It used to be brutal, now its an art’: Changing negotiations of violence and masculinity in British karate

Abstract

In most western (and indeed eastern) cultures, fighting is seen as an ultimate symbol of masculinity-an embodied display of dominance, control, and violence (Bourdieu, Masculine domination. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). As a space legitimizing and praising performances of mimetic violence (Dunning, Sport matters: Sociological studies of sport, violence, and civilization. London: Routledge, 1999), combat sports provide an arena where the virtues of dominance and power at the heart of conceptions of orthodox masculinity (Anderson, Orthodox and inclusive masculinity: Competing masculinities among heterosexual men in a feminized terrain. Sociological Perspectives, 48(3), 337-355, 2005) or hegemonic masculinity (Connell, An iron man: The body and some contradictions of hegemonic masculinity. In Messner, M. A. & Sabo, D. F. (Eds.), Sport, men and the gender order: Critical feminist perspectives (pp. 83-96). Champaign Illinois: Human Kinetics, 2005) can be symbolically presented by men through bodily displays of strength, physical aggression, and the taking and overcoming of pain (Bourdieu, Masculine domination. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001; Messner, When bodies are weapons: Masculinity and violence in sport. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 25, 203-220, 1990; Wacquant, Body & soul: Notebooks of an apprentice boxer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Yet, over the last 20 years, the focus of karate in Britain has been perceived to shift from aggressive acts of 'hitting hard' to developing and displaying controlled, acrobatic, and technically precise movements. Drawn from a nine-month ethnography and seven semi-structured interviews, this chapter explores how British male karate practitioners re/negotiate ideas of masculinity and embodiments of a masculine identity in the context of karate's changing emphasis on, and practices of, 'violence'.