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Sharp Spear, Crystal Mirror
Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 312 pages (1998) Recommended w/reservation Sharp Spear, Crystal Mirror is an attempt to illuminate the significance of fighting arts for women in general. Through a series of participant interviews, Hoppe constructs a narrative exploring the ways in which women have conceptualized the effect martial arts have had on their understanding of assertiveness, aggression, violence and bodily integrity. The account is limited in several ways. The author's experience with T'ai Chi Ch'uan permeates all the interviews and causes her to favor explanations that resonate with what she refers to as "soft styles"-meaning those that involve minimal sparring or forceful bodily contact. The women are also primarily middle-aged or older. Although this allows them to give a fuller account of women's experience because of their many years of practice, the ability to generalize their experience for all women is limited. This limitation is useful in that the timeframe for the initial experience of many of the interviewees-1970s and '80s-reflects a huge increase of women onto the sport, physical activity, and martial arts scene in America. The book's main contribution to the limited collection of literature chronicling women's experience in martial arts (as unique from men's) is precisely that it captures the experience of women who matured during the feminist movement of the 1960s and who experienced a paradigm shift that prompted them to seek out martial arts as a vehicle for understanding the integration of body, mind and spirit. I would consider the narratives as minimally useful for explaining the contemporary experience of most women, but important to quantifying the difficulties faced by the pioneering generation of women in martial arts practice in America. Annotated by: Erin Bingham (April 2001)
Martial Arts: Aikido | Arnis | Judo | Jujitsu | Karate | Kendo | Kung Fu/Wushu | Taekwondo | Taijiquan | other martial art: Capoeira and Naginat Topics: biography | history | self-defense | women studies | |
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