Real Knockouts: The Physical Feminism of Women's Self-Defense by Martha McCaughey

Real Knockouts: The Physical Feminism of Women's Self-Defense by Martha McCaughey.

New York: New York University Press, 1997, 270 pp. $19.00 paper.

Martha McCaughey introduces herself as a pioneer. She is the first person to write about women's self-defense and feminism as a scholar, a feminist, and a participant-observer. She notes that feminist academics don't know how to shoot someone or kick them in the jaw, nor do teachers and students of self-defense read Judith Butler, Catherine McKinnon, or Michel Foucault. As a participant in all these worlds, as a self-defense student and teacher, martial artist, feminist activist, and women's studies professor, I commend her efforts, but I find this book contradictory. McCaughey convincingly argues that self-defense can potentially challenge rape culture. She discusses a broad range of self-defense classes and conveys the perspectives of students and teachers alike, information that rarely makes its way into academia. Yet the book sensationalizes women's use of physical force and too often equates feminism with post-structuralist academic feminist theory. When she calls for feminism to rethink its assumptions about women's bodies, she is clearly referring to academic theorists, not to activists in the self-defense, anti-rape, and anti-domestic violence movements.

McCaughey spent more than 120 hours participating in a broad range of self-defense classes, including Model Mugging (padded attacker classes), courses at martial arts dojos...