Do You Hit Women?
In Do You Hit Women? I wanted to explore the strengths and limitations of my/the female body. I invited a male opponent to participate in a Kick-Boxing sparring/performance. I wished to raise questions relating to consent, boundaries and sex segregation in sports, and challenge the social taboo of violence against women by adding the factors of consent, sports rules, and a predetermined time and space for it to happen.
Do You Hit Women? is about gendered bodies and their abilities. Is it OK for a man to fight a woman? What are the boundaries of consent? What are the boundaries of violence?
Thank you to Alex Channon for writing this inspiring paper that I’m quoting from.
“Hitting women, then, becomes the physical expression of men’s re-worked gender habitus, forged through the shared histories of men and women learning how to fight together, and therein learning to engage with one another outside of the bounds of typical, patriarchal gender norms.”
Performed at
Tempting Failure festival of performance in London (2018) under the title Do You Hit Girls? and Mooring the Docs in Amsterdam (2021).