Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the embodied experience of pain caused by bodily movements such as kicking, punching and choking works as a focal point for how individuals build social relationships to each other within the experiential space of a Danish MMA gym.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how the embodied experience of pain caused by bodily movements such as kicking, punching and choking works as a focal point for how individuals build social relationships to each other within the experiential space of a Danish MMA (mixed martial arts) gym in Copenhagen. Through sharing experiences and fighting with the men and woman in the gym, I came to understand that the daily embodied experience of shared pain constitutes a complex social space where meanings, relationships and imaginations are constantly transformed and negotiated and therefore provide a grounds for social interaction. This interaction not only operates on a discursive level but in embodied, tacit and sensorial ways. Fighters ritually spar and drill different agonizing bodily techniques with each other that evoke facial expressions of clenched teeth and bloodshot eyes and verbal sounds of fighters gasping loudly for air after being choked.

Building on the phenomenological notion of intersubjectivity, I argue that fighters' shared experience with painful bodily movements can challenge general ideas about physical pain as a merely private or passive experience, wherein pain is inflicted upon a suffering object, rather than an agentive subject (Asad 2000:41). Not only can the experience of physical pain work as a way for humans to recognize their individual agency, as Talal Asad argues (Ibid), I also suggest that such agency expands into the collective space of the MMA gym, where it establishes an embodied experience of pain that gives a shared social meaning to the fighters.