Participation,Pain,and World Making

Media Political Economy and Participation

As Robert McChesney (2000, 110) summarizes, political economy of media has two major dimensions: the relationship between media and communication systems and broader social structures, and how ownership, support mechanisms, and governmental policies influence media behavior and content. Political economy and cultural studies have had, at times, an uneasy relationship (e.g., see Garnham 1979; Garnham and Fuchs 2014; Mosco 2008, 2014). I situate myself as a cultural studies scholar employing a political economic perspective—not a political economist examining cultural artifacts. That is, my interest lies in power, its unequal distribution, institutional structures, and scarcity of resources.

Various populations possess unequal degrees of access to and involvement with the cultural resources of media systems and their representations within them. From this perspective, participation has long been a key dimension of media political economies. Yet “participation,” as a signifier, has been stretched and deployed to varied meanings and purposes as Nico Carpentier’s (2011) exhaustive analysis demonstrates. I will rely on a description of media participation that specifies four aspects: affiliations within communities, expressions of new creative forms, collaborative problem-solving to complete tasks and develop new knowledges, and circulations of media flows (Jenkins et al. 2013, 8).

It is important to differentiate participation from interactivity. Interactivity is a polyvalent and ambiguous term that refers to a number of manners in which audiences can exhibit agency and activity in regard to media (McMillan 2006; Rafaeli 1988, Scott, 2010). Interactivity is a property of a medium or text, whereas participation has broader cultural implications. As Carpentier (2011) describes, media participation is aligned historically with democratic participation. In the Habermasian tradition, democratic citizens access mediated public spheres to become more informed citizens, who are better able to participate in democratic deliberation.

Theories of media participation often echo the utopian and dystopian poles in technological discourses. Historically, the mass culture critique by the Frankfurt School and others saw the lack of participation—in contrast to previous folk cultural production—as a key problem. Later media theorists made similar claims, in which the passivity of mass media audiences had detrimental individual and cultural effects. The emergence of alternative and community media was hailed as benefiting civil society. Technologies that enabled more participation were hailed for their civic and cultural potential. In today’s culture of networked, participatory media, users are optimistically seen as able to access formerly inaccessible mass media, spread ideas and expressions, gain greater access to digital public spheres, create communities, topple dictatorships, and address social problems. More pessimistic theories suggest that participation distracts from democratic processes, reinforces social norms, and supports surveillance, exploitation, and neoliberalism.

These, combined with more mixed assessments, ultimately provide no definitive idea as to what media participation exactly is or does, but I suggest that the scholarly fascination with it evidences participation’s conceptual meaningfulness and power. That is, the continued preeminence of media participation as a scholarly topic could be described as a sign of a “participatory sublime,” following the mythic trends of sublime technology, electricity, and digital media (Jones 2010; Mosco 2004; Nye 1994). Whether viewed positively, negatively, or in-between, media participation is frequently approached with urgency and awe, spawning cultural narratives of hope and fear.

However, media theories tend to view participation as an act in and of itself, progressing from there to study its applications and impacts. Communication theories employed to study media use, such as information seeking, media choice, uncertainty reduction, media richness, social presence, and social influence, rely on behavioral and functional models of rational actors—not ideal for political economic and cultural studies of media. Power, simply, is not rational. Arguably, the participatory sublime blinds scholars to such questions. Given the long history of the concept of oppressed, passive, mass media audiences, there seems to be an assumption that everyone simply wants to participate. However, research provides counterexamples, such as “a ‘popular’ debate on the BBC News website’s post-moderated comments system . . . [that] attracted contributions from just .05 percent of the site’s daily unique audience” (Thurman 2008, 154).

Robin Mansell (2003, 3) calls for “a revitalization of [research into] the political economy of media and communications in order to achieve a more holistic account of the dynamics of new media production and consumption.” Among networked social media, user-generated content, and mass media, I have argued elsewhere that it is crucial to approach the mediated public sphere using an inclusive perspective that accounts for not only rational information seeking but also “emotional, narrative, and illogical elements” (Scott, 2008).

Affective Economies

This article approaches participation not from an evaluative or normative perspective but by incorporating the trajectory, established by Ahmed (2004c, 4), of asking “what emotions do.” As I will demonstrate in my case study, a consideration of affect adds to media political economy, first, an elevation of representations of emotional practices and relations into analysis along with that of manifest images and language, distribution flows, and allocation of resources. Arguably, art, entertainment, and even news all provoke and manipulate internal feeling states even if their resulting emotional cultural practices may end up as outrage, passivity, disinterest, or confidence. This analytic elevation is similar to sound studies’ elevation of the aural, not in replacement of more common areas of analysis but as an integration of a previously neglected area. Second, this allows for analysis of affective accumulations, how they adhere bodies together and cohere them into the effect of collectives (Ahmed 2004a). Such conceptual tools afford greater engagement with the productive work of emotions, such as the effects of boundaries, surfaces, and bodies, literal and metaphoric. This foregrounds the inquiry into what emotions do. Finally, such an approach is particularly apt for examining media participation, given the social nature of emotions, as social media have become a dominant form of media participation.

Studies of emotion and affect have varied traditions, with often contradictory terminology, ranging across fields such as psychology (Berner 1988; Dean 2006), social sciences (Wetherell 2012), cultural studies (Clough 2008, 2010; Shouse 2005), and sociology of emotions (Spencer et al. 2012). Affect studies exist as a field or interdisciplinary conversation (Seigworth and Gregg 2010). Here, I will focus on Ahmed’s (2004a, 2004b, 2004c) concept of affective economies.

A fundamental aspect of Ahmed’s phenomenological approach to emotions is their sociality or, to use the language of sociology of emotions, relational nature. Emotions are not individual psychological states but cultural practices. As these practices circulate, they become increasingly affective: they perform work, particularly that of constituting and shaping worlds, bodies, and collectives. Ahmed (2004a, 117) writes, “emotions are not simply ‘within’ or ‘without’ but . . . they create the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds.” They evaluate individuals and bodies, and align them with ideologies of identity and community. Ahmed refers to this concept as “affective economies,” the social, psychic, and material circulation of emotions between bodies and signs, through which the effect of surface boundaries of bodies and worlds are created. Here, “emotions work as a form of capital: affect does not reside positively in the sign or commodity, but is produced as an effect of its circulation” (Ahmed 2004c, 45). I wish to push this sociological relationality toward a more political economic relationality of media ecosystems. Useful here is the care that sociologists of emotion have taken to incorporate the role of objects within affective economies (Spencer et al. 2012), elevating the material dimension that at times can be neglected in applications of Ahmed’s (2004a, 121) more phenomenological approach even though Ahmed writes, “Affective economies need to be seen as social and material, as well as psychic.” I suggest that this allows for a more balanced engagement of affective economies and political economies of media. As Tanya McNeil (2010, 58) argues,

Empirical (“rational”) and affective (“emotional”) ways of knowing are entangled. . . . Affective modes of knowing are co-constituted through structural arrangements of power. Identity and subjectivity are shaped in and through affective processes and material structures of power, both of which are constituted in and through each other. Affects of belonging are produced through co-constitutive processes that are shaped by the material and the psychic

Indeed, I take my cue here from other scholars in media and technology studies who examine circulatory relations between affect, media, and material culture (Andrejevic 2011; Jenkins 2004; Mannik and McGarry 2015; Ouellette 2012; Sheller 2004).

Irish Travellers

Irish Travellers are tight-knit, often nomadic, ethnic Irish descendants living in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Travellers—distinct from but often colloquially combined with British Romanian “gypsies”—have an unknown origin and unclear relationship with past nomadic groups identified as Travellers. Historical records regarding Travellers are scarce. By the 1950s, they had emerged as a recognized nomadic minority in Ireland numbering around seven thousand. A 1957 travel book referred to them as “the fiercest fighters” but only among their own kind, causing no problems for others (quoted in Bhreatnach 2007b, 48). Anti-Traveller prejudices are deeply rooted and long-standing in Irish culture, where members of the group are often treated like pariahs or a lower caste (Bhreatnach 2007a, 2007b; Hayes 2006). Irish and European anti-Traveller racism is rooted in a dialectic of barbaric/civilized, similar to one I will discuss in regard to mixed martial arts (MMA) fighting. Despite efforts in recent decades to provide formal opportunities for their civic participation, they remain marginalized from Ireland’s liberal democracy (O’Connell 2006). Ultimately, Travellers are positioned as a social Other who, via their nomadism and antiassimilation, represent the uncivilized, anachronistic, traditional outsiders to the civilized, settled, industrialized modern world (MacLaughlin 1998).

As Griffin (2002, 45) describes, “Traveller social organization supports a world-view and set of categories and symbols which serve to fashion identity. . . . When Travellers speak about the body and its ‘inside’ they are talking metaphorically of the wider social body.” Specifically, Traveller society features a complex relationship structure between Self and Other(s), one that is both internal and external. Internally, the nuclear family is the fundamental unit within Traveller society. Individual families or clans engage in long-standing disputes, creating constitutive relations of opposition and difference. Clans address these feuds through bare-knuckle fights incited, documented, and shared through participatory videos. Such oppositions are a defining element of Traveller culture. Yet externally, they are united as Travellers in a fiercely defended distinction between Travellers and non-Travellers. At both levels, these relations are exaggerated to bolster a fragile communal identity and resist assimilation (Griffin 2002).

Fighting is thus central to Traveller internal relations. An educational study positioned fighting as a common “maladaptive” strategy for coping with the cognitive dissonance of adolescent Travellers in English secondary schools, in contrast to the more “adaptive” strategy of “adopting a bicultural identity” (Derrington 2007, 357). As Ahmed (2004b, 29, emphasis in original) notes, “It is through the flow of sensations and feelings that become conscious as pain and pleasure that different surfaces are established.” Or as Pavlidis and Fullagar (2015, 483) describe in their analysis of women’s roller derby, “Painful affects are mobilized in particular ways: to imagine collective belonging, to invent alternative feminine subjectivities, and to mark out the limits of self and other.” Pain, hate, shame, pride, and disgust reinforce internal boundaries that, in turn, maintain internal unity in opposition to outsiders. Such relations are maintained and negotiated through bodily conflict and pain that is shared not only by the combatants in Irish Traveller fights but also by live and media audiences, suggesting their affective work. Fight videos are not simply provocations of sensation to be co-opted, reversed, or championed. They labor to maintain Traveller identity regardless of the sentiment with which they are experienced. Indeed, as Spencer (2014a) has described in regard to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu fighters, the circulation of YouTube videos about this martial art, closely related to MMA, has become part of the global practice of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. The circulation creates and maintains the world and collective. Irish prejudice against Travellers has increased significantly since the 1970s (Hayes 2006); notably, this period also marks the beginning of the diffusion and adoption of home video technologies.

Knuckle

Knuckle is a 2011 feature-length documentary from the United Kingdom/Ireland by Ian Palmer. Palmer spent over a decade documenting bare-knuckle fighting of Irish Traveller clans in Ireland and the United Kingdom. As shown in the film, a clan would make a videotape provoking a member of another clan into a fight. Originally, private tapes were sent through postal mail, but now newer technologies circulate them more widely through video sharing sites, such as YouTube. All of these forms are repurposed in Knuckle, which was released internationally but primarily distributed through video-on-demand streaming platforms and DVD purchase or rental services.

Knuckle offers a very literal and extreme manifestation of affective circulation of bodies, sensations, and boundaries: physical fighting fueled by familial vengeance. This is amplified by the central place of fighting in Traveller culture. These displays of emotional relations are undeniably corporeal. As Ahmed (2004c, 1) writes, “Emotions work to shape the ‘surfaces’ of individual and collective bodies. Bodies take the shape of the very contact they have with objects and others.” Finally, given that Knuckle combines original media participation with Palmer’s videography, and has been officially and unofficially distributed across various platforms, it presents media participation within what scholars have described as contemporary formal and informal media economies (Cunningham 2012; Lobato et al. 2010).

My goal with Knuckle was to ascertain where, within the media participation involved in and around the film, the representations of fighting were going (and coming from) as well as what emotional practices were occurring across such circulations. To assess these multiple dimensions of affective political economy, this project triangulated methods of textual analysis, qualitative online network analysis, and automated colink analysis. The documentary was analyzed for manifest content (particularly in regard to economics and emotional expressions and practices) and sources of content material (i.e., original or redistributed). To approach the dispersion of Knuckle online, video sharing and other sites were searched for repostings of clips from the film, as was the official Facebook page for the documentary (https://www.facebook.com/KnuckleTheMovie). Finally, to get a sense of the gestalt of the documentary’s Facebook page, an automated colink analysis was performed on all the URLs on the page. This provided a more quantitative understanding of the dominant participatory practices taking place there.

Participation

The fight videos in Knuckle and its circulation exhibit Jenkins et al.’s (2013) dimensions of media participation. Affiliations are demonstrated, maintained, and policed through documenting the original intent of the fights: vengeance for affronts to members of various Traveller families. Indicative of the internal/external relations described previously, it is repeated throughout the film that the clans are all related, fighting their own cousins. The boast videos created to provoke these fights explicitly affirm clan affiliations as well as a broader affiliation with Traveller community, as does their participation in the documentary. Moreover, the original sharing community via postal mail expands into online video sharing communities and other social media. The expressions made in these videos are a unique combination of community and independent media, documenting the lives of intensely private and reclusive people, but with an expressive component suggestive of autobiographical zines or blogs. Yet the boasts, provocations, direct addresses to the camera, and fights themselves are also amateur productions that reveal a fan-like familiarity with and appreciation for the media productions of professional wrestling and MMA. The clans are explicitly working together in teams for collaborative problem-solving; the manifest problem here being the feuds. (I will discuss economic issues later.) Each clan has multiple fighters, some of whom also work as trainers, and they collectively appear in the videos taunting and provoking another clan and celebrating victories. One sequence shows clan members all sporting matching T-shirts with a repurposed tabloid headline about their family fighter. Finally, Travellers shape the flow of media in their circulations of tapes, clips, images, online comments, T-shirts, and other material. James Quinn McDonagh, the protagonist of Knuckle, participates in film festivals and media tours for the documentary, and posts links on the Knuckle Facebook page to his official Facebook page, which include video clips from Knuckle, its trailer, other videos of himself, and clips of and links to websites for other fight promoters and organizations on Facebook, YouTube, and elsewhere. Furthermore, as an independent, low-budget production by a first-time director, Knuckle itself can be considered a form of participatory media.

Affective Circulation

Foregrounding affect, I will now discuss production, distribution, promotion, and consumption, and then tie these into an economic analysis of monetization.

In terms of production, Knuckle shows how these amateur documentarians and videographers affectively circulate representations of emotional practices. The anger, pride, and vengeance of the clans are the stated force behind the fights. As the time period of the film progresses, we see an increase from a single videographer to numerous video and still cameras in the audiences. The fights are provoked through callout videos, in which opposing fighters and clans members are called “baldy bastards,” “monkeys,” “fuckin’ murderers,” and “not one of you any good.” One threatens, “You cowardly pack of bollocks! Kiss my Joyce’s behind, you dirty pack of cowardly bastards.” Another taunts, “So be men, and fight,” “You’re not good enough to fight. I’ll poke your eyes out,” and “I’ll beat you the length of Ireland.”

Ostensibly, the central feud in Knuckle traces back to a murder in the 1990s, and it is suggested that a fight should have resolved the feud, but the videotapes kept it going. As a referee from a neutral clan explains, “It’s what you see in the videos that makes the fights [happen].” Michael Quinn McDonagh, the brother of Knuckle’s protagonist James, is also featured and shown at one point preparing for a rematch with an opponent to whom he had lost in disgrace years prior. He states, “That’s what this fight is over. Over that tape they made. . . . almost nine years ago. That’s what this fight is basically over. We had no argument with those people.” James, shortly after, seems to note a decrease in tape circulation: “It goes to show you how, ten years ago when the tapes were going around, how evil and how bad things were compared to today.” However, subsequent scenes reveal a new fight challenge arriving on DVD, and as noted, today they circulate on YouTube. The fights display emotional relations, as do the production of callout videos, which incite the fights to begin with and become the content for subsequent videos. Director Palmer states in his narration that it was the displays of violence—fighting as an emotional relation—that moved him to start documenting the fights and, eventually, produce the film.

As for distribution, at the Sundance Film Festival, Knuckle was an in-demand property for remake and distribution rights (Fleming 2011). Cable channel HBO bought the remake rights and planned to develop a drama based on the film, but this has yet to happen (Schaefer 2011). Current TV, a smaller cable channel, produced that year a knockoff documentary also called Knuckle but focused not on Travellers but American fighters emulating their style. Knuckle has been shared by more than two dozen individual YouTube accounts in various forms including a direct stream of the full movie, a trailer, and individual scenes—some produced by filming the movie as it played on a TV or computer. Fan videos, such as “Big Joe Joyce” (MegaBlainy 2013), remix Knuckle to reframe its ostensible antagonist Joe Joyce, leader of a clan feuding with the Quinn McDonaghs, and reposition him in a more positive light. Michael Quinn McDonagh has his own YouTube channel where he posts fight and callout videos, as do many of his fans and opponents. His brother James Quinn McDonagh promotes the DVD and his own book of similar material through his Twitter account.

One of the things representations of emotional displays do here is promote the videos. Knuckle’s theatrical trailer places the fights in the context of the mythic family feud of the American West, the Hatfields and McCoys, and even the biblical story of brothers Cain and Abel. The DVD trailer opens with the quote “I hate this man.” Posters and promotional images for the film focus on bloodied knuckles, injured faces, and bare-chested fighters, emphasizing bodily surfaces: The fighters literally reshape the surfaces of individual bodies as a way of maintaining and reshaping social bodies, as Ahmed describes. That is, representations of individuals’ broken skin, bruised chests, and bloody faces do not merely evidence their commitment and endurance but also visibly mark social boundaries around and across Traveller culture. On YouTube, video titles are a crucial form of promotion. Combined with the thumbnail image, they must motivate the viewer to participate by clicking on the video. In these titles, fighters use insults such as “no balls . . . haha,” “small cuck” (misspelling “cock” to avoid obscenity filters), and “hairy.” Fans use language such as “Fat Ass Dude vs. Skinny Dude Bare Knuckle Fight,” “Irish Bare Knuckle Boxing Neanderthals in Action” (described with a sarcastic “Ireland’s pride!!! Ireland’s pride!!!”), “challenges and threatens,” “knockout,” “Gypsy” (a derogatory term for Travellers), “Crazy Gypsy,” “feuds,” and capital letters and exclamation marks, as well as their own account names, such as LETHALBOXING.

Circulation increases affect not merely in media consumption, in the sense of viewing the videos, but also in the meaning-making processes of interpreting them. In the popular MMA discussion forum Sherdog, a user posted the Knuckle trailer, provoking a discussion of the merits of Traveller fighters vis-à-vis MMA (“Knuckle” 2011). Although several participants suggested that there could be more skilled fighters among the Travellers, one reply stated that they have hurt the sport of boxing in Ireland because “they have a tendency to harass and beat the shit out of anyone who beats them in boxing” (Croz 2011, 1). Another stated, “Ah those knackers. I remember those videos were like gold dust in school” (“Vascular15” 2011, 1). (“Knacker” in this use is an Irish general pejorative for lower-class persons, similar to the British “chav.”) The Facebook community page “Big Joe Joyce Memes” celebrates the outspoken fighter seen in Knuckle with comments and captioned photographs and photographic juxtapositions that reframe a seemingly idiotic man as an example of national and class pride.

In the Traveller videos, compelling emotional relations are represented, and such relations are also the effect of their participatory viewing, sharing, dissecting, defending, or mocking. Participation is a component of monetization. Shares, likes, clicks, views, and similar user actions generate advertising revenue, boost rankings, and improve search engine placement in the attention economy of networked, convergent media. Therefore, affective circulation as a form of participation plays directly into the affective political economies of media.

This is suggested in the videos as part of the motivation for participating in the fights themselves—the content of the videos. Family members pool resources to generate the prize money awarded to the winner. In one scene, a group of boys notice the videographer and shout, “Camera’s here!” They crowd around, boasting how their man will win £2,000. James Quinn McDonagh describes how the history of the feud is about bad blood, “but also a few quid at Christmas.” A female family member at one point concurs, noting that if they win, “We’ll have a good Christmas.” Years later, after retiring from fighting, James Quinn McDonagh accepts a challenge from a young, less experienced fighter, explaining, “I need some fast money.” However, training for a fight also causes to him to miss work, and so he later seeks to raise the stakes to compensate.

Participating in the distribution of the videos has commercial motivations as well. After a win, clan members record themselves celebrating at a local pub and taunting the other clan, spending the money they won from them on drinks and crowing that they will be thinking of them when hungover the next morning. When shared with opponents, such gloating provokes future fights and prize money. Shortly after meeting the Travellers, director Palmer enters into a deal to continue filming their fights: he will provide them with copies to sell under the table at their pub, and they will split the profits. Although not explicitly addressed, participating in the documentary, including sharing their original videos with Palmer, will provide further distribution for more scenes of their fights. This could lead, in turn, to a higher degree of notoriety and media celebrity, with additional financial rewards. James Quinn McDonagh (2012) earned a book contract with HarperCollins and used the same title as the film, Knuckle. Big Joe Joyce was announced to be starring in a reality show “Big Fat Gypsy Brawling,” continuing in a line of successful British reality programs centered on “gypsies” (Dillon 2013). Similar to U.S. series about lower-class Italians and Southerners, spectacular emotional displays are key to such series.

Monetization continues in the participatory world of social media. Knuckle’s Facebook page contains mostly links to news and entertainment sites promoting the film, and very little personal, athletic, sports, or fan material. One of the film’s distributors, Element Pictures, posted a clip on its YouTube channel to promote the film on the Volta video-on-demand service. It is by far the most watched clip, with more than 950,000 views. Such participation elevates the clip to the top of Element’s “Most Popular” category, which makes it more visible on the website and, in turn, attracts more views. More than three hundred comments also draw attention to the film, and the comments, a heated series of arguments over a wide range of topics including the war in Iraq, politics, racism, and religion, are filled with insults and derogatory terms. Whether directly related to the film or Travellers, participating in such discussions extends the experience of the film. It allows users to not only participate in media but also in the emotional relations displayed in the film even if regarding different topics. The comments section becomes a sanitized space to participate in a brawl.

Commercialization is further evidenced by a colink analysis of the Knuckle Facebook page. Using the open-source network location and visualization software tool Issue Crawler (http://www.issuecrawler.net), the thirteen outbound URLs of the Knuckle Facebook page’s posts were used as seeds. These were subjected to a colink analysis, which crawled these seed URLs and captured every page that had received at least two links from them. If the seed URLs evidenced what pages Knuckle’s Facebook page was linking, colink analysis shows where those pages are in turn linking, demonstrating the expansion of circulation beyond the seeds. Colink analysis identified a network of fifty-eight distinct actors with a total of 8,651 unique URLs. This was an overwhelmingly commercial network, the vast majority of actors being commercial news media, such as the Los Angeles Times newspaper, and especially those related to the film industry, such as websites for trade journal Variety and its YouTube channel. Google’s advertising service DoubleClick was a major actor, as was WordPress.com VIP, a company that provides website support services with rates starting at $5,000 a month for cloud-based and $1,250 a month for self-hosted accounts. The network was almost exclusively commercial entertainment media. Personal pages of filmmakers, fighters, or fans, and pages on Irish Travellers, or even fighting and athletics more broadly were almost entirely absent. The media participation of individuals using personal tapes, which attracted the attention of a documentary filmmaker, were now circulating in an almost entirely commercial network.

Although not repurposing scenes from Knuckle, many recent Traveller videos feature members of the same clans, such as the Joyces. Callout videos and their responses are collected and shared for mockery in an episode of the YouTube series Epic News (with Peter & Chris). The two hosts narrate a compilation of Traveller videos with mocking commentary. They introduce the compilation by saying, “As we all know, YouTube is full of shitty and embarrassing videos. . . . But nothing compares to the sheer cringe-worthiness of watching Irish Travellers call each other out online” (“Traveller Fight Swipe” 2012). At the time of this research, the clip had received more than 494,000 views, driven 1,372 subscriptions to the channel, and been shared 725 times, according to the page’s analytics. In addition to the standard embedded ad from Google, an ad in the video directs viewers to “Game of Mobile Homes” (2014), Peter and Chris’ weekly web series devoted to humorous commentary of Traveller fight videos, or what they call “Irish Grizzly Man Mortal Combat.” Episode 1, uploaded April 7, 2014, gained almost forty thousand views in two weeks, drove 172 subscriptions, and had been shared 101 times. The series makes fun of the emotional displays of the callout videos, commenting on clips and recontextualizing images and characters into parody animations and pictures. A frequent source of humor is the brain damage that can result from violent fighting, which, combined with images of bloody knuckles, again underscores the visceral, physical reconfiguration of bodies within these affective circulations. Peter and Chris humorously position their flirting with such intense emotional practices as key to their brand and success, describing themselves as “two dickheads who laugh at the world to feel better about themselves. 8 million views later and no one’s punched [us] in the face . . . yet” (“About” n.d., 1). Finally, the original Peter and Chris episode, “Traveller Fight Swipe,” was further redistributed with the video sharing site LiveLeak under the title “Irish Travellers Bare Knuckle Fighting— Piss Take with Sub Titles!” (Donegal 2013). Although ranking fewer views (just below three thousand), the overall traffic to the LiveLeak site earned the post a frequent first-page results ranking when searching for “Irish Traveller fighting” on Google. It was also more heavily advertising-driven.

The original videos created by the Travellers were shared with Palmer in the creation of his documentary and, in turn, repackaged in clips and preview trailers for the film. These have then been shared, commented upon, reworked, and otherwise engaged with by hundreds of thousands of online viewers. The families who participated in the original videos, as well as creating and promoting the documentary, have participated in additional media projects of their own and others, creating their own content and content for others’ productions and commentary. In such a complex media system, it is impossible to generalize about the quality or effects of such participation. Arguably, it promotes gambling, physical violence, ethnic stereotypes, hegemonic masculinity, and forms of exploitation. These particular examples of media participation could also be said to empower users to comment upon and negotiate such negative reads, financially empower some participants, and generate ethnic pride and visibility for a marginal subculture. The ends to which producers and users put their participation are manifold and diverse. However, by foregrounding the affective as well as political economies, we gain insight into these complex bodily practices, the participatory creation and sharing of their representations, and how, in a variety of contexts with various meanings attached, Traveller fight videos serve to build and maintain identities, communities, and social worlds.

MMA/Travellers

I conclude by addressing relations between underground fighting, such as Irish Travellers, and MMA, to suggest the broader affective economies and world-building practices beyond, but suggested by, my case study. As noted, Traveller fight videos have become popular among MMA fans, who repost them on sites such as Mixed Martial Arts Share and the MMA forum of Reddit. In 2011, Traveller fighter John Maguire crossed over into MMA with the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fight card 138. Today, he has an 18/6 win/loss record in professional fighting. The current popularity of UFC Irish fighter Conor McGregor suggests, as do debates over his possible Traveller background, that Traveller fighting not only serves to build Irish and Traveller worlds but others as well, such as those of MMA, as does the complicated history of affective relations between UFC and underground fighting.

The relatively brief history of MMA illustrates the broader identity building and maintenance work of fighting. As ethnographies of MMA have suggested, fighting produces particular types of bodies and bodily awareness of individual and social bodies of self and other (Green 2011, 2015; Spencer 2009, 2014b). Intimacy, or what Laurendeau (2014, 16) calls “inter-corporeal emotion,” brings fighters’ bodies together while, seemingly paradoxically, reaffirming larger boundaries and separations. The sport of MMA itself has been described as a clash between Eastern and Western masculine identity types (Hirose and Pih 2009).

The UFC is the leading MMA organization, and it has engaged in boundary production between underground and organized forms of fighting. Criminologists Brent and Kraska (2013) frame this within a barbarism/civilization dialectic, in which underground “sport fighting” represents the former and mainstream, mass-audience MMA the latter. Sport sociologists Van Bottenburg and Heilbron (2006, 2010) use the terms sportization (the civilizing of the barbaric) and desportization (the regression to barbarism). They and others describe how, in the case of UFC, the positions in this dialectic have not been stable (Sanchez Garca and Dominic 2010; Van Bottenburg and Heilbron 2006, 2010). The first UFC fights were promoted as “No Holds Barred” events in which “There are no rules” (Downey 2007). Marketers emphasized their violence and barbaric, desportized nature (arguably, their affective potential). Taking advantage of a new aspect of media political economy—pay-per-view cable television—was key. “As was soon confirmed by the marketing department of the UFC,” write Van Bottenburg and Heilbron (2010, 126), “the people who bought the programs were not interested in the specific skills and styles of the fighters, but far more often in the excitement produced by a transgressive event.” Regulations and fighting techniques changed in these early days to make it more visibly violent, for reasons related to safety and spectacle (Downey 2007). However, as the then-controversial UFC grew, access to broader media distribution required rebranding themselves as civilized, resportized, and regulated, with underground street fighting now its Other. The term mixed martial arts was born. Significantly, this change occurred through the circulation of discourses and representations between UFC marketers and mainstream press coverage. Changes in UFC ownership were incorrectly reported as bringing about new, legitimizing regulations, which had, in fact, been put in place by previous owners to secure state sanctioning (Masucci and Butryn 2013).

The underground/regulated dialectic is central to the identity, community, and brand of the UFC. We can see this dialectic playing out in its current, curious state. For a variety of reasons, the UFC has found itself with a saturated market and declining brand. Glimmers of hope come from cases that foreground dialectics of insider/outsider. The two biggest stars in UFC today—and their number of stars have been drastically declining—are the heavily promoted fighters Conor McGregor and Rhonda Rousey. An expressive, loudmouthed, confrontational Irishman, Conor evokes the underground fighting world of Travellers, and indeed, as was noted, fans debate online whether or not he is one. Pairing him with calmer, more meditative fighters emphasizes this effect. Rhonda Rousey, who won the UFC’s first women’s match in 2013, rapidly became one of its biggest stars. Although not associated with underground fighting, women fighters’ inclusion and, in particular, Rousey’s rapid ascension foreground issues of the same dialectic by throwing them in disarray: Are women’s fights more civilized or barbaric, sportized or desportized? Meanwhile, MMA is also grappling with its first female-to-male transgender fighter Fallon Fox (McClearen, 2015).

Analyses of the affective political economies of Fox, Rousey, and McGregor, in their participatory media representations and affective circulations, could be particularly insightful explorations of sex, gender, and ethnicity in the social worlds of sport. As I have attempted to demonstrate here in my case study of the affective and political economies of Knuckle, the many forms of media participation involved connect to a variety of meaning-making practices inside and outside of Traveller communities. Participants delineate their identities as fighters and members of clans, clans defined in alliance or enmity with other clans, yet united in their distinction from non-Traveller society, elements of whom are, in turn, participating with the videos in defining Travellers, the Irish, genres of fighting, and other social categories and formations. This suggests the utility with which affective political economy offers a tool to explore not merely where media goes and what people do with it but also what worlds are created.