women's sports because I do think they matter and I do think representation, at the end of the day, I do think representation matters. But…

Jessica: I know. We were both at the US women's national team game here in Austin against Nigeria the other night. We both paid our money and–

Jenn: Begrudgingly, to US Soccer. [laughter]

Jessica: I know, I know, exactly. And I loved every second of it.

Jenn: Me too. It's a sold out crowd, it’s the first game in the stadium. It was electric. It was amazing. It felt fantastic. 

Jessica: And Nigeria really held their own.

Jenn: The goalkeeper was incredible for Nigeria. It was amazing.

Jessica: Listen to us. [laughter]

Jenn: And I'll keep going, but I'm also going to keep critiquing those power structures and keep talking about it, because that's how I reconcile the love and violence.

Jessica: Well, thank you so much, Dr. Jenn McClearen, for being on Burn It All Down. You should go get her book. It's called Fighting Visibility: Sports, Media, and Female Athletes in the UFC. This has been a highlight of my month, Jenn. Thank you so much.

Jenn: Me too. Thank you, Jess.