ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces ethnographic data that can help frame the rest of the project by foregrounding some of the dominant community discourses in circulation within the space. First, it outlines why people chose to join Origins Combat Gym before demonstrating how much the space means to people, not only as a space that allows them to transform themselves – which has implications beyond fighting alone – but also as a highly valued social space. Following that, it offers an account of how training to fight wrests on notions of egalitarianism and meritocracy – that can be juxtaposed with the wider social world, which is understood as unfair – as fighters must perform the requisite “techniques of the body” alongside one another, in near-perfect unison. It argues that this creates conditions for fighters to conceive of one another as the same, bonded by their shared experiences of training to fight alongside one another. The final two sections outline how this involves fighters arguing that preconceived notions of gender and race are irrelevant within the space, as everyone is seen as the same.
