Risk, Failure, Play

Abstract

Decried as mere brutality on display and celebrated as viscerally real, combat sport has escaped nuanced reflection. Risk, Failure, Play addresses this gap, signaling the many ways in which competitive martial arts differentiate themselves from violence through risk-based play. Despite its association with frivolity and ease, play is not the opposite of danger, rigor, or failure. Indeed, Risk, Failure, Play demonstrates the ways in which physical recreation allows us to manage the complexities of our current social reality. This book suggests that play gives us the ability to manage difficult conditions with intelligence and that physical play, with its immediacy and its heightened risk, is particularly effective at accomplishing this task. Presented from the perspective of a dancer and writer, this book takes readers through considerations of the politics of everyday life exemplified in martial arts practices such as jeet kune do, Brazilian jiu jitsu, kickboxing, Filipino martial arts, and empowerment self-defense. Risk, Failure, Play intertwines personal experience with phenomenology, social psychology, dance studies, performance studies, and theories of play and competition in order to produce insights on pleasure, mastery, vulnerability, pain, agency, individual identity, and society. Ultimately, this book suggests that play allows us to rehearse other ways to live than the ones we see before us, challenging us to reimagine our social reality.

Communicating consent in sport: A typological model of athletes’ consent practices within combat sports

“…Throughout much of our own engagement in sparring, these symbolic acts serve to identify clear start and endpoints for the practice. They work as indicators between partners that they have stepped across a threshold into or out of realms where otherwise unacceptable levels of physically intense interaction are expected, even welcomed (O’Shea, 2019). In the words of one of our training partners,…”

“…First is the question of violence, and the role of consent in mediating the legal as well as moral implications of people purposefully hitting each other. As we have previously argued, the action constitutive of combat sports is not typically understood by its practitioners as ‘real’ violence per se (Channon, 2020; Matthews and Channon, 2017; see also O’Shea, 2019). This position largely depends upon the use of a definition of violence that incorporates notions of violence-as-force as well as violence-as-violation (Channon and Matthews, 2018; Matthews and Channon, 2017).…”

“…my sparring partner's punch is not understood by either of us as violence when thrown during a round in the ring, although it would be when thrown during an argument outside). Clearly, consent plays an important role here as it constitutes the mechanism for determining what does and doesn’t count as a context-specific, subjectively interpreted ‘violation’ (Channon and Matthews, 2018; Matthews and Channon, 2017; O’Shea, 2019).…”

A Typology of Martial Arts Scholar–Practitioners: Types, Transitions, and Tensions in Capoeira

“…It is important to highlight the fact as with yoga studies that these aforementioned martial arts scholar-practitioners are typically male, and more often than not, white Westerners. In recent years, more writing has come from female researchers such as dance scholar and Jeet Kune Do practitioner Janet O'Shea [49], adding to the earlier work from established names such as cultural studies figure and boxing enthusiast Meaghan Morris, who has written about Bruce Lee and many other topics [50]. Another renowned figure is veteran ethnographer Sara Delamont, who is an interesting case of a non-practitioner of the martial aspects of Capoeira and Savate despite her extensive writings on these systems and their pedagogies [51].…”