‘It used to be brutal, now it’s an art’:changing negotiations of violence and masculinity in British karate

In most western (and indeed eastern) cultures, fighting is seen as an ultimate symbol of masculinity – an embodied display of dominance, control and violence (Bourdieu, 2001). As a space legitimising and praising performances of mimetic violence (Dunning, 1999), combat sports provide an arena where the virtues of dominance and power at the heart of conceptions of orthodox masculinity (Anderson, 2010 ) or hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 2005) can be symbolically presented by men through bodily displays of strength, physical aggression, and the taking and overcoming of pain (Bourdieu, 2001; Messner, 1990; Wacquant, 2004). Yet, over the last twenty years the focus of karate in Britain has been perceived to shift from aggressive acts of 'hitting hard' to developing and displaying controlled, acrobatic and technically precise movements. Drawn from a nine-month ethnography and 7 semi-structured interviews, this chapter explores how British male karate practitioners re/negotiate ideas of masculinity and embodiments of a masculine identity in the context of karate’s changing emphasis on, and practices of, 'violence'. This paper suggests that a 'civilising' shift (Elias and Dunning, 1986) in the competition rules increases in women’s participation in karate with men, and subsequent negotiations of mimetic violence, complicate the use of violence as a symbol of praised masculine identity within British karate . A praised masculine identity is crafted by carefully blending traits conventional deemed feminine such as technical precision, elegance and agility alongside displays of strength and dominance. Such performances challenge conceptions of an orthodox sporting masculinity and notions of hierarchical gender distinction

Obesity frames and counter-frames in British and German online newspapers

By featuring news articles highlighting certain aspects of obesity and backgrounding others, the media can frame these aspects as especially applicable to how obesity should be understood and addressed. Despite the highest rates in Europe, news reports from Britain and Germany have come under little scholarly scrutiny. In this article, we explore frames and their frequency of use in British and German online newspapers. Our findings reveal a dominant cross-national framing of obesity in terms of ‘self-control’, which places a more pronounced emphasis on individual responsibility than demonstrated by earlier studies and may contribute to a culture of weight bias and stigma. The results also reveal evidence for cross-national efforts to challenge this individualising framing with counter-frames of ‘acceptance’ and ‘coming out’. We argue that this is a positive development, which demonstrates the potential of media frames to function not only as possible contributors to weight bias and stigma but also as mechanisms for countering entrenched social conceptions of obesity