Reframing the 'Violence' of Mixed Martial Arts: The 'Art' of the fight

•MMA media develop distinct understandings of violence and action in MMA.•Each type is subject to different levels of enjoyment, varying judgements of aesthetic merit, and rationales towards MMA in practice.•At the aesthetic peak of the sport, MMA is rhetorically and analogically constructed as equivalent to 'highbrow' culture.•An 'aesthetic disposition' creates distinction between MMA media and mass audiences.

This paper deploys conceptual and analytical tools from cultural sociology to analyze Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). While often characterized as violent and uncivilized, MMA has a core following of fans who watch MMA and consume MMA media out of an interest in the aesthetics of the sport. As salient actors within the 'internally legitimate' sphere of the sport, this paper explores the way the MMA media construct symbolic boundaries around different kinds of fights through aesthetic and moral evaluations. Through qualitative content analysis of MMA media discourse, I attempt to reconstruct their general aesthetic principles, demonstrating a fourfold typology of MMA in practice: repulsive 'excessive violence', boring 'insufficient action', soft 'palatable practices', and sublime 'aesthetic violence'. This framework allows the MMA media as 'connoisseurs' to create hierarchical 'distinctions' between their aesthetic attitudes and those of more casual 'mass' audiences. This research may prove useful for scholars interested in MMA, culture, and sports media studies.