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Breaking the First Two Rules of Fight Club

  • Mark A. Wood
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Part of the Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture book series (PSCMC)

Abstract

This chapter examines how fight pages, as a form of antisocial media, have changed the terrain for distributing footage of public bare-knuckle violence. Drawing primarily upon my experiences following five fight pages, I provide an account of the content hosted on these pages, from the clips of bare-knuckle brawls they curate, to the video descriptions that enframe them. Through doing so, I show that the violent entertainments hosted by pages were not only highly heterogeneous but also curated in a manner that legitimated street fighting, and street justice: eye-for-an-eye retributive violence enacted in response to a wrong.

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© The Author(s) 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  • Mark A. Wood
    • 1
  1. 1.CriminologyUniversity of MelbourneParkvilleAustralia

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