Dangerous Encounters: Protecting Women's Bodies and Privilege

• In Event: 4284 - Section on Sociology of Sex and Gender Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 16. Sexual Assault, Trafficking, and Street Harassment

Abstract

Over the course of six months of participating in and observing women’s self-defense classes, I observed much comfort in students challenging teachers’ authority, technique, and justifications. This paper is an analysis of women’s self-defense tactics where both instructors and students rely on and reproduce racialized gendered class-privilege. This unfolds through two major channels. The first is middle-class privilege, demonstrated by cultural class-specific references, jokes and preferences for interaction. Joking about violence helps situate racialized class-privileged women as fundamentally outside of spheres of vulnerability. The second channel is the learning of physical attacks and appropriate defenses (an immediate and constant practical task) in ways that will resonate with middle-class women yet open up a space for them to transform their embodied proclivities toward being vulnerable to violence. Participants must become assailants, but in a middle class leisure practice form. Findings indicate that the project of women’s self-defense rests upon prior assumptions that work to privilege women who are targeted as the consumers of such classes, even as they claim to render the disadvantage of (white, middle-class, heterosexual) gender into a rallying point. From this privileged habitus, techniques will be learned and read as empowerment, a practice that claims but ultimately fails to place the “field” of gender on terms consistent with equality. This paper destabilizes any notions of a logical connection between vulnerability to violence and learned tactics for defense. The process of learning to fight imagines women never as objects of suspicion or fear due to social distribution of vulnerability. Risk and safety become individualized and internalized through techniques of the classes, which encourages learners to disconnect in important ways. Students are discouraged from imagining alliances, collective responses and even environmental or social variations on individualized vulnerability.

Author

• Dimitra Rose Cupo, University of Oregon