This paper is a study of institutional regulations of combat sports vis-à-vis ethico-moral codes of conduct in Martial Arts to attend to idea of “self” as expressed in multi-sited utterances of “self-defence”. In this paper I show how bodily practices underscored by codes, rules, ethics, laws, and regulation configure, and are themselves configured by underlying (or sometimes abject) ideas of what is or isn’t “violence”. The paper looks at how practitioners, institutions and legislators demarcate “violence” from “combat” in drafting what is legal/illegal, fair/foul, acceptable/unacceptable in the practice of combat sports. By placing the regulatory mechanisms at the center of the discussion, this paper also engages in a deconstruction of the idea of Martial Arts and Combat Sports, to expose the internal contradictions and contentions inherent to any associations or demarcations between the two. These demarcations- between violence and combat, between martial arts and combat sports- at the foremost have a bearing not only on the internal constitution and practice of the same, but also suspend the socialities that emerge from and around them into a hierarchical space. Conversely, the paper also accounts for the how apriori contesting and hierarchical socialities actively spill over into and express themselves in the realm of sports and body practices continually. By taking Taekwondo as its object of analysis, this paper studies the “becoming” of the “Martial Art” into a “Sport” and what such a “becoming” entails and produces. By treating the body of the practitioner as the surface upon which institutional and social regulations act, this paper shows how Martial Arts and Combat Sport as embodied practices essentially become an embodiment of legality.
