‘Suddenly they are crying. Damm! What is this?’ – conflicting martial gendered embodiment for women karate athletes

Martial arts and combat sports (MACS) are often gender binary environments. In karate, women tend to be considered unable to learn and properly perform martial arts and martial movements due to their gender. The social embodiment they bring as ‘girls’, socially allowing them to cry, leads their coaches to affirm that women are not made for fighting. By taking a critical, feminist, social-constructionist framework, we explore how this embodiment is both criticized and reinforced withing karate. We follow Merleau-Ponty [(2005). The spatiality of one’s own body and motility. In Phenomenology of perception. Routledge] theory to unpack embodiment and inquire into embodiment as ‘crystallizations’ that happen to women’s bodies and subjectivities, socially and in karate. Young’s [(1980). Throwing like a girl: A phenomenology of feminine body comportment motility and spatiality. Human Studies, 3(1), 137–156] work – updated by Mason [(2018). Gendered embodiment. In B. J. Risman (Ed.), Handbook of the sociology of gender, handbooks of sociology and social research (pp. 95–107). Springer International Publishing] – is central for this paper. Young’s three levels, covered by the corporal, spatiality, intentionality and transcendence, are transferred to women’s experiences in karate, highlighting how women’s bodily experiences are restricted, incomplete or simply absent, with a consequently limited embodiment. This was verified through research with the Spanish women’s Olympic karate squad, getting insights from their embodied experiences through observations, video-analysis and semi-structured interviews with 14 elite women fighters and four men coaches. We focus on the contradictions surrounding the gendered embodiment of martiality, the negotiations women make to remain in the environment, and how the navigation between adapting to norms and challenging them contributes to disrupting normative traditions and may generate new ways of embodiment. The paper does not present a unique direction, but a combination of contradictions and mixed feelings, opening the floor for further discussions.