Christina Olivares

I find this one difficult to work out: If you have never boxed, or done some sort of martial art, it might be hard to understand how such activities aren’t quite about violence. But in this post that boundary around violence is difficult to identify, since part of what I’m thinking about is a kind of self-defense (which thus assumes violence). I’m not saying, for instance, that I believe that all women should box, or that knowing how to fight would necessarily alleviate women’s vulnerability to domestic abuse. But there is something to be said for the psychological effects of imagining one’s self as able to hold one’s own. It’s an effect on the mind developed through the disciplination of the body.

“Disciplination,” by the way, is just fancy for “what we put our bodies through” in order to achieve some kind of effect. Disciplination makes comportment– or what my grandparents refer to as “how you carry yourself.” So learning a new sport or a new style of dance involves disciplination. We simply use the fancier word when describing such activities as also having psychological effects. The philosopher Iris M. Young has this beautiful essay called “Throwing Like Girl,” and in it she talks about a moment when she realizes that there are all these things she never learned to do with her body because she was a woman, and that “being a woman” was explicitly tied up in having a limited physical relationship to her body. It’s not that girls can’t throw; it’s that girls never learn to throw. We don’t teach girls to throw because girls can’t throw; girls never learn to throw. There is no such thing, really, as throwing like a girl. Oh, unless “girl” just means “badly.” Language is a bitch, huh?

It’s really quite amazing to think about. If I throw a ball at you, will you duck or catch? How much is that reflex guided by your training? How much is your training justified or strengthened by what do you think you should do? Or what you have always done? Who are you anyway?

Comportment is fascinating, especially coming off of a semester of teaching classes like “Girlpower” and “Racial Passing.” Passing is all about understanding comportment, and knowing how to adjust one’s bearing in such a way that people take you to be a certain kind of person. Two of the best examples of passing through comportment I can think of are Will Smith’s character in Six Degrees of Separation, and Kevin Spacey’s character in The Usual Suspects. (Although I guess these might also be examples of how vexed relationships between the real and the imaginary can be: remember when Denzel told Smith to use a body double for kissing a man, b/c it would ruin his career?)

But anyway, race and gender passing are usually about conscious decisions, while comportment is mainly unconscious, much in the way being “who we are” is an unconscious performance (for instance your regional accent or your gentle manner). But sometimes things happen that make you suddenly aware of “who you are.” Someone tells you that you don’t sound black, or look Jewish, or sit like a man. That moment of being told who “you” are is called an interpellation, and it speaks to how identity requires both our own actions and other people’s explicit recognition thereof. (If you’re interested in thinking about what this means for gender performance, you should check out the Chloé A. Hilliard article I mention in “all lesbians are sneaky.”)

So back to boxing and blows, to subjects and objects, and to the complications of our relations therein. Three powerful readings: In her post on CnS, Olivares has all these important things to say regarding boxing in relation to her own femininity through boxing. Then I saw a post over at a cat and twenty, picked up via Objectify This. Both women riff on how often women apologize, “I’m sorry this,” “I’m sorry that.” Apologies for imposing. Apologies for taking up space. Apologies for making people deal with themselves, and then watching their struggle.

1. So here’s Olivares. I don’t want to reproduce too much here, because I’d really like you to read the women above for yourself:

on the train to the gym this morning i realized that it was fear that kept me rooted & accepting of my teammate’s blows. not about being quick. i’ve just been trained to sustain blows. when i was little – the one time i evaded my father’s heavy hand, perhaps at 7 or 8 years old, i felt, for the first time in my life, not fear, but contempt for him as i spun to the other side of the kitchen – and he, shame? either way, when he caught me by the arm a second later, it became the worst beating of my life. for future (inevitable, i was a back-talker) punishments i never resisted, partly to not bring worse punishment, but partly, it must’ve been, so that i would never have to feel contempt for my father. fear was preferable to loathing. fear made it my fault; loathing, his fault. and so i’ve trained myself to not duck blows.

2. From a cat and twenty:

… she was sorry. she knew enough, even drunk to the point of unconsciousness and physically incapable of movement, that she was sorry about something. because we always are. we are always supposed to be.

you know what i wish? well, i wish a lot of things, really, chief among them being that men would stop hating women so goddamn much. because it’s not our fault. whatever it is that actually drives that misogyny, whatever fear is actually coiled up at the bottom of that vast heart of darkness, it is most definitely not our fault.

but barring these impossible dreams, you know what i wish? i wish that we would stop apologizing. it’s not easy – we’ve learned to say “i’m sorry” to try to preempt the whipping, or to lessen the lashes, or just to quiet our own minds while it’s happening. we’ve learned that “sorry” helps us survive. but i wish we could start fighting back, just a little, in little ways.

3. And finally, two scenes from Karyn Kusama’s Girlfight. The first is when Michelle Rodriguez’s Diana gets into a fight with her abusive father, and beats him. The second, which you can catch a glimpse of in the clip below, is when she hits her sparring partner. Hard. Then she apologizes. Her trainer admonishes her “don’t be sorry. Don’t ever be sorry.”

I could problematize this by emphasizing that the “don’t be sorry” implores women to be like oppressors. But here, I really don’t think it’s about apologizing, about proper conduct in the interest of ethical relations. This is about a state of being: Don’t ever be sorry.Though there are dangers. On top of her father, subjecting him to her blows, there’s this moment when Diana seems to see her abusive father in herself. By virtue of her position over him, she suddenly sees him as her abused mother, which makes her… Multiple subject positions, multiple significations: It’s hard not be sorry– in every sense of the phrase. Hard not to apologize for living while female, and then hard not to be a sorry ass punk… So much work.

To end, a Madonna video, “What It Feels Like for a Girl.” I have some feelings to smash out. The ending doesn’t bode well (nor does her English accent!), but afterwards I always feel strangely fine, being left to the work of recuperation.

But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading
cause you think that being a girl is degrading
But secretly you’d love to know what its like
Wouldn’t you?
What it feels like for a girl?