The Path to Empowerment: Gender, Class, Race, and the Techniques of Transformation through Self-defense

• In Event: 415 - Section on Race, Class and Gender Paper Session. Gendered Racism, Vulnerability and State Sanctioned Violence

Abstract

The aesthetic we identify is an embodied manifestation of a certain habitus coupled with emotion work, while bodily positioning and violent techniques (punching, kicking, and yelling) also conjures emotion. We look at the link between emotional and body labor, the micro-processes of embodiment, and the physical retraining of the body. The imagined attacker is always an immediately violent stranger which lends the learning of self-defense a profoundly physiological dimension. The instructors are selling fear and vulnerability and the ability to protect oneself from it, they are also selling the acknowledgement and normalization of fear as well as ways to undo it.This new aesthetic labor does the work of reconciling femininity with physical violence, by imagining highly violent scenarios and acting them out, privileged women use their protected “corporeal envelope” to be both attacker and victim.

Authors

• Dimitra Rose Cupo, University of Oregon

• Eileen M. Otis, University of Oregon