Women in Mixed Martial Arts and Theologies of Human Flourishing - Janice McRandal

Summary:

This project aims to use women’s participation in Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) as a site to theorize the role of violence in sporting pursuits of human flourishing. The project will bring together literature on political theology, psychology of religion and sport theory, studies in women’s relation to violent sport, and psychoanalytic and psychological theories on the formation of subjectivity in relation to wellbeing and flourishing.  

The working thesis of the project is that, for women who participate in MMA, giving and receiving violence is integral to their pursuit of flourishing, a flourishing that has complex relations to identity and gendered violence more broadly. Read from the discipline of political theology, these pursuits of flourishing can be read as always and already theological.  

This project is needed for the following reasons: 1) it will challenge limitations that are put around the concept of ‘flourishing’ and demonstrate that certain kinds of violence within social relationships can be part of flourishing 2) it will demonstrate the unique relation that women have to the violent aspects of participation in sport 3) it will draw these two previous points into conversation with political theologies of human flourishing that can and do read sport as the site of theological discourse.   

This project contributes to the theme of “the role of religion in human flourishing in social relationships” by first disrupting the religious / secular distinction that dominates discussions of the role of religion by analysing sport as the site of theology, and second, by showing how violence contributes to the flourishing of women who participate in sporting social relationships (MMA).  

The project activities will include literature review in the following areas: theology, psychology of religion and sport, women’s participation in MMA and violent sports, and psychoanalytic and psychological theories on the formation of subjectivity and identity. Qualitative analysis of the social media presence of women in MMA will also be undertaken.  

The planned outputs include a peer-reviewed journal article based on my analysis of the literatures cited above that includes a new theorization of theological accounts of human flourishing for women, a conference presentation in 2025 that draws from the research (proposed to be at the 2025 American Academy of Religions), a guest presentation of the research at the Queen’s foundation Research Symposium on the Faith Lives of Women and Girls, and a blog post summarizing my research.   The anticipated outcomes of this project include a complexified concept of human flourishing that includes giving and receiving certain forms of violence, a deeper understanding of how women who participate in violent sports relate to sporting violence, a novel interpretation of the theological dimensions of the role of sporting violence in human flourishing, and an example of research that demonstrates ways to draw feminist psychoanalytic theories and social psychology together, rather that reperforming the typical antagonism between the two fields.