While much research and theory has paid attention to how organizational actors stigmatized for their core practices conform to the beliefs and demands of broader and oppositional audiences, we examine the opposite and ask: How do these actors preserve the controversial elements of their stigmatized practices? To address this question, we engage in an inductive historical study of one stigmatized practice, mixed martial arts (MMA), the social sanctions used to inhibit it, and the resistant responses by long-time organizational actors to those sanctions. Our findings suggest that rather than dissuade highly identified core-stigmatized actors, different types of sanctions primed target identities and emotions among them and energized defiance. These stigma-defiant activities included liberation responses, refusing to comply with opponent’s efforts to control them, and inducing covert bargaining with targeted members of monitoring audiences about sanctioning their controversial elements. As a result, these activities created ongoing controversy among monitors and protected ‘perceptually deviant’ elements of such practices by codifying them within the sanctions themselves. In contrast to prior studies, our work suggests the use of stigma to employ sanctions can prime identities and emotions among highly identified, stigmatized actors, driving efforts to preserve controversial elements.
