| This thesis is based on ethnographic and interview research conducted in a women's self-defense course over the course of three and a half years (1999--2002). This is a feminist post-structural analysis of the course, dominant discourses that shape issues relevant to the course, and its participants' situated narratives, with an emphasis on power, resistance and the body. The conclusions here propose a unique theory on how discourses and self-narratives intersect in such a way as to underscore these women's embodied agency and ultimately resistance. Findings suggest that women "take back" social space through the embodiment of resistant discourses presented to them in the course. They reject demands for women's invisibility or hyper-visibility, contesting these through corporeal actions. Many of the women studied also take up subversive discourses on gender as part of their own self-narratives in a subversion of "victim" narratives and expectations of vulnerability. Finally, the social construction of whiteness and these women's fear of crime are combined in an analysis suggesting that fear of crime functions as a disciplinary power for many women before the course. After the course, these fears are challenged with a reinstatement of (race and class) privilege. They challenge a culture of fear but do so by reinstating "white safety zones". In short, this course specifically, but self-defense in general, has the capacity to subvert dominant discourses on femininity, female embodiment, vulnerability, and fear of crime. This research offers a glimpse at how agency manifests, how it creates the conditions for resistance and how this is negotiated in and through women's bodies. Traditional dualisms are agitated and problematized as these women take up contradictory discourses and incorporate them into their own self-narratives. What emerges is a negotiation between collusion with dominant paradigm that is sexist, heterosexist, racist (for example) and a counter-dominant one of women as strong, powerful and potent. The theoretical contribution of this thesis is a more complex understanding of agency and resistance which emerges from a focus on embodied subjectivity. Spaces within contradictory discourses create the conditions for agency and in turn, ultimately, resistance. |
