Training Our Bodies to Defend Ourselves: Self-defence Training as Embodied Learning

This thesis examines how self-defence training changes participants’ experiences of, and responses to, lived vulnerability to interpersonal violence as seen through gender. Fieldwork for this thesis took place in both an eight-week women’s self-defence class and a twelve-week advanced (co-ed) self-defence class; taught by the same studio. Participants in these classes cultivated a variety of body-habits that will be explored in terms of training perception; control over one’s affective responses to threats; and control over aggressive/threatening situations as a whole.While other studies of self-defence featuring women tend to focus on describing the benefits of the practice for female survivors of sexual violence, this study is broader in scope. It examines how these benefits come about through a phenomenological analysis of the habits taken up in self-defence training, and it offers commentary on how gender norms are addressed, taken up, or challenged through the practice of self-defence.