Our purpose was, in an analogy with Young’s (1980) ‘throwing like a girl’, to investigate what it means to learn ‘to fight like a girl’ and if there is a feminine fighting style evident among women karate elite athletes. We adopt a critical feminist position, taking inspiration from the work of Iris Marion Young on the feminine within physical pursuits such as throwing or fighting like a girl, and Nyberg’s contributions to the development of learning theories in physical education and sport.

Karate, organized by weight categories, has room for different body types. Starting with Young’s (1980, 144) writing, ‘one can nevertheless sensibly speak of a general feminine style of body behaviour and movement’, we described main features for each female weight. Such description allowed the observation of general characteristics of the fighting styles. We structured findings in first, ‘fighting like a girl’, presenting the analysis of the criteria, and second, ‘specificities of girls’ embodied knowing in movement’, focusing on movement capability and embodied learning as background for the learning and development of fighting styles (Nyberg 2015; 2021).

Regarding the analysed criteria, Use of space, expansive male movements, and restricted female movements make the first set trying to say that women fighters present inferior performance in comparison to men fighters. The comparisons are constant. We, however, neither agree with the inferiority that mainly karateka men attribute to women, nor consider the comparison itself worthwhile. Social burdens count for female and male resourcefulness, the former being given a position of object in a wide range of environments, and the latter of subject. Considering the normative context of karate, women could keep a position of self-consciousness about their bodies and ways to move diminishing their possibilities for performance, while men could build their embodied awareness relatively more easily (Mason 2018; Standal and Bratten 2021).

A second set of criteria Less risk taking, less aggressive, and difficulty in complex time-gesture coordination can be summarised to a matter of perspective. This is so that often athletes and coaches present opposite views about same issues. For example, women athletes consider themselves to be aggressive, while for coaches that should be highly improved.

Less projection work, sweeps, melee work was the third set of criteria, since women are considered by coaches to present a natural inability to perform these complex movements. Traditional martial pedagogy (Cynarsky, Obodynsk, and Zeng 2012) proposes the achievement of an elevatedmoral level through the development of the character of practitioners (Funakoshi 2003). However, in the gender binary organization followed by this pedagogy, men and women correspond to different places in terms of morality. Once the environment is built on hierarchy and a stream of tradition that is passed on, teachings received are going to be retransmitted with priority over formal pedagogy. Then, the common position given to women in the field, that of inability to perform some movements is spread and passed on, and (often) embodied by the women.

A fourth set of criteria, tactical work, more careful and assertive, do the basics necessary to score, showed different perspectives. Coaches tend to consider that women ‘think too much’ to carry out good tactical work, and athletes understand they are very attentive and this is a good thing. This presents itself as part of social-karateka construction, building women fighters normatively following the traditional martial pedagogy, but expecting them to perform non-normatively. It seems to be of fundamental importance to achieve embodied self-knowledge (Standal and Bratten 2021) in order to develop movement capability (Nyberg 2015) and be sure of the person’s own potentialities in a mixture of resisting and giving in.

This paper refers to a part of a broader study. We have carried out an ethnography project with autoethnographic elements. For the specific content reported here, we have carried out a video analysis in order to observe and analyse the gendered martial-sportive movement learning and performance of women elite karate fighters. We developed a series of criteria to carry out this task supported by the literature, coaches’ perspectives and athletes’ views. We used these criteria qualitatively to describe and discuss the fighting styles of the women, looking for the obvious and not so obvious aspects of combat in karate from a gender perspective. We have interviewed twice each both the women’s Spanish Olympic karate athletes team and their male coaches in preparation for the Tokyo Games 2020 (2021). Participants in the study reported here included ten women practitioners of kumite, the modality within karate that corresponds to the fight and is organized in weight categories, and four men coaches. For this analysis, their interviews were considered as well as 20 videos of the women athletes displaying, according to their own judgements, their best athletic performances. They were asked to send us two videos in competitions, and they did so.

In karateka environment, to fight like a girl means, for men practitioners, not only to fight differently due to social feminine construction of girls as Young explains but also to keep the childish condition of a girl through life and not be able to throw the opponent at all. For them, to fight like a girl means inferior performance in comparison with men. However, for us, it means ‘to fight’, not just on the mat. The perpetual comparisons between male and female sport position the former hierarchically higher when the comparison itself is unworthy, promoting a feeling of superiority on an unequal basis, supported on a traditional and normative pedagogy. Regarding a fighting style, there is a feminine way of fighting, but only with generalized characteristics, since there is a rich plurality of styles. The gendered embodiment, cultivated throughout life, cannot be easily annulled. Even though women are magnificent in the execution of karate techniques, they perform under both sportive and traditional martial pedagogy that they are taught, scenarios where the binary conception of gender is hegemonic and severely challenges them. Notwithstanding, while karateka women face several difficulties to perform in the traditional and normative karate environment, they challenge the environment too by being there. The very beginning of karate is narrated as being a way of resistance (White, 2014). Men started to fight to defend their lives or property. Currently, perhaps it can be said that women assumed this position, fighting to resist, discovering ways of resisting domination. Even though they are often invited to leave the martial-sportive field, their action of remaining is creating space, no matter how slow the process. This picture gives a historical perspective, where the structure as much as the agents, once we keep fighting, may be redesigned, hopefully in a more just way.

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