This article problematizes claims of women’s empowerment in “masculine” sports through an exploration of women’s participation in mixed martial arts (MMA)—a combat sport colloquially referred to as “cage fighting.” MMA, perhaps more than any other sport, allows women athletes to challenge patriarchal beliefs about gender by demonstrating women’s capacity for physical violence and domination. But whereas investigations into MMA have produced important findings for studies of men and masculinities, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to women’s participation in this hypermasculine world. This article begins to fill this gap through an ethnographic account of this growing sport. Drawing from more than four years of ethnographic fieldwork and 40 semi-structured interviews with professional women’s MMA athletes, I show how the neoliberal–postfeminist culture of MMA undermines its empowerment potential by shaping gendered subjecthood in ways that are conducive to the maintenance of gender inequality. I conclude by discussing the implications of my findings for women’s empowerment in sport.

本文通过探索女性参与混合武术 (MMA)（一种俗称“笼式格斗”的格斗运动）来质疑“男性”运动中赋予女性权力的主张。MMA 或许比其他任何运动都更能让女性运动员通过展示女性的身体暴力和支配能力来挑战父权制的性别观念。但是，尽管对 MMA 的调查已经为男性和男性气质的研究产生了重要的发现，但令人惊讶的是，女性参与这个超男性化的世界却很少受到关注。本文开始通过对这项不断发展的运动的民族志描述来填补这一空白。从四年多的民族志实地考察和对职业女子综合格斗运动员的 40 次半结构化采访中得出，我展示了 MMA 的新自由主义-后女权主义文化如何通过以有利于维持性别不平等的方式塑造性别主体来破坏其赋权潜力。最后，我讨论了我的研究结果对女性在体育运动中的影响。