Sharing Reflections on Proposing Non-Conventionalism for Inclusive Martial Arts and Combat Sports by Fabiana Turelli (Brazil).
Martial arts and combat sports (MACS) continue to show a high abandonment rate by girls and women (e.g., Carlsson, 2017). This is often due to the type of pedagogy that is adopted in martial arts, a traditional pedagogy (Cynarsky, Obodynsk & Zeng, 2012), binary and heteronormative. In this pedagogy, therefore, girls and women have their place as historically, culturally, and socially assigned to them (Marcuse, 2018). With new inclusive policies, they end up taking part in the martial context, but this permission does not necessarily mean true inclusion or belonging achieved by girls and women. Even when black belts and high-level competitions are achieved by them, for example, they can continue to be considered imitations of real fighters, a status that is generally held by men (Turelli, 2022; Turelli et al., 2022). My goal here is to reflect on possibilities for focusing on fights that remove them from stigmatized and stigmatizing places, offering unconventional perspectives to build inclusive martial experiences for girls and women.
I have been practising MACS sports for almost three decades. I started in karate in Brazil when I was a child, scaled the hierarchy of belts, competed, and left karate after having a hard experience. Then I practised martial arts of a philosophical background while off karate, which were Iaido, the traditional Japanese sword, and Nei Kung, a martial art of Chinese inspiration aiming at self-knowledge. Notwithstanding, with the announcement of karate as an Olympic sport, I decided to resume my practices in the discipline and accompany this Olympic moment, researching it. Indeed, I researched karate in a PhD project carried out in Spain, and have started a journey advocating for its transformation towards girls’ and women’s empowerment through fighting. Thus, my lived experiences in addition to my research on martial arts are allowing me to suggest some possibilities that may be beneficial to so-called minority groups, even though here I am focusing on girls and women.
Women and girls in martial arts face several stigmas although I will mention only two here. The first one, either it keeps girls away from fights, which is very recurrent, or it makes them establish themselves in the martial environment and, possibly due to the threat they can represent of dismantling power, they are addressed pejoratively as masculinized women. A strong and courageous woman, for common sense, cannot be a woman. Supposedly, whoever is brave and strong is a man. So, the affective options of women who escape the stigma of fragility and being afraid are put in check and they have to deal, in one way or another, with all the stress resulting from such gossip. The second stigma derives from the stereotype of the sexualization and sensualization of the bodies of female athletes. There, women are not masculinized, but eroticized and objectified, with their sporting performance disregarded and their bodies consumed (Turelli, Vaz & Kirk, 2023).
Considering this brief justification, it is important to reflect on possibilities for focusing on MACS that remove them from stigmatized and stigmatizing places. These places, established for a long time, keep comfortable those who fit in and define the structure. However, these same places are unfair to the portion of people that do not benefit from the patriarchal dividend (Connell, 1995), and for these people, the issues of equity, diversity and inclusion need to be seriously embraced and made a reality. Taking this into account, next I share general thoughts towards constructively disruptive actions of martial environments.
Including girls and women in MACS classes means giving them space, more than that, making the space theirs, so that they don’t feel intrusive in a world to which they don’t belong. They need to feel that this world is theirs too. Since they are born, for simply being born girls in a patriarchal society, they are fighting. Therefore, the martial world is their world. Feeling recognition, support, and encouragement from sensei, not as empty or politically correct encouragement, but as genuine actions, is something essential. Sensei need to be interested in their students and seek, with them, alternatives to make classes and training sessions accessible. This breaks with the traditionalism usually found in MACS, where the content is rigidly given for each belt and students need to absorb it. The context here must be pedagogical and didactic above all. There is no search for concrete results. Medals, belts, hard punches… that’s not the point or main goal. The priority is that students experience, that they feel capable, included, and that they also have fun.
Martial arts are understood as something serious and, therefore, the idea that they can be fun is often criticized, but I think that pleasure cannot be eliminated from life, in all age groups. Fights can be and carry a lot of fun, not just for boys and men. The main thing, I argue, is that the environment be built suitably. For this, it is necessary to overcome other stigmas, such as that there are strict exact and correct ways to carry out certain activities. Students shouldn’t worry about beating their peers, competing with them, pleasing the sensei, winning belts, or throwing strong or biomechanically perfect punches. With more openness to diverse performances (Butler, 1990), probably senseis be more often surprised by the ability of students. I would not recommend separating girls from boys for classes. This is justified in some cases with adults, starting late in martial practices (Rodrigues, Turelli & Kirk, in review), but especially in the case of children, where muscle and hormonal differences up to a certain age are not established, and where high-level performance is not the goal, gender diversity must be encouraged.
However, it is possible that it becomes necessary to deal with some dissatisfaction of boys and men, in case the inclusion of girls and women puts them in a position of discomfort. By being uncomfortable and unusual for them, complaints could be expected. The search for the inclusion of girls and women may sound like giving priority to them, taking space away from boys and men. And wouldn’t that be unfair to them? No. Just uncomfortable. I cannot speak from the standpoint of a man, but I can speak from that of a visibly white, cis-gender woman (McDonald, 2014). Though my privileges are few, I recognize them, and from this place, I can say that I know how uncomfortable it can be felt when my few privileges are touched. And I know even more how discomfort screams, bordering on injustice in some cases, when structures are the norm and discrimination is the consequence. Thus, for people to transit to different places than they are used to in the social order is highly educational. Girls and women get used to the place where they feel strange to the point that the stranger becomes naturalized (Young, 1980). However, I would propose to come back to strange, in an unconventional proposal that finds in the known poison itself, the antidote and remedy to alleviate the pain.
Being strange, being queer (Ahmed, 2004; lisahunter, 2017), and making MACS queer, with simple but constructively disruptive actions that are traditional and disempowering for girls and women, can open up windows of opportunity for them. By promoting moments that break with traditionalism, innovative activities that denote care and planning, more than any intention of destruction that continually receive criticism, it would come to be seen, understood, and accepted as new opportunities. It is not about destroying the old order to impose a new one, just changing who leads and dominates. It is about working for a permanent and fluid reconstruction, where no position is unquestionable and perpetual. It is about continuing to reflect and seek alternatives, to apply them, reformulate them and improve them in a passionately critical way. Considering all this, my proposal for an inclusively non-conventional approach is not a recipe but is based on general ideas fruitfully open to strange contributions.
Author Biography
Dr. Fabiana Turelli is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management at the University of Manitoba, Canada. She has worked as a physical educator, pedagogical coordinator, and lecturer in Brazil. During her doctoral work in Spain, she spent eight months at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland, with Professor David Kirk, and eight months in Italy, with Associazione Leib and Università di Bologna. Her PhD was a study of the women’s Spanish Olympic karate squad. Her postdoctoral study, in Australia, searched for ways to bring theory into practice in a struggle against social issues. Dr. Turelli’s research line is critical, combining concepts of critical theory, feminism, sociology of sport, Anglophone proposals for critical pedagogies, and intersectionality. By being herself a martial arts and combat sports (MACS) practitioner for several years, she advocates for the potential of MACS to holistically empower people, as much as for the transformation of often hostile combative environments to avoid disempowering embodied experiences.
References
Ahmed, S. (2004). Queer Feelings. In: The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge, London.
Carlsson, H. (2017). Researching boxing bodies in Scotland: Using apprenticeship to study the embodied construction of gender in hyper masculine space, Gender, Place & Culture, 24(7), 939-953, DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2017.1343282
Connell, R. W. (1995). Políticas da Masculinidade. Educação e Realidade. 185-206.
Cynarsky, W. J., Obodynsk, K., & Zeng, H. Z. (2012). Martial Arts Anthropology for Sport Pedagogy and Physical Education. Revista Romaneasca Pentru Educatie Multidimensionala. 4(2): 129–152.
lisahunter. (2017). What a queer space is HPE, or is it yet? Queer theory, sexualities and pedagogy, Sport, Education and Society, DOI: 10.1080/13573322.2017.1302416
Marcuse, H. (2018). “Marxismo e feminismo”. Trad. Mariana Teixeira. Dossiê Herbert Marcuse, Parte 2. Dissonância: Revista de Teoria Crítica, 2(1.2), 77-90.
McDonald, M. G. (2014). Mapping intersectionality and whiteness. Troubling gender and sexuality in sport studies. In: Hargreaves, J., & Anderson, E. (Eds.). Routledge handbook of sport, gender and sexuality. Routledge.
Rodrigues, A. I. C., Turelli, F. C., & Kirk, D. (in review). Fighting like a girl: Towards a critical pedagogy of martial arts. Anthology on ‘Martial Arts & Therapy’. European Academy of biopsychosocial Health. https://www.fpi-publikation.de/
Turelli, F. C. (2022). “Nothing Stops You, Nobody.” Construction of Female Embodied Subjectivity in the Spanish Olympic Karate Team. PhD Thesis. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. 426p.
Turelli, F. C., Vaz, A. F., & Kirk, D. (2023). “We are not products”: Stereotyping women athletes in karate through demands on femininity and sensual bodies. Revista Mujer y Políticas Públicas. Vol. 1 Núm. 2. Enero-junio 2023. http://revistas.urp.edu.pe/index.php/mpp/
Turelli, F. C., Vaz, A. F., Tejero-González, C. M., & Kirk, D. (2022). ‘Fighting like a girl’: qualitative analysis of the gendered movement learning in the Spanish Olympic karate team, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, DOI: 10.1080/17408989.2022.2125947
Young, I. M. (1980). Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality. Human Studies, 3, 137-156
Kate Sylvester Perspectives 