Approaching the Gendered Phenomenon of ‘Women Warriors’

Abstract

Our initial motivation for producing Global Perspectives on Women in Combat Sports: Women Warriors around the World began several years ago when, as PhD candidates studying together at Loughborough University, UK, we developed a shared interest in combat sports through our separate but related research projects. Christopher’s work, involving an ethnographic study of a working class, predominantly male boxing club, and Alex’s, which explored the phenomenon of mixed-sex training in a range of martial arts schools, fuelled many discussions between us on the sociological richness of these activities. Topics such as the contentious definition of ‘violence’, the emotional landscape of training to fight, the social class characteristics of participants in different clubs and schools and the complex relationship between ethnicity and authenticity in the martial arts occupied many of our debates. However, the most salient issue for both of us, and that which we returned to with the greatest regularity, was the manner in which gender was constructed, portrayed and lived out within these activities. Indeed, both our doctoral theses and subsequent publications were eventually based on analyses of the gendered behaviour of practitioners within such settings, and these marked the beginning of our academic careers as scholars in this particular field (e.g. Channon, 2012a, 2012b, 2013a; Matthews, 2012, 2014).