by Manon Soavi

Part 2: The Path of the Dragon

Part 1 available here

In her book The Power of Mothers, Fatima Ouassak reminds us that there is nothing to expect from the authorities in power, that ‘we must become political subjects, rediscover our dragon power. Because our power to make the world is immense. That’s why it’s been taken from us.’ ‘It is our resistance that we must pass on.’ ¹

Let us become dragons, let us become ReSisters! This brilliant play on words underlines the fact that it is possible to Resist as Sisters, as local ReSisters groups around the world are doing on food security, militarism, pollution, reproductive rights and land distribution.

Let us use the power of the concept of Reclaim – reappropriation/rehabilitation/reinvention – one of the most powerful tools of ecofeminists. This gesture of reappropriating and modifying the subject, and at the same time being transformed by it. Martial arts were not created by gods, they all evolved!

‘A permanent, unfinished creation’: this is, incidentally, how aikido creator Morihei Ueshiba considered his art at the end of his life. He himself had synthesised in aikido a lifetime of martial and ascetic practices much older than himself.

We also need to break down the rivalry between women that favours men, as some Olympic woman athletes have done by openly supporting their losing opponents. ReSisters support and inspire each other. From those of the past, like Édith Garrud’s jujitsuffragettes², to those of today. MMA woman champion Djihene Abdellilah has turned her passion into a tool for women’s emancipation. In China, feminists are reclaiming Wing Chun³. In Mozambique, young women are inspired by their women’s boxing team, The Powerful Ones⁴. Finally, in Bolivia, the woman descendants of the Aymara and Quechua indigenous women, the Cholitas, dressed in their traditional skirts, have become figures of rebellion through mountaineering, skateboarding and wrestling.

This ReSisters and reclaim spirit inspired me to create women-only aikido sessions. A year after its creation, I can see that the non-mixed nature of the sessions removes a major barrier for female beginners and increases the sense of sisterhood in the dojo. In six months, the number of women who came for a trial session quadrupled and a third of them continued to practice.

Changing the rules

Rather than hiding behind the idea of equality, which is de facto protection of the status quo, let us take a fair approach that recognises unequal starting points and gives everyone a real chance in the world of sport.

A simple example comes from a small football club in the south-east of England.

Not content with having introduced equal pay between its men’s and women’s teams since 2017, the Lewes club is now going a step further with its See Us As We Are campaign, because ‘women footballers need their rules monitored, dark shorts to play in, extra coaching to build their confidence (they’ve been told they can’t play since they were little) [and] shoes that fit women (otherwise they’re prone to injury because of the angle between the knee and hip).’ They need ‘physiological and nutritional support and training programmes based on the female body, not on the male game.’ ⁵

Ultimately, ‘The initiative also invites the football industry to recognise the differences in culture and values between men’s and women’s football, and to not just try to squeeze women’s football into the broken mould of the men’s game.’ It ‘asks for the time, space and freedom to allow women’s football to develop according to its own emerging characteristics’. ⁶

Another example is the balance established in my aikido school⁷, which owes nothing to chance. There are 60% of women, and they have the highest responsibilities, including teaching. Régis Soavi sensei has been working towards this goal since the 1980s. To encourage the emergence of women and maintain this fragile balance in the dojos, everything is important: the way he teaches, the priorities he sets, the atmosphere, the attention. And intransigence in the face of macho behaviour.

Creating a vision

A reclaim requires profound change. Activist author Starhawk has written that magic is creating a vision. This vision gives us the courage to change the world and move towards a different kind of society⁸. In order to create a broad and positive vision of sport, the Move her Mind study proposed redefining sport as an activity that involves the body in movement, with a general sense of well-being, regardless of level or goal.

This more open vision puts competition back in its (small) place. Indeed, 96% of women participate in an activity primarily for their physical and mental health⁹. In amateur football, a study¹⁰ shows that winning a title is the least important aspect of a match for 82% of male and female players. In aikido, it is the state of mind (24%), the martial aspect (24%) and the absence of competition (21%)¹¹ that stand out among woman practitioners. That is why our school has chosen to operate without ranks, so as not to reproduce the war of egos they entail and the damaging oppression that goes with hierarchical respect in too many clubs.

For my part, I would like to convey a vision of aikido as a transformative power, a practice that is a link between everything we have artificially separated. To reconcile with oneself, to position oneself with one’s body. Aikido can be this path of sensitivity that makes perceptible what weaves together the human and non-human worlds.

Having a partner is the great richness of aikido. We need to enter into a relationship and find in our bodies, through our gestures, a self-affirmation that does not crush the other. Instead of turning violence against the other, we must try to build another possible relationship outside the field of predation. This takes the conflict situation out of the narrow confines of destructive confrontation. Otherness is part of life; to eliminate it completely is a dictatorship nightmare. Aikido teaches us how to live together despite and with conflict. With humans and non-humans.

Performing without destroying yourself

Imbued with a certain masculine idea of what is rational and what is profitable, we continue to inherit toxic ways of learning. Perhaps we need to take a step back, remove our blinkers and draw inspiration from other cultures that experience physical activity in a much less harmful way.

Following the Ayurvedic tradition, Indian women’s health educator Sinu Joseph¹² deplores the fact that ‘[m]odern day sports training push athletes to exceed their limit, assuming that this is how endurance is built’. She quotes a master of Kalaripayattu, an age-old martial art, as saying that ‘“[t]he exercises […] should be done only for 50% of that person’s capacity. Whereas in modern sports, if he can run 1 km, we make him run till he gets exhausted. In Kalaripayattu […] [we] bring the entire body to a stage where he/she can perform without getting exhausted. But, we do not begin by forcing the child to keep running till they exhaust themselves out.”’. The holistic aspect is striking in the Indian arts, which prescribe a certain diet and exercises, massages with specific oils, listening to biological cycles, etc.

It is important to review the concept of performance and endurance from this perspective. To value adaptation, continuity and, why not, small steps, instead of always long, hard and exhausting training sessions. Djihene Abdellilah points out that boxing sparring should not account for more than 10% of the preparation, which ‘is based on strategy, technique and adequate physical and mental preparation. […] What builds real warriors is not brutality, but mastery and precision.’ ¹³

In our aikido dojos, everyone comes at their own rhythm, but we offer daily practice. The sessions last an hour and a quarter, and the idea is not to do a lot of effort at once, but rather to establish a rhythm where the practice ends up acting by “capillarity”. It is not very intense, but it is very sustained over time. Ecofeminist Ariel Salleh describes this rhythm, which is analogous to the way living organisms function, as ‘enduring time’ ¹⁴. A cyclical temporality, like biological rhythms, which in the long term maintains the balance of the body in a much more enduring way.

Rehabilitating cycles

Cycles are only timidly beginning to be taken into account in the training of top-level woman athletes, but are far from being integrated into amateur practice. We can go even further by reversing the perspective. Look at cycles as an opportunity, after all. Menstruation is considered the fifth vital sign¹⁵ after blood pressure, temperature, pulse and respiratory rate. It reflects our state of health and offers a window into the proper functioning of many internal dynamics. Even better it contributes directly to our health, as the hormones produced by the ovaries perform an impressive number of useful functions for the cardiovascular, nervous and metabolic systems. Progesterone has an anti-depressant effect, contributes to breast health, and is essential for bone formation.¹⁶

Cycles are influenced by many factors: physical, emotional, psychological, cultural and socio-economic. A healthy menstrual cycle is not only a sign of good health, but also an indication of the quality of our close environment. This is clearly seen in sport, where some female athletes, because of the deleterious culture in which they develop, use amenorrhoea as proof of sufficient training and as a guarantee of their strength. But instead, this signal must be heard: training is too hard and the body is starting to break down. Men, who do not receive this signal, are therefore more prone to overtraining, which can lead to permanent damage.

Menopause should also no longer be a shameful taboo for those who go through it. With great humour, Élise Thiébaut explores the menopause, its setbacks and its joys, reminding us that it is not an illness, but rather a more or less harmonious dance, and sometimes also a trial. She concludes wisely: ‘I wish we could pay more attention to the subtle vibrations that speak of the importance of the sensitive, the spiritual, the invisible in our lives. What the menopause sometimes inflicts on us, in a modern world disconnected from natural cycles, where we are constantly asked to swear to our computer that we are not robots, we are now inflicting it on the Earth. Its hot flashes and our own seem to be condemning us to a final catastrophe. I believe, on the contrary, that the profound acceptance of who we are will allow us to give birth together to other forms of society, other ways of living together, linked to ancient and future knowledge.’ ¹⁷

Regaining our bodies

As Françoise d’Eaubonne said, we need practices that bring us back to the fact that we have a body, powerful and beautiful no matter what.

Beyond the sabotage of the pyramid of oppression and the anger against violence, there is the essential question of regaining the body. It is not “only” a matter of access to sport, or even of equality, but of the denial of the body, which is the loss of vitality and contact with reality. Human beings have not always been so uprooted, so devastated within themselves, so doubtful of their own sensation, their own intuition.

Let us re-appropriate these martial arts, these sports, from which we have not always been excluded¹⁸. Together we can revolutionise them.

Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères

Manon Soavi

Article by Manon Soavi published on 15 Sept. 2024 on Élise Thiébaut‘s Mediapart blog

1. 1. Fatima Ouassak, La Puissance des mères [The Power of Mothers], août 2020, pub. La Découverte (Paris), p. 23 & al.
   2. Lisa Lugrin and Clément Xavier, Jujitsuffragettes, les Amazones de Londres [Jujitsuffragettes, the Amazones of London], 2020, pub. Delcourt (Paris)
   3. see 闯 Chuang’s blog, ‘Study the crotch-kick & use it for self-defense against sexual harassment’, 12 Jul. 2017 (original article in Chinese, 24 Apr. 2017)
   4. cf. Sandrine Mouchet, Boxeuses au Mozambique. Sur le ring pour sortir du K-O [Woman Boxers in Mozambique. In the Ring to Get Out of the Knockout], 18 Jan. 2020, pub. on French digital media Àblock! [PumpedUp!]
   5. Caroline Criado-Perez, Invisible Women: See Us As We Are, 2 Sept. 2024, Substack
   6. Lewes launch ‘See Us As We Are’ shirts for pre-season, 19 Jul. 2024, Lewes Football Club website
   7. the Itsuo Tsuda School
   8. see Starhawk, Dreaming The Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics, 1982, 1988, 1997, Beacon Press (Boston)
   9. Move Her Mind 2023 study
   10. Michael Moynihan, ‘Women Are Not Little Men’ — how sports science is finally changing with the times, 25 Oct. 2019, Irish Examiner website
   11. Women’s Commission of the French Aikido and Budo Federation 2019 Report, available online
   12. Sinu Joseph, Sports and Menstruation: Exploring Indigenous Knowledge, 19-22 Nov. 2021, Indica today (originally published in Oct.-Nov. 2016 on IndiaFacts)
   13. Djihene Abdellilah, Arrêtons de normaliser la violence dans l’entraînement sous couvert de formation de guerrières [Let’s Stop Normalising Violence in Training Under the Guise of Training Women Warriors], 1 Sept 2024, LinkedIn
   14. Ariel Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics, Chap. 9 ‘A Barefoot Epistemology’, ‘Grounded Solidarity’, 1997 & 2017, Zed Books (London), pp. 203–210. [The concept is actually attributed (see p. 202) to French thinker Georges Gurvitch.]
   15. see Chris Sweeney’s 10 Sept. 2019 post on Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health website
   16. cf. Menstruations en santé: un signe vital ! [Healthy Menstruation: a Vital Sign!], 17 Dec. 2020, Réseau québécois d’action pour la santé des femmes [Women’s Health Action Network of Quebec]
   17. Élise Thiébaut, Ceci est mon temps [This Is My Time], 2024, pub. Au diable vauvert (Vauvert, France), p. 238
   18. Adrienne Mayor, Les Amazones. Quand les femmes étaient les égales des hommes [The Amazons. When Women Were the Equals of Men], 2017, pub. La Découverte (Paris)
   19. Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères, 1985, Beacon Press (Boston), p. 89 (1^st ed. in French: 1969, pub. Les Éditions de minuit (Paris), pp. 126–127). [The French word “guérillères” is the plural feminine of “guériller”, a neologism evoking both “guerrier” and “guérillero” – warrior and guerilla fighter.]