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Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
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Getting Physical

Subverting Gender through Self-Defense

Kristine De Welde

University of Colorado

This article presents ethnographic research on a women's self-defense course and proposes that socially available gender narratives of white femininity are potentially disempowering and victimizing to women. Changes in self-narratives as a result of the course reflect a more powerful self that challenges dominant discourses. The process illustrated in this article consists of reframing victimization, liberating the self, and enabling the body in a transformation of gender and self-narratives that affirm "femininity" while subverting its defining ideologies. What results is a physical agency within which narratives about femininity are reinterpreted and reembodied as powerful instead of vulnerable.

Key Words: self-defense • agency • femininity • resistance • embodiment

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 32, No. 3, 247-278 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/0891241603032003001
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