Punching Back: Gender, Religion and Belonging in Women-Only Kickboxing 9781800736900

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1 A PLACE FOR US Neighbourhood and Nation in a Kickboxing Gym
CHAPTER 2 PUNCHING, KICKING AND BELONGING THROUGH LEARNING TOGETHER
CHAPTER 3 CRAFTING GENDERED SUBJECTIVITIES IN KICKBOXING
CHAPTER 4 TO FIGHT OR NOT TO FIGHT Religious Sensibilities in Sports
CHAPTER 5 FIGHTING YOUR WAY IN Competitive Kickboxing against the Odds
CONCLUSION
REFERENCES
INDEX

Citation preview

PUNCHING BACK

NEW ANTHROPOLOGIES OF EUROPE: PERSPECTIVES AND PROVOCATIONS Series Editors: Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University Melissa L. Caldwell, UC Santa Cruz The anthropology of Europe has dramatically shifted ground from its emergence in descriptive ethnography to the exploration of innovative theoretical and methodological approaches today. This well-established series, relaunched by Berghahn Books with a new subtitle, invites proposals that speak to contemporary social and cultural theory through innovative ethnography and vivid description. Topics range from migration, human rights and humanitarianism to historical, visual and material anthropology to the neoliberal and audit-culture politics of Schengen and the European Union. Volume 5 Punching Back: Gender, Religion and Belonging in Women-Only Kickboxing Jasmijn Rana Volume 4 The Pursuit of Pleasurable Work: Craftwork in Twenty-First-Century England Trevor H.J. Marchand Volume 3 Bigger Fish to Fry: A Theory of Cooking as Risk, with Greek Examples David E. Sutton Volume 2 Vertiginous Life: An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen Daniel M. Knight Volume 1 Modernity and the Unmaking of Men Violeta Schubert

PUNCHING BACK Gender, Religion and Belonging in Women-Only Kickboxing

 Jasmijn Rana

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 Jasmijn Rana

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rana, Jasmijn, author. Title: Punching back : gender, religion and belonging in women-only kickboxing / Jasmijn Rana. Description: First Edition. | New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Series: New Anthropologies of Europe: Perspectives and Provocations ; 5 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022028510 (print) | LCCN 2022028511 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800736894 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800736900 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Kickboxing--Netherlands. | Sports--Religious aspects--Islam. | Muslim women--Conduct of life. | Self-realization in women--Moral and ethical aspects. | Women martial artists--Netherlands. | Sports for women--Social aspects-Netherlands. | Sports and state--Netherlands. Classification: LCC GV1114.65 .R36 2023 (print) | LCC GV1114.65 (ebook) | DDC 796.81/7082--dc23/eng/20220825 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028510 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028511 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-689-4 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-690-0 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800736894

CONTENTS

 Acknowledgementsvi Introduction1 Chapter 1.  A Place for Us: Neighbourhood and Nation in a Kickboxing Gym

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Chapter 2.  Punching, Kicking and Belonging through Learning Together48 Chapter 3.  Crafting Gendered Subjectivities in Kickboxing

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Chapter 4.  To Fight or Not to Fight: Religious Sensibilities in Sports

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Chapter 5.  Fighting Your Way In: Competitive Kickboxing against the Odds118 Conclusion143 References150 Index166

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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rafting knowledge is a collective process. Without the help, trust and faith of many people and the support of several institutions, this book would not have been possible. First and foremost, I want to thank all the kickboxers that I have got to know over the last few years for letting me into their lives and sharing their stories and skills with me. There are two gyms, in particular, in The Hague that take centre stage in this book. Their owners, trainers and fighters welcomed me with a kindness and curiosity that shaped not only my kickboxing skills and identity, but also my theoretical deliberations. The gyms became places where I felt at home, found new sporting idols and created new friendships. I extend a heartfelt thankyou to all the women and girls in the women-only sessions I attended. My ­kickboxing adventure started in Amsterdam, but it also brought me to Rotterdam, Den Bosch, Rabat, Casablanca and other places where kickboxing families all warm-heartedly welcomed me in their gyms and at their tournaments. Without mentioning their real names, I am enormously grateful to all the kickboxers for letting me into their lives and sharing their stories with me. A large part of the empirical research for this book was supported by the Berlin Graduate School for Muslim Cultures and Societies (BGSMCS), which granted me a scholarship from the Excellence Initiative of the German Federal and State Governments. I am deeply grateful to Kai Kresse and Schirin Amir-Moazami at Freie Universität Berlin. Kai and Schirin enabled me to pursue my research on my own terms, while gently nudging me in the right direction. The long talks, critical feedback, and academic and personal guidance shaped this book and my anthropological approach in invaluable ways. I can only pay you back by paying it forward: I hope to mentor young scholars as you have mentored me. I would like to thank Jutta Schmidbauer for always being there and ensuring Berlin became a home for me. I would



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also like to thank all my other colleagues at the Berlin Graduate School for Muslim Cultures and Societies and at Freie Universität Berlin, but especially Rosa Castillo Cordillera and Jasmin Mahazi: thank you for your friendship and advice, but also for your hospitality when I needed a place to stay. This book builds on older relationships too. The first seeds of this research date back to 2008, when I was working at the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM). I want to thank Annelies Moors for believing in me. I am enormously grateful for your support and advice, which led to a research fellowship at the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research, supported by FORUM, Institute for Multicultural Affairs. During the short time I spent at the University of Amsterdam, I worked with amazing people. I want to thank Vincent de Rooij, Francio Guadeloupe, Niko Besnier, the late Gerd Baumann and my then fellow researchers Vanessa Vroon and Arzu Ünal for supporting and helping shape my research project. I also want to thank Imagine IC, where I developed the project ‘Chicks, Kicks and Glory’ and where I first experienced the importance of sharing untold stories in the field of cultural heritage. Marlous Willemsen, Tuğba Özer and Danielle Kuijten were, at that time, the heart of the organization, which made for such an inspirational workplace. Thank you for your friendship! I wrote this book while working as an assistant professor at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. I am blessed to work with so many supportive, creative scholars. I feel fortunate to be working together to build this space, where, instead of a politics of competition, an ethics of care is actively cultivated. Many colleagues have read and commented on parts of this book, discussed its arguments during seminars, and have kept my spirits high while I have been working on it. I want to thank Peter Pels, Anouk de Koning, Annemarie Saumels, Irene Moretti, Wiebe Ruijtenberg, Siyun Wu, Igor Boog and Elsa Charlety for commenting on chapters, and Mark Westmoreland, Ratna Saptari, Andrew Littlejohn, Federico de Musso, Zane Kripe, Tessa Minter, Suzanne Naafs, Bart Barendregt, John Boy, Sabine Luning, Erik de Maaker, Erik Bähre, Ilse Prins, Louise van Gent and many others for all forms of support and your overall collegiality. In anthropology, sport remains a niche field. I am grateful for the amazing sport scholars that helped me navigate this world by sharing work in writing and through presentations. Agnes Elling, Ester Wisse, Jacco van Sterkenburg and Kathrine van den Bogert helped me ground my work in the field of sports in the Netherlands. Alex Channon, Dan Burdsey, Thomas Carter and Sean Heath welcomed me at the University of Brighton and expanded my worldviews. Samie Artie and Samaya Farooq Samie introduced me to the feminist postcolonial approach in sports that I so greatly yearned for and

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from which I learnt so much. Stanley Thangaraj read parts of this book and helped me find my voice. I am grateful to the series editors Michael Herzfeld and Melissa Caldwell for supporting this book, three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback and Tom Bonnington at Berghahn Books for guiding me through this publication process. Friends and colleagues have influenced me profoundly on both personal and professional levels, by reading my work, listening to my presentations and engaging in discussions. I thank Paul Mepschen, Radhika Gupta, ­Cristiana Strava, Merve Kayıkçi, Sertaç Sehlikoglu, Adnan Hossain, Shivant ­Jhagroe, Markus Balkenhol, Sinan Çankaya, Tillman Heil, Damani Partridge, Esra Özyurek, Duane Jethro, Mihir Sharma, Kristine Krause, Kim Knibbe, Rachel Spronk, Marina de Regt, Ina Keuper, Tine Davids, Filipa Oitaven, Roxane Kroon, Yvette Kopijn, Nancy Jouwe, Garjan Sterk, Wayne Modest, Amal Alhaag, Hester Dibbits, David Kloos, Charles Hirschkind, Martijn de Koning and Fouzia Outmany. A special thank-you from the bottom of my heart goes to my colleague-turned-friend Jessica Alice Rivers – who continuously offered brilliant suggestions, improved my English, provided support and demonstrated her Brazilian jiu-jitsu chokeholds when necessary. I am no one without my family and friends. To my friends Irene, Valerie, Sarah, Lisette and Coosje: I’m so thankful that even when time passes too quickly, I can always count on your love. Thank you for keeping me sane with runs, swims, dinners, museum visits and phone calls. I want to thank my mother for raising me the way she did and teaching me that there are always at least seven solutions to every problem; and Mimuna, Remy, Tarik, Wilma, Lina, Dani, Skander, Tosca, Senza, Reva, Ramses, Barbara, Ali, Selma, Jan, Zeno, Cas, Dries, Sara, Ria and Dave for showing me the important things in life. My partner in all that life has to give, my dearest John: I could not have done this without you. You planted the seed for this book project in my head about fifteen years ago and saw me through all the different phases of it with patience, care and commitment. Your emotional and intellectual support is invaluable. With you, it is all worthwhile. I am grateful to the following journals and publishers for allowing me to use portions of publications in this book. Parts of this book originally appeared on a smaller scale in the following publications, but this book offers other ethnographic additions and new analyses. Rana, Jasmijn (2022). ‘Muslim Women and Self-Improvement: Secular and Religious Sensibilities in Dutch Women-Only Kickboxing Gym’, American Ethnologist 49(2), 191–203.



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Rana, Jasmijn (2014). ‘Producing the National, Healthy Citizen: Participation in Ladies-Only Kickboxing Training’, Etnofoor 26(2), 33–48.

INTRODUCTION

 The first time in my life that I delivered a punch to someone’s face, Zaynab was on the receiving end.1 It was in a gym located on the second floor of an old office building on the outskirts of The Hague, the Netherlands. I trained with mostly Muslim Moroccan-Dutch women in a ‘women-only’ kickboxing class. We gathered there three times a week, between the 6 pm children’s and the 8 pm men’s training sessions. Zaynab lived just a five-minute walk away from the gym, some of us came from adjoining neighbourhoods and some had to travel for half an hour just so they could exercise for one hour with their peers and friends. After an aerobic warm-up and extensive stretching, the bulk of the training session consisted of paired technique training with pads and other props. The final fifteen minutes of training were reserved for sparring: practising fighting without intending to hurt one’s opponent too much. Nazira, the young mother with whom I had partnered for the first f­ orty-five minutes, decided, as usual, to look for a different partner for sparring. Her sparring does not include punches to the face, because she believes it is inappropriate by Islamic standards. She walked to the other side of the gym and joined the pupils with similar motivations or insufficient training for full-contact sparring. I had been kickboxing for more than a  year and had  not done full-contact yet. But that day, I was motivated to test and improve my kickboxing skills. This gym was relatively new to me: I had joined it for my field research two months earlier. With 30-year-old Salima and 18-year-old Zaynab, both of whom removed their headscarves for this training session, I formed a small minority of sparring partners who were in agreement about punching opponents in the face. The three of us took turns in sparring rounds of one minute.   ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry’, I said, mumbling because of the mouth guard I was wearing. We had barely started the fight, but when my glove touched her nose, I felt my heartbeat throughout my entire body. ‘Whoa!’ Zaynab exclaimed, taking a step back. Then she flashed her distinctive grin and I remembered that this is what we were supposed to be doing. It was my automatic apology that was out of place. Zaynab approached me again and we continued the short fight even more intensely than before. The punch in the face was a sign for Zaynab to take it up a notch. Her fighting stance became more active. She moved forward and faster. Then, she landed several

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combinations of kicks and punches, one after another. To keep the fight moving, I did the same, giving it all I had until the buzzer went off. One minute had passed. Before that moment, I did not know how exhausting just one minute could be. Zaynab took off her gloves and wiggled her nose with one hand to ease the pain. She smiled and winked at me and said: ‘Don’t worry, next time I’ll get your pretty face.’

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he dominant scholarship on Muslim women in general and North-­ African and Turkish diasporas in particular often focuses exclusively on the veil and Muslim piety. Such myopia can result in essentialized, limited understandings of the lives of Muslim women. However, in the vignette above, we see something interesting taking place. In the Netherlands, girls and young women are increasingly active in kickboxing. While some girls and women join mixed-gender sessions, gender-grouped training has lowered the threshold for many women and girls to engage in sports, and martial arts and combat sports more particularly. With the instruction of a kickboxing teacher and co-gendered sporting interactions, the women learn how to punch, kick and spar. Women-only kickboxing classes are offered by kickboxing clubs known for their competitive fighters, including the gym owners and their trainers. The expertise of the trainers helps create a sporting space in which skills and a life-long passion for the sport are nurtured. There has been increasing interest in combat sports among both men and women, with more people dreaming of becoming professional fighters. Most participants in the women-only training sessions, however, join for purposes of leisure; some join for more serious exercise. Only a few have ambitions to become competitive fighters. Some girls live in the neighbourhood and go to school there, while some women started coming for their kids’ kickboxing practice and now stay an hour longer so they can exercise themselves. Most women have religious reasons for choosing to exercise in a space that is secluded: no men are allowed into the gym during these hours and the windows are blinded. The pleasure the women take in sport participation is part of their identity formation (Alter 1992; Rand 2012; Thangaraj 2015). Monographs on martial arts and combat sports are plentiful (e.g. Beauchez 2017; Rennesson 2012; Wacquant 2004), but women’s experiences are underrepresented, if not non-existent, and monographs on women’s sports ­often highlight overly femininized practices (e.g. Sehlikoglu 2021; Spielvogel 2003).2 This book challenges these heteronormative approaches to sports and gender by centring women’s practices of what is considered a masculine sporting culture. The young women and girls fulfil certain desires and enjoy certain pleasures through sport participation in kickboxing. The media and research reports often celebrate Muslim women’s participation in sports as a sign that they are now ‘empowering’ themselves and integrating into Dutch society. Those who do this type of reporting tend to focus on the barriers these women and girls have to overcome to participate



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in the first place (Rana 2017). This is largely due to the inherent juxtaposition between sport and religion, and the juxtaposition between Muslim women’s submission and Western women’s agency. In many ways, the Western (white) imagination of the Muslim woman has often been marked by physical weakness, submission and a lack of agency.3 As in the case of Muslim women and girls from the Maghreb in France, their piety is seen as a sign of oppression and racial difference (Beaman 2017; Keaton 2010). Various policy programmes have championed sports and kickboxing as a means of equipping Muslim women with the physical skill and power to protect and empower themselves. Sport is seen to empower Muslim women, but it also racializes them and Islam as governed by violent Muslim patriarchy, against which the fighting sports offer a defence. Muslim women’s participation in kickboxing is understood to be empowering, a view that rests on the belief that Muslim Moroccan-Dutch women are confined to religious dogma and are not allowed to partake in the quintessential secular activity of sport. Modern sport has long been positioned as a practice invented by ‘modern European’ civilizations, even though various forms of physical activity and sport have a long history in Muslim communities. Therefore, Muslim women who participate in sport are viewed as ‘breaking from tradition’. It is not merely that sport participation was initially depicted as forbidden; the narrative shifted to portray Muslim women as not having the agency and strength to participate in sport under the same conditions as non-Muslim women (with religious dress codes being just one thing used to racialize Muslim women). This stereotype presumes that M ­ uslim women are not already agentic beings and that Islam does not encourage women’s participation in (combative) sports. The implication is that Muslim women are lacking something that, through modern secular intervention, they can acquire. Although combat sports and self-defence training reportedly have an empowering effect on young women (Hollander 2018; McCaughey 1997, Speidel 2014), the framing of kickboxing as a means of empowerment and integration for Muslim women specifically is problematic. It presupposes a submissive, backwards, underdeveloped group of people who need to be transformed into secular, modern individuals. The juxtaposition of the secular, modern feminist woman and the religious, conservative, backwards woman cannot help us make sense of the articulations of secularity and religion in everyday practices. In the short fight described above, Zaynab and I, like all the other women kickboxing, negotiate how to play the game and determine what kickboxing means for us. We navigate belonging and non-belonging within this group of women, our respective ethnic and religious communities, and Dutch and European society. Headscarves are a conventional topic in discussions of the embodied practices of young Muslim women (e.g. Amir-Moazami 2011;

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Bracke and Fadil 2012; Moors 2009; Scott 2009). By contrast, my focus on young Muslim women’s engagement in sports enables us to think about different forms of self-realization. Their involvement in sports is another modality of everyday practices that sheds new light on the dynamics of secular and religious sensibilities. Muslims understand the choice to cover one’s hair as a sign of adherence to the faith. The media, politics and mainstream public opinion, however, often interpret the wearing of headscarves as a sign of women’s subordination. The freedom to choose is questioned, most extremely in the proposal to tax the wearing of headscarves4 and the recent ban on face veils (Moors 2009, 2018). The corporeal practice of kickboxing among Muslim women is, on the other hand, often celebrated by the majority of the public as a means of emancipation and empowerment, while some Muslims deem kickboxing a transgressive practice. Discussions on internet forums, Facebook groups and in the actual locker room demonstrate how the choice of kickboxing is imbued with understandings of whether violence is permissible, whether sports are permissible for women and what form of dress is appropriate for both men and women in kickboxing (Rana 2011). Unlike many other popular sports in the Netherlands that have not seen an increase in mass participation in ethnic minority communities, such as field hockey and tennis, combat sport has proved to be successful in drawing in ethnic minorities (Carrington 2013; Heiskanen 2012; van Sterkenburg and Knoppers 2004). Contemporary research alludes to the historical ‘­ethnic’ roots of combat sports as one explanation for their appeal (Heiskanen 2012).5 Kickboxing is an umbrella term for contact-sports based on kicking and punching, with several variations around the world, including ‘Dutch Kickboxing’ and ‘Muay Thai’ or Thai boxing. Both Dutch and Moroccan kickboxers are well represented among international champions in various competitions, which effects the popularity of the sport among Moroccan-Dutch youth in particular. It is only in recent times that young women and girls have begun taking up the sport for the purposes of leisure. Following their brothers and cousins to their gyms, where women-only classes became more common, young women availed of this opportunity to engage in recreational sports that allow them to craft different gendered subjectivities to the ones that both their families and the nation expect of them. Kickboxing has been a popular sport in the Netherlands for decades and Muslim women’s engagement in kickboxing has recently doubled against the backdrop of national initiatives to promote and increase opportunities for Moroccan-Dutch and/or Muslim women to engage in kickboxing and other combat sports (Frelier and Breedveld 2010). Punching Back takes the growing presence of young Muslim women in Dutch kickboxing as a point of departure to discuss how state projects



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use sports as vehicles to ‘integrate’, ‘empower’ or ‘modernize’ minorities, with the underlying assumption that they are ‘saving’ Muslim women ­(Abu-Lughod 2013; Morris and Spivak 2005). Although there is a growing body of literature on Muslim men and Muslim masculinities (Hossain 2019; Inhorn 2012; Thangaraj 2015), there is a lacuna when it comes to the leisure practices of Muslim women in Western contexts. Punching Back engages with the voices, bodily practices and pleasures of Muslim Dutch-Moroccan women to highlight identity formation that involves dealing with various racializations, both local and global. As well as examining the ways in which the state manages its subjects and tries to ‘save Muslim women’, the book explores how young Muslim women navigate gender, religion and racialization to produce pious subjectivities through sports. I consider the various ways in which young girls incorporate the practice of kickboxing into their lives as a way of managing transnational connections during this time of the ‘global war on terror’ and rising Islamophobia. Their interest in the ‘masculine preserve’ (Theberge 1987) reveals how they realize their selves by becoming insiders in the social space of the gym. This is not the unilateral ‘empowering’ process leading to an emancipated, liberal self that sports policies aim for. Instead, the young women demonstrate a variety of ways of being active agents and creating positive selves. Their self-realization in the kickboxing gym cannot be seen as separate from their efforts to be a pious ­Muslima (Muslim woman).6 I examine how young Muslim women who kickbox disrupt Western European parameters of secularity and religiosity through their gendered agency. Their secluded, leisurely activity is liberating, but not in the ways outlined by government-sponsored women empowerment programmes. They do not view their involvement in the combat sport as a quest for cultural integration or emancipation from their Muslim communities, but rather as a way of practising both religious and secular forms of self-realization. This book critically examines how the cultural phenomenon of ­women-only kickboxing in so-called ‘disadvantaged neighbourhoods’ engages important aspects of representations at the intersection of religion, gender and race/ethnicity in the lives of Muslim women and girls. It argues that young Muslim women use the sporting culture of kickboxing as a way of reproducing, negotiating and contesting their racialized gender subjectivities. The focus on this very particular practice and population allows a more intimate account of people who have often been generalized through singular perceptions, reflections, interpretations and analyses of their existence. The stories, voices and journeys captured in this book facilitate a critical ­reflection on ‘integrationalist’ sports policies in Europe by demonstrating how ideas of empowerment, integration and citizenship are learned, mediated, negotiated and challenged through bodily training.

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How are embodied practices influenced by dominant discourses, policies and stories in the media about Muslim women’s bodies? How are notions of self and senses of belonging (re)produced in the process of acquiring bodily knowledge and the acquisition of skills? How are femininity and masculinity performed as part of, and as a challenge to, empowerment paradigms? What is the role of self-realization and self-cultivation in understanding Muslim sport practice? Punching Back presents a series of potential answers to these questions by describing and analysing ethnographically how desires and pleasures in sport practices fit and resist normative ‘empowerment’ expectations. In short, this book argues that the increasing number of Muslim women in sports gives rise to new ways of thinking about and understanding the lifeworlds of Muslim women in Europe, and it intends to disrupt current theories on learning, belonging and secularity. By centring women-only sports, personal projects of self-improvement are approached from the vantage point of a non-religious practice – kickboxing – while taking the religious pursuits of its practitioners seriously. The book draws on three years of immersive, experiential ethnographic research, including interviews and participant observation in multiple kickboxing gyms that offer women-only training sessions, to argue that kickboxing is taken up by young Muslim women and girls as part of processes of self-formation at the intersection of religion, gender and race/ethnicity. It offers a plane of citizenship that incorporates Muslim women, Islam, heterosexuality, gender expression and sport. It is a practice of cultural citizenship that challenges and exceeds normative expectations (Maira 2009; Thangaraj 2015). Thus, Zaynab and her peers, through their negotiations of how to participate in sports, how to fight in a sparring round, and their choice to fight at all, provide a window into how the boundaries of sports and leisure are created in relation to nation, gender, race/ethnicity, class and religion.

DEMOGRAPHY AS DESTINY? Young Moroccan-Dutch Muslim women are the most widely present group in women-only kickboxing. All of the young kickboxers we will meet in this book were born and raised in the Netherlands, and sometimes their parents were too. First- and second-generation migrants make up 24.7 per cent of all Dutch citizens (CBS 2019). Alongside the Surinamese, Dutch Caribbean and Turkish diasporas, Moroccan migrants and their (grand)children make up one of the largest minority groups in the Netherlands. While the Surinamese and Caribbean migration was an effect of Dutch colonialism, today’s Moroccan and Turkish minorities are the result of 1960s and 1970s labour migration. Most Moroccan migrants, from the Rif area, sought temporary



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work in the Netherlands and were referred to as gastarbeiders (guest workers) (Bouras 2013) because they were supposed to return to their home countries after their work contracts had come to an end. Instead, many settled in the Netherlands; the population of 24,000 in 1973 had grown to ­approximately 350,000 by 2011 (Bouras 2013). After Amsterdam and Rotterdam, The Hague is the third largest city in the Netherlands, with half a million residents. Although the Dutch population in general is ageing, this is not true of The Hague, which has become one of the country’s youngest cities. Young people (0 to 19-year-olds) now make up 18 per cent of its population (DHIC 2021). Of The Hague’s residents, 56 per cent are considered to have ‘a migration background’ (ibid.) and have long been officially categorized as ‘allochthone’. The categorization of citizens using the concepts of autochthony and allochthony – ­derived from ancient Greek and meaning respectively ‘from this soil’ and ‘from foreign soil’ – became increasingly popular in the 1990s (Geschiere 2009). ­Introduced as a substitute for ‘ethnic minorities’, the terms were meant to be neutral,7 but they were effectively a racializing measure that did not necessitate the use of racial terms (Wekker 2016). Allochthones were defined as either citizens who were born outside of the Netherlands or citizens who had at least one foreign-born parent. Subcategories further differentiated between ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ allochthones. But, in everyday usage, allochthone has ­become synonymous with non-Western allochthone, or even ­exclusively (children of ) ‘guest workers’ with Moroccan or Turkish, Muslim backgrounds (Geschiere 2009: 150). Paul Mepschen argues that the trope of autochthony ‘can be understood as a nostalgic cultural practice in and through which people shape a sense of self, place, and belonging’ (2016: 37), while allochthony serves to frame those who do not belong. Recent studies have revealed the essentializing and totalizing dichotomy’s further pitfalls, for ­example, when referring to white autochthone Muslim converts (Vroon 2014) and when seeking to understand religion and secularism in the ­Netherlands (Beekers 2021). The ambiguity of the terms and the effect of stigmatization has not gone unnoticed. In November 2016, the Dutch government agreed to no longer use the terms. Citizens are now categorized as ‘having a migration background’ and can be specified as ‘having a Moroccan/Turkish/etc. background’ (Bovens et al. 2016).8 However, this change does not change the politics of belonging, in which the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are constructed along the same imaginary differentiations (Yuval-Davis 2006) and can be understood as a continuation of the culturalization of Dutch citizenship (Ghorashi 2017). The development of cultural racism (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991) has been observed across Europe (Lentin and Titley 2011; Silverstein 2000; Vertovec 2011). This ‘culturalist turn’, marking the

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categorical shift in focus from ethnicity to culture and religion, includes a strong aversion towards Islam. Problems that were formerly addressed as a national minority problem were translated into a religious minority problem, whereby citizens with Turkish and Moroccan backgrounds were now addressed as Muslims (Baumann 1999). Moroccan and Turkish immigrants and their children were increasingly ‘discovered’ as Muslims (Sunier and Van Kuijeren 2010: 123). Roughly 5 per cent of the Netherlands’ total population of seventeen ­million people is Muslim (Maliepaard and Gijsberts 2012). Approximately 35 per cent of Muslims in the country have a Moroccan background and 35 per cent have a Turkish background. The country’s unease with Islam is arguably rooted in Dutch society’s rapid de-confessionalization in the 1960s. While religion had historically been central in processes of identification, the Dutch majority in the wake of the revolutionary social and cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s came to see itself as liberal, progressive and secular (Mepschen, Duyvendak and Tonkens 2010; van der Veer 2006).9 ­Religion – its traditions, institutions and authority – was increasingly d ­ epicted as backwards, while the freedoms gained in the 1960s, most notably in the public performance of sexual identity, became mainstream (van der Veer 2006).10 The growing visibility of Islam in the Netherlands thus led to secular discomfort.11 Since the events of 9/11 in the United States and the killing of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004 and right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002 in the Netherlands, anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic rhetoric has ­increased in the Netherlands, as it has in other European countries (­ Ewing 2008; Mepschen, Duyvendak and Tonkens 2010; Murray 2006; Pitcher 2009). Muslim minorities in the Netherlands are categorized as the ultimate ‘Other’ in Dutch society and they often have to cope with being pigeonholed as the ‘forever foreign’ who cannot assimilate into the Dutch way of life. The labels ‘Moroccan’ and ‘Muslim’ are frequently used interchangeably in negative public discourse. For instance, there is now an even stronger tendency to criminalize Moroccan-Dutch Muslim youth, especially men and boys (de Koning 2016b). Discrimination against Muslims has grown in recent years. In other Western nations, such as the United States, there has been a rise in discrimination against Muslims in the form of increased attacks and problematic media representations of Muslim men (Alsultany 2012; Beaman 2017; Rana 2011); however, there has been little engagement with the voices, stories and experiences of Muslim women (Karim 2009; Rouse 2004). The rise of this form of cultural racism, often termed anti-Muslim hatred or Islamophobia, is reflected in feelings of belonging that unmark secular whiteness by marking Muslim Dutch-Moroccans as bodies out of place (Douglas 2005; Thangaraj 2015). Polls showed that 45 per cent



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of Muslims felt ‘at home’ in the Netherlands before the murder of Theo van Gogh in November 2004; only 27 per cent felt that way in 2007 (Aouragh 2014: 362). Muslim subjectivities in the Netherlands are positioned within these politics of belonging.

THE MUTUALITY OF THE SECULAR AND THE RELIGIOUS Muslims in contemporary Europe have been subjected to state interventions that combine the regulation of race/ethnicity (integration) with the regulation of religion (secularism) (de Koning 2020). Western European secularism refers not only to the separation of church and state but also to ‘the re-articulation of religion in a manner that is commensurate with modern sensibilities and modes of governance’ (Mahmood 2009: 65).12 Current secularist discourse in Europe leans on public debates on Islam (e.g. Douwes and de Koning 2005; Sunier and Van Kuijeren 2010; van der Veer 2006) that cast Muslim practices as a danger to the European self (Bracke 2012; El-Tayeb 2011; Ewing 2008; Moors 2009). Several studies have focused their attention on the secular as an embodied mode of living (Bakker Kellogg 2015; Mahmood 2005a; Scott 2009). However, approaching the secular ‘through its shadows’ (Asad 2003: 16) has resulted in many studies of the formation of selves as religious subjects at religious sites, such as mosques. The gym as a site of focus qualifies as a secular space of modern self-fashioning (Guttmann 1988; Hirschkind 2011). The ‘non-religious’ space constitutes an embodiment of secularity through v­ arieties of physical practices. A women-only gym that specifically welcomes Muslim women contests the status quo of secularity. I examine how young Muslim women combine pious and secular sensibilities through women-only sports and reveal the intersection of women’s religious, ethnic and gendered subjectivities through emergent forms of embodied practice. The specific instantiation of secularity in the Netherlands, which fuses race and religion through integration governance (de Koning 2020; Korteweg 2017), led me to focus on how young Muslim women configure modern religiosity and personal autonomy in the space of the kickboxing gym. Muslim men are racialized as violent, dangerous and radicalized both in the Unites States (Bayoumi 2015; Garner and Selod 2015) and in Europe (de Koning 2020; Korteweg 2020). The racialization of Muslim men, however, does not occur in isolation. The counterpart trope in this discourse racializes Muslim women as passive dupes and the powerless victims of ­Muslim male tyranny. They are stereotyped as ‘the Muslimwoman’ (Abu‐Lughod 2016) who must be saved from her culture, religion and men. ­Women’s bodily practices are central in politicizing the relationship between the individual

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and society, and have become sites for contesting national, ethnic and religious identities and forms of belonging (Moors 2009).13 In the kickboxing gym, Zaynab and her friends shape their identities and their own sense of being Moroccan-Dutch Muslims through their engagement with the sport. Their participation in sports is understood as part of processes of ‘integration’ and ‘empowerment’, but little is known about the particularities of the performance of their sport identities. Although sport is often imagined as the ultimate site for assimilating foreign ‘Others’, the lives of these women showcase their agency and various practices of managing the complexities of diasporic life. They smash mainstream stereotypes of the submissive Muslim woman by choosing to partake in combat sports, while cultivating an ethical self by engaging with these sports in gender-grouped settings.

IMMIGRANT INTEGRATION AND SECULAR SPORTS Historically, sports have been a prime field for producing national citizenship. Since their emergence as separate and regularized types of activity in the mid-nineteenth century, sports have been associated with nationalist projects of integration and citizenship. At the root of the historical development of organized sports is discipline, largely because of the ­nineteenth-century doctrine of muscular Christianity, which emphasized asceticism, racial purity, masculinity, and action in the service of God, country and empire (Besnier and Brownell 2012). For many nation states, amateur and professional sports still serve to maintain the gender, sexual and ­racial order. How athletes develop and use their bodies has become a symbolic means of representing a nation and constructing a national identity (see Brownell 1995; Bufford 1993; Alter 1992). As will be elaborated on in chapter 1, the symbolic nature of sports has become increasingly visible in immigrant integration goals in recent years, as European nation states promote sports to encourage the cultural and social integration of minorities. Citizens from ethnic minorities have been particularly encouraged to participate in sports as a point of access for physical health, social bonding and belonging in society. In addition to highlighting the possibilities for physical, psychological and organizational self-development, the socio-integration value of sports has become a central tenet of sports policies, which contribute to a larger set of discourses on ‘immigrant integration’ that portray immigrants as racialized subjects (Korteweg 2017; de Koning 2020; Schinkel 2018). Immigrant integration is often presented as a break from previous multiculturalist policies, representing the enduring effect of coloniality in a postcolonial period



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(Silverstein 2004: 124) as a neocolonial form of knowledge (Schinkel 2018). The state’s attempts to regulate people implicitly question the citizenship and belonging of second- and third-generation migrants. As Wayne Modest and Anouk de Koning (2016) argue, this is part of ­‘anxious politics’, whereby Europe is imagined as a racially and culturally h ­ omogenous space that is under threat because of the intrusion of ­‘newcomers’ – both immigrants and refugees.14 In this discourse, the ordinary iconic figure of ‘the Moroccan youth’ (Koning and Vollebergh 2019) meets his woman counterpart of the oppressed Muslima. Hegemonic discourse on Muslim citizens in the Netherlands characterizes the Muslima, the ­Muslim woman, using the trope of Muslim women’s lack of autonomy (Moors 2018). Mainstream Dutch liberal society assumes a dichotomy ­between the secular/modern and the religious/backwards. This way of thinking is often implicit, but it is also explicitly expressed. For example, the former Dutch Minister of Health, Welfare and Sports delivered the ­prestigious Van Schoo lecture in 2016, which is published annually by Elsevier; in the lecture, e­ ntitled ‘The Paradox of Freedom’, Schippers claimed that M ­ uslim girls living in ‘certain’ neighbourhoods in The Hague were ­vulnerable and not truly free to wear whatever they wanted and choose their partners ­because of social pressure (Schippers 2016). She continued the long-standing othering of youth with migrant and Muslim backgrounds in Dutch ­society, pigeonholing them as foreigners living against the grain of the Dutch way of life. The neighbourhoods that Schippers alluded to are working-class, ‘multicultural’ neighbourhoods in The Hague. It is these neighbourhoods that house kickboxing gyms. Hockey fields, tennis courts and running tracks are to be found in more middle- and upper-class, white neighbourhoods. The way Schippers addressed ‘certain neighbourhoods’ is representative of a larger discourse in which the geographical unit becomes a symbol for immigrant populations, crime and deprivation. It is the neighbourhood and the neighbourhood resident that became the focus of integrationalist and secularist policies, and ‘integration-through-sports’ policies in particular. At the same time, young Muslim women embrace the neighbourhood as the space where practices of self-improvement through sports are realized. Schippers assumed that her audience would agree that Muslim women are in a subordinate position and lack agency. In questioning ‘whether they are really free’, she juxtaposes Muslim women and non-Muslim women, whose choices she cannot imagine to be anything other than autonomous. The view expressed by the minister in this lecture indicates a dominant, secular, liberal public understanding whereby white Dutch women’s emancipation is considered complete, but that of Muslim and/or migrant women is not.

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THE RHETORIC OF EMPOWERMENT Kickboxing has been a popular sport among Moroccan-Dutch youth for ­decades – its popularity is reflected in the number of national and international Moroccan-Dutch professional fighters and champions. More recently, the sport has been promoted to appeal to young girls and women from these communities. In mainstream media outlets, young Muslim women and girls taking up kickboxing are often celebrated as examples of feminist liberal agency and empowerment – a transformative force that allows them to be strong and dominant.15 Empowerment, a term that is used in multiple ways, can be as broad as ‘anything that makes women’s lives better’ (Connell 2010: 171) or as specific as developing a feminist consciousness that leads to agentic and internally motivated acts against collective oppression (Hill Collins 2009; Lorde 2012). In sport research, feminists have argued that sports can be empowering, ­especially sports that centralize force and power (Hall 1996; Theberge 2003). Considering gender embodiment is always embedded in practices of power (Davis 1997), the idea that increasing physical power can have empowering effects for an individual is understandable. Although the male body is commonly understood to be more powerful than the female body, feminists have been imagining a change in gender embodiment as a form of empowerment. Engaging in physical exercise (traditionally a male-­dominated pursuit), especially a practice that teaches strength and power, allows women to acquire traits typically associated with the physically strong in society. This is unsurprising, given that dominant notions of ‘masculine’ identity – both within and beyond the sporting context – were traditionally born of and compounded by images of strength, aggression and muscularity obtained in and through sport. The idea of physical empowerment implicitly relies on the notion of a hegemonic masculinity. Hegemonic masculinity, a term coined by R.W. Connell (1995), oppresses both men and women, who are forced to rank themselves according to this system. It implies that physical prowess and power are not only dominant and domineering traits, but that sport is a ­vehicle for obtaining power. Having power, as opposed to not having power, allows one to be empowered (read: to be strong, etc.). In this sense, women’s empowerment is about women gaining domineering traits that men are revered for possessing. This not only solidifies the link between strength, aggression and power, but also reaffirms ‘the centrality of the (physically strong) body’ in acquiring transformative power (Theberge 1987: 390). One could argue that empowerment enables women to have a form of masculinity, since masculinity cannot be equated with maleness and is not innate to the male body (Halberstam 1998). However, the number of women’s



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sports studies that engage with ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and demonstrate the ­opposite, the presence of an ‘emphasized femininity’ (Connell 1987), reveals that the gender binary, as well as patriarchal hierarchies, remain largely intact (Hargreaves 2004). The rhetoric of empowerment is therefore also challenged by sport scholars, as it spotlights individual success and ­obscures how dominant power hierarchies might be reproduced (Caudwell 2011; Hargreaves 2004; Velija, Mierzwinski and Fortune 2013). This book adds to this critical scrutiny of the rhetoric of empowerment by showing the unwanted side effects of this rhetoric when it is targeted at Muslim women in the Netherlands in particular. In the Netherlands, the English term ‘empowerment’ is mostly used when talking about women from minoritized communities (Boumans 2012); the implication is that they – in contrast to white communities and white women – lack power. The emphasis on empowerment, as a part of citizen participation, has been traced to the rise of neoliberalism, which accommodates both governmental intervention and withdrawal (Zandbergen and Jaffe 2014). The implication is that ethnic minority communities are ‘lacking’ something that, through Western intervention, they can acquire. The governmental tool of empowerment is therefore often criticized as a marketization of s­ocial identities and relations (Kamat 2003). Adam Wright (2012) argues that the empowerment paradigm legitimizes and reproduces neoliberal practices (such as responsibilization and self-esteem) and subjects and therewith conceals the subordination of actors. The promotion of empowerment through kickboxing presupposes a submissive, backwards, underdeveloped group of people who need to be transformed into modern, liberated and secular individuals. It is telling that in Dutch sports policies, the religious and ethnic backgrounds of young women and girls are the precondition to be recognized as in need of empowerment. The dichotomy of girls perceived as powerless and a powerful sport further fuels the assumption that kickboxing is a form of feminist agency for young Muslim women. The empowerment of young Muslim women is assumed to require physical force, which is not associated with other popular sports in the Netherlands, such as field hockey or tennis. Muslim girls and young women are assumed to be in need of the masculine characteristics of kickboxing, including the ability to endure and inflict pain, in order to defend and emancipate themselves. This reproduces ideas of Muslim women and girls as submissive subjects who lack physical power and agency and who are in danger or under threat. As with media reports about Muslim sportswomen more generally, representations of Muslim women in combat sports have fixated on their struggles to compete. Pakistani-British Ambreen Sadiq, reported to be one of Britain’s first Muslim women boxers, was often depicted as having had to ‘overcome

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opposition in her community’ (Gledhill 2010). In an article in The Telegraph, Ambreen was asked to talk about ‘what it’s like battling prejudice and racism from her community – and even her family’ (Sanghani 2014). Likewise, Bengali-British Ruqsana Begum, the current British woman atom-weight (48–50 kg) World Kickboxing Association Muay Thai champion and captain of the British Muay Thai team, must ‘break down’ (Badshah 2014) or ‘kick down’ barriers (Gubuan 2015), with details of her accomplishments being side-lined. Researchers also employ this rhetoric of barriers and challenges (e.g. Kleindienst-Cachay 2011; Pfister 2011). Although it is good that researchers wish to illustrate women’s agency in overcoming challenges, they all too often conclude that Muslim women’s experiences lag behind those of their ‘Western’ counterparts. There is also a singular narrative of overcoming oppression that flattens out their complex identity, their desires, their pleasures and their stories. Muslim women’s agency is celebrated only in so far as it confirms and solidifies the metanarrative that they are always controlled or always resisting being controlled (Ratna et al. 2018: 634). Such essentialist representations of Muslim sportswomen are as predictable as they are ubiquitous. Samaya Farooq Samie and Sertaç Sehlikoglu (2015) make the same point in their unpacking of the media representation of Muslim women at the 2012 London Games. That various media sources relied on and perpetuated discourses of fear and suspicion to transmit messages about the ‘strangeness’ of Muslim sportswomen illustrates the pervasiveness of negative thinking about Muslim women (ibid.: 14). Scholars also suggested that Muslim sportswomen lead a double life – ‘trapped’ between modernity and tradition, the global and the local (Hargreaves 1994: 91) – and that Muslim sportswomen are at least able to strike a ‘balance between two cultures’ (Kleindienst-Cachay 2011: 102). Both of these common tropes in sports research create opposite poles and do not account for diasporic life, which involves managing many cultural terrains and transnational connections. This essentialist depiction of immigrants and Muslim women in particular as ‘lagging behind’ is inherent in sports policies, the sports media and Western public perceptions more generally. A tenet of sports policies, and therefore also sports studies, is that participation in sports is the end goal – and, particularly in the context of immigrants and Muslim citizens, the final stage of emancipation. Non-participation of any kind by immigrant and Muslim citizens is therefore perceived as ‘backwards’. Sport participation is seen as a performance of this universal (white) womanhood and progressive modernity. This temporal discourse according to which Muslims are ‘backwards’ or ‘lagging behind’ is a way of othering Muslims, who are ‘denied coevalness’ (Fabian 2014: 31). Their way of life and choices are deemed to be from another time and out of sync with today’s secular mainstream Western culture. The discourse surrounding Muslims and Muslim women



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in particular thus perpetuates orientalist and colonialist perspectives on the non-Western Other, situated at an earlier historical ‘stage’ of evolutionary human history. Peter van der Veer (2006) points out that Muslims’ ‘strict morals remind the Dutch too much of what they have so recently left behind’ (119), a reference to the cultural revolution of the 1960s. The notion that Muslim women are one step behind is part of a temporalization and stigmatization of Muslim women. Lila Abu-Lughod (2002, 2013) has argued that this temporalizing and stigmatizing discourse surrounding women in particular involves the idea of ‘saving Muslim women’. In her reflections on ‘the war on terrorism’, human rights discourse, the (face-)veil, honour killings and non-fiction biographies, she demonstrates how contemporary discourses on freedom, rights and equality turn the Muslim woman who needs saving into an essentialist icon. In trying to understand and help Muslim women, historical and political dynamics are denied and a new form of ‘colonial feminism’ (Ahmed 1992) and white and Western supremacy come into play. Gendered orientalism is not only seen in development work in countries like Afghanistan (Abu-Lughod 2013; Kipnis and Caudwell 2015). It is also implicit in sports policies in Europe, where discussions about the participation of Muslim women in sports are undergirded with ideas of the Muslim woman in need of saving. For the same reason, Muslim women’s choice to engage in sports in gender-separated settings is perceived as ‘backwards’. For example, gender-grouped swimming was banned in The Hague in 2009, with the municipal government proclaiming it as ‘not suited in this time’.16 Even those scholars and politicians who see gender-grouped sports as a means of increasing participation consider participation in gender-mixed sports as full emancipation.17 Both in the Dutch context and worldwide, the femininity of ethnic minorities is often constructed as antagonistic to physical activity.18 Young Dutch Muslim women and girls who take up kickboxing confront important aspects of representations of the intersection of gender and ethnicity. They participate in a form of exercise that is widely perceived as aggressive and that is offered to them with the aim of ‘empowering’ youthful minority femininity. This book complicates these discourses that deny young Muslim women their agency, instead demonstrating their desires and pleasures in sport practices and identities. As we will see, young women and girls turn the sport into a source of casual comfort for themselves,19 at least within the walls of their gym during women-only sessions. While there might be a tendency to want to ‘save’ young Muslim women and girls by encouraging them to participate in sports, this book aims to shed light on how the participants determine for themselves what form their participation will take, what they want from such sporting activities, and what role sport will play in their lives. To understand what kickboxing means for them and how it might or

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might not have positive effects for them individually and (Muslim) women collectively, it is important to take seriously their narratives and practices that revolve not only around power, self-esteem and individuality, but also around sociability, comfort and piety.

MUSLIM SELF-IMPROVEMENT To become fitter, healthier, happier – reasons for engaging in sports vary, but they are often related to self-improvement (Spielvogel 2003). Both elite and amateur athletes strive to become the best versions of themselves. Becoming an athlete is, however, embedded in various moral registers outside of sports. Even more than in elite sports, participants in recreational sports do not necessarily strive to become the best in their discipline, because sports might not be the most important or the sole important goal in their lives. Zaynab’s choice to engage in a sparring bout and Nazira’s choice to refrain from it are embedded in pursuits of ethical formation through the cultivation of sensibilities within the everyday (Das 2012: 134). For both of them, the process of becoming better kickboxers is not separable from the process of becoming better Muslims. Situated in the kickboxing gym, the ethnography presented in this book highlights the nuances of ethical formation and the cultivation of religious subjecthood as an intrinsic part of everyday life. The anthropology of Islam has been concerned with the cultivation of religious subjecthood, with scholars taking a variety of approaches and positions. With regard to Muslim women’s agency, the work of Saba Mahmood (2005) has been particularly influential, as her ethnography goes against modern liberal ideas of agency based on resistance to social norms. Her canonical work on the Islamic Revival Movement in Egypt argues that the participants and their embodied means of subject formation illustrate the need for an alternative way of thinking about agency that ‘uncouples the notion of self-realization from that of autonomous will’ (Mahmood 2005: 14). Religious observation is an expression of agency. The implementation of religious and social norms in the everyday lives of these Muslim centres on the cultivation of piety. Individual feelings and desires matter less than the training of elaborate ‘technologies of the self ’ (Foucault 1982; Foucault and Sennett 1981). We have to include the perspectives of the actors who engage and struggle with the particular constraints of their lifeworlds, in pursuit of their own envisaged self-realization. Above all, Mahmood (2005) insists that we can only understand agency when we take into account the power structures in which it resides. Feminism, anthropology and Muslim women’s practices have been called a troublesome threesome ( Jacobsen 2011) as religious subjectivities



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challenge feminist theories and politics. Not only Mahmood, but more and more feminist anthropologists argue that we cannot study Muslim women only or simply as victims of patriarchal norms and structures (Abu-Lughod 2013; Jacobsen 2011; Moors 2009). If we view Muslim women as agents, we can see that not only religious specialists, but also ordinary Muslims partake in the production of Muslim identity through everyday ethical practice. This line of reasoning emphasizes women’s dignity and self-realization as an alternative to the dominant secular languages of equality, individual rights and autonomy ( Jouili 2011). By following Talal Asad (1973) and Mahmood (2005), and highlighting the cultivation of piety (as active self-realization), scholars of Muslims in Europe have countered overly simple, homogenizing discourses within minority and migration studies (e.g. Amir-Moazami and Salvatore 2003; Fadil 2008; Jacobsen 2011; Jouili and Amir-Moazami 2006). They have furthermore shown that the self-realization practices of Muslim women in Europe are neither linear nor unambiguous (Amir-Moazami 2005; Jouili 2015). There is a continuous struggle and internal ambivalence that cannot be overlooked – a complexity of everyday life that challenges essentialist assumptions. The above approach – whereby Islam is not seen in essentialist terms – enables greater attention to socialization and processes of power, and to the meaning of Islam in Muslims’ everyday lives. Since the publication of Asad’s influential essay ‘The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam’ (1986), in which he argues that Islam should be understood as a ‘discursive tradition’, anthropologists have been analysing the various ways in which Islam is produced and reproduced in the specific contexts of everyday life.20 How Islam is articulated in everyday life may reflect the many ways in which Muslims systemize Islam and it is the anthropologist’s job to seek to ensure that ‘the efforts of the practitioners … achieve coherence’ (Asad 1986: 17). Drawing on Asad, the focus on piety by Mahmood and others gave rise to scholarship on the formation of religious subjects that revealed the contextual, diverse nature of Islam in the everyday lives of Muslims (e.g. Lambek 1993; Marsden 2005). But Mahmood’s approach has also been criticized (e.g. Schielke 2010; Soares and Osella 2009) for over-emphasizing attempts by Muslims to lead pure and pious lives, with the consequence that everyday lifeworlds have not been studied enough. Scholars such as Kai Kresse (2013), who argues that we should speak of a ‘worldly Islam’, and Magnus Marsden and Konstantinos Retsikas (2013), who urge anthropologists to ‘de-exceptionalize Islam’, inspired the way in which this ethnography examines not only religious techniques of the self, but also the broader skills of self-formation. The techniques and sensibilities of Muslims – like everyone else’s – are always local and contextual. Contributions such as these do not undermine Asad’s understanding of Islam as a

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discursive tradition, whereby expression of coherence of Islamic societies around the world is emphasized. At the same time, anthropologists increasingly stress that ‘being Muslim’ is not the sole and/or foremost identification marker for the people they study. Samuli Schielke, for example, wonders if ‘there is too much Islam in the anthropology of Islam’ (2010: 2).21 It is not helpful to separate out aspects of Muslim life as un-Islamic or secular; they are instead ‘fully implicated in all of the processes important to the lives of the people under study’ (Marsden and Retsikas 2013: 25). Marsden and Retsikas (2013) have urged anthropologists to be aware of the ‘exceptional’ position given to Islam, a call that has been echoed by several colleagues (Bracke and Fadil 2012; Fadil and Fernando 2015; Fernando 2009; Schmidt 2008). This has had its consequences for the specific debate about ‘ordinary ethics’ (Lambek 2010) within the anthropology of Islam. But regardless of whether recent studies have found that multiple forms of self co-exist or conflict, they have contested deterministic notions of the influence of Islam in the lives of Muslims. There is an undeniable and perhaps irreducible ‘tension in human practice between an existential power to determine the meaning of one’s circumstances and structural power that threatens to limit the exercise of one’s will to knowledge’ (Rapport and Harris 2007: 328). It is up to the anthropologist to unravel those mysterious interrelations between the personal, on the one hand, and the historical and cultural, on the other. By focusing on the body as a site of knowing, I will analyse the relation between the individual and sociocultural milieux. It is anticipated that the ethnography – the stories, voices and journeys captured in this book – will facilitate critical reflection on ‘integrationalist’ sports policies in the Netherlands and on how young women confront representations of the intersection of gender, ethnicity and religion.

BODY TECHNIQUES In addition to examining the everyday practices of religion, this book purposefully prioritizes a non-religious practice. Asad argued that religious ‘body techniques’ (following Mauss 1934) that are key in the cultivation of religious subjects need to be understood as agency (Asad 1973). Investigating body techniques in kickboxing and the cultivation of an ethical self within that practice might draw on other sensibilities and strands of life. The life stories of the young women that we will get to know in this book furthermore demonstrate that the juxtaposition of sports and religion is perceived in different ways. The persistence of gendered orientalism in discourses surrounding Muslim women’s bodies and corporeal practices demands a



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new approach in which it is not only women’s religious subjectivities but also their broader being-in-the-world that are foregrounded. Taking cues solely from the literature on the cultivation of pious selves would result in an over-emphasis on the importance of religion in the women’s lives. While incorporating scholarship on the cultivation of piety, we need to refer to a larger platform of social action. Especially because of the general tendency to frame Muslim women as being in need of ‘saving’, it is essential to emphasize their agentic power and diversity. At the same time, this book also intends to challenge the field of sport studies, in which the same ‘body techniques’ are centralized in order to confirm the existence of a specific athlete’s ‘habitus’. The concept of habitus, also derived from Marcel Mauss’s (1934) theory of ‘techniques of the body’, has been used in numerous studies of sports (e.g. Alter 1992; Bourdieu 1990; Wacquant 2004). Its widespread use is unsurprising because habitual, corporeal practices and embodied knowledge are central to success in sports. Habitus refers to a system of embodied, habitual and sedimented dispositions that function as enduring schemes of perception, thought and action. To be able to function successfully in a particular field, such as kickboxing, one needs to have ‘incorporated’ particular bodily techniques to such an extent that they feel like second nature. Sport scholars have stressed the malleability, contextuality and changing dynamic of habitus and how it is constituted through embodiment, but they have demonstrated little theoretical advancement in their understanding of agency and how it relates to embodied subject formation. It is therefore helpful to go back to both Asad’s and Pierre Bourdieu’s source of inspiration for their theories, Marcel Mauss’s Techniques du Corps (1934). Mauss understood bodily techniques as ‘physio-psycho-sociological assemblages of series of action’ and stressed the importance of education in understanding bodily techniques ‘in group life’ (Mauss 1973: 85). To truly understand how group life is construed in daily life, we have to understand the development of habitus as a social act (Crossley 1996). This book will shed light on processes of self-realization and the role of agency therein because it examines body techniques and how they are learned and mastered, but even more so because it centralizes a group of people and a cultural practice that are not commonly studied in this combination. I therefore build on the intersectional feminist understanding of self-realization, whereby class, race/ethnicity and gender are taken into consideration (Crenshaw 1989; Hill Collins 2009; Lorde 2012) and, more particularly, reference is made to the work of feminist anthropologists of Muslim women (Abu-Lughod 1999; Mahmood 2005a; Moors 2018) who intervened in feminist theories of agency, free will and individual autonomy. This intersectional approach to becoming a recreational athlete, in this

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case a kickboxing Muslima, will elucidate the importance of centring body ­techniques. Learning body techniques is the central focus in this book, and in ­chapter 2 more specifically, because it is in the development of learned capacities that enculturation, or ‘enskilment’ (Ingold 2000; Palsson 1994) happens. Experiential ethnographic research with an emphasis on apprenticeship has therefore been crucial in the empirical research for this book.

A METHOD OF LEARNING KICKBOXING To understand the crafting of Muslim women’s subjectivities in Dutch ­women-only kickboxing, I conducted extensive research in two gyms in The Hague from 2011 to 2013. However, when I started my research, I was not new to kickboxing. In 2009, I began training in women-only kickboxing in Amsterdam as a student at the University of Amsterdam. I started out of sheer curiosity: like most other students at the gym, I had never engaged in sports before, apart from the two hours of compulsory physical education at school. A volunteer at a community centre had invited me, thereby introducing me to one of the most popular sports in the neighbourhood. Amsterdam was known to be the cradle of Dutch kickboxing, but The Hague experienced a boom in fight clubs and more informal kickboxing venues when I moved there in 2010. While the then mayor of Amsterdam prohibited fight events in the city for a period of five years (which will be discussed at greater length in chapter 5), The Hague benefitted from both national and local governmental programmes that funded recreational martial arts and other sports for ethnic and religious minorities. New kickboxing gyms and informal training sessions in community centres and after-school programmes mushroomed in The Hague, mainly in the Southwest neighbourhoods that were home to many second- and third-generation migrants. Most notably, the availability of kickboxing training for women only rapidly increased, lowering the threshold for many girls and women to take up kickboxing as a leisure and sports activity. Having some experience of kickboxing prior to joining two gyms in The Hague in 2011 was both an advantage and a disadvantage. I was readily accepted by the trainer and some of the more advanced students, but it was more difficult to connect with the absolute beginners. Having been raised as a Muslima by a brown Pakistani father and a white Dutch mother in a family in which boys were more engaged in sports than girls, but also having the same skin and hair colour, made me an insider to the young women in this research. Not having Moroccan heritage, living in a different neighbourhood, working at a university, not observing Islam meticulously, being older



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than many of the women and having a different (‘white’ or ‘posh’) accent when speaking Dutch highlighted the fact that there were also significant differences. Because my ethnic and class identity was a point of difference, I did not experience subtle and not-so-subtle exclusion and racism as frequently and explicitly in Dutch society as many of my interlocutors. The book is based on immersive research with a feminist ethnographic approach (Abu‐Lughod 1990; Visweswaran 1997), not only because I home in on the experiences and stories of women, but also because I analyse gender not merely as personal identification, but as social constructions in the context of specific structures of power. As an experiential ethnographer (Thangaraj 2015; Wacquant 2004), I trained at two gyms in the Southwest of The Hague on a daily basis and paid attention to ethnographic apprenticeship (Downey 2005; Palsson 1994). Experiencing the pain of getting punched in the face or kicked in the stomach, feeling an unease about hurting someone that later turned into excitement and pleasure, adjusting to unspoken dress codes and behavioural patterns – it all helps to make sense of the meanings and values that people attach to their movements and bodies. I involved my own body to access experiential, embodied knowledge on the production of kickboxing subjectivities. Becoming a kickboxer through learning kickboxing informed the methodology for understanding the shaping of a fit, beautiful, heterosexual body and the cultivation of an ethical self. Every now and then, I switched from participating fully in sparring exercises in order to become a better fighter, writing my field notes with hands that were still shaking at the end of the night, to having my notebook out and silently observing training sessions. The ethnographic approach I took called for sensuous scholarship (Stoller 2010), whereby my own body served as a data-gathering instrument and the starting point of analysis. When I began to regularly attend kickboxing classes, I experienced how sedimented dispositions and habitual practices were part of my kickboxing practice. Kickboxing challenges embodied knowledge about how women are supposed to behave. In the first few months, I felt that I had to overcome the fact that I did not like to fight and that I did not enjoy watching others fight. I avoided pain and apologized instantly whenever I hurt someone. Part of the enskilment of kickboxing is changing one’s perspective of what pain and violence mean and realizing how the experience of pain is part of gendered socialization. A further exploration of movements, sartorial practices and discursive practices revealed what a good Muslim woman in kickboxing is. Outside of the gym, I met my fighting classmates to go jogging, to shop, to eat out, to go walking around town, to flirt with boys, to go to high school, to visit fitness gyms, to attend taekwondo training, to meet their parents at home, to hang out in the park and to gather in mosques. In the process of

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sharing these aspects of their daily lives as part of participant observation, I favoured informal talks and more sustained social interaction over formal interviews. I conducted sixteen formal interviews with gym owners, trainers and fighters, but a more natural conversational approach in daily activities was more useful with the girls and young women that are at the heart of this book.22 Zaynab, her peers and their families live in the Southwest of The Hague, in the neighbourhoods of Schilderswijk, Moerwijk, Zuidwest and Transvaal. This part of the city contains more women-only sport and leisure centres than other neighbourhoods and its kickboxing gyms are visited by more Muslim women than other gyms. When the weather allowed it, I would ride my bicycle to the gym from the city centre where I lived; on rainy, snowy and windy days, I preferred taking trams and buses. I came to know The Hague Southwest by joining kickboxers on their walks, bike rides and bus rides to other training facilities, to go eat out or to meet friends. Following these trajectories through the city and through their lives resulted in friendships that allowed me to better understand how larger sociocultural and historical forces play out in everyday life.

BOOK STRUCTURE Like Zaynab, most of the young kickboxers I met did not take sport participation for granted and did not come from families in which sport was an inherent part of women’s and girls’ upbringing. Their stories give an unprecedented insight into how sport participation became part of their life stories. The chapters are ordered to mirror the life trajectory of a young girl that becomes a kickboxer: from choosing a leisure activity in her neighbourhood, to aligning this activity with religious pursuits, to potentially becoming a professional fighter. Concentrating on this micro-level, the book provides insights into lesser-known parts of Muslim-minority gender subjectivities in Europe. Chapter 1 introduces the neighbourhoods of The Hague Southwest, where there are many kickboxing gyms. It outlines the setting and context of the neighbourhood and city and takes a closer look at how women-only kickboxing is embedded in ‘integration-through-sports’ policies. The chapter then gives a brief history of the Dutch system of subsidizing sports and its relation to neighbourhood policy before describing the neighbourhood in which this research took place. This is followed by a description of the two gyms on which I focus and the people who frequent them. Situating my research within the broader contexts of Dutch and European society and debates on sports and integration, I argue in this chapter that sports create



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a vicious circle for Muslim youth – a vicious circle in which race and gender power imbalances are reproduced. Common preconceptions regarding the empowering workings of sports will be critically analysed and I will show how they are reproduced in the everyday workings of sports. Chapter 2 enters the two gyms in The Hague Southwest and describes how members of the women-only classes become recreational kickboxers through learning together. It explores the process of acquiring bodily knowledge and techniques as a means of (re)producing group formation and a sense of belonging. Kickboxing shows us that learning is not merely a transfer of knowledge from the trainer to her pupils, and not merely about modelling and copying. It is a form of coordination between a person’s body, perceptions, resources, tools and environment that, in this case, is very much based on peer learning. It is precisely through learning together that group formation and a sense of belonging are produced. Learning kickboxing is not a linear process, because it is imbued with ideas of race/ethnicity, gender, class, age and locality. This chapter therefore renders explicit the specificity of bodies and contexts and shows that becoming a kickboxer is different in different environments. Chapter 3 explores some of the implications of learning and sociability in the context of women-only kickboxing in The Hague. While kickboxing is seen as stereotypically masculine, the gendered, religious and racialized social and cultural context of the young women provides for a different kind of kickboxing practice, in which skill, ambition and subjectivity take different forms. In women’s kickboxing practice, acquiring fighting skills goes hand in hand with crafting alternative gender subjectivities that play with notions of masculinity and femininity while keeping close to gender conformity. This chapter examines the rhetoric of empowerment and self-defence and practices of aesthetics and sociability in the gym. Thus, the chapter reveals how skill is developed differently in women-only kickboxing and how new gender subjectivities are crafted in the gym while an apologetic position visà-vis men is upheld. Chapter 4 asks how gender subjectivities in women-only kickboxing are imbued with religious embodiment and ambition. Muslim women in sports are often ascribed feminist agency for contesting not only gender roles, but also what is considered ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. Examining the strategies and choices involved in women-only kickboxing, this chapter argues that the gender subjectivities that are crafted are based on a pious ideal. A religious and gendered embodiment allows young women to contest and negotiate gendered, sexual and religious subjectivities, and is a strategy to claim space in a masculine and secular setting. The spatialization of the halal gym enables pious cultivation of the self and the collective, and reveals that both secular and religious sensibilities are crafted in women-only kickboxing.

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Chapter 5 examines in fine-grained detail how a girl from a so-called ‘disadvantaged neighbourhood’ becomes a competitive kickboxer. Alia’s life story illustrates her decisions to practise kickboxing, choose a gym and become a competitive fighter. The chapter demonstrates the complexities of racialization and its intersection with religion and gender by spotlighting the expectations, ambitions and relations with family and friends of those who pursue a kickboxing career. I argue that the negotiations of gendered subjectivities are temporal and shaped through discourses of gender and relationships with their male counterparts. Alia’s life story shows that self-­ realization does not only concern religious pursuits; rather, different spheres intersect in her everyday life and add to her notion of self. Describing Alia’s career with an emphasis on her personal, agentic power, this chapter enables a deeper understanding of the subtleties of self-formation. Based on the findings gathered in this book, I examine gendered ­self-realization in the conclusion by reiterating that, on the one hand, kickboxing is perceived as an emancipatory, liberal practice, precisely because of the racial and religious backgrounds of the women and girls, while, on the other hand, it reinforces heteronormative and racialized identifications. This exploration will unpack the essentialized identity of ‘the Muslimwoman’ by theoretically intervening in debates on gendered subjectivity, secular and religious sensibilities, and belonging.

NOTES  1. The names of the kickboxers in this book are all pseudonyms, except for the names of international champions that were not part of this study; their full names are given.  2. The work of Adele Pavlidis and Simone Fullagar (2014) on roller derby, not a combat sport but a contact sport nonetheless, is a notable exception.  3. See Abu-Lughod (2013), Ahmed (1992) and Nguyen (2011).  4. In 2009, Member of Parliament Geert Wilders, leader of the right-wing political party Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, Party for Freedom), suggested a headscarf tax of €1,000 per year to discourage people from wearing headscarves.  5. It should be noted that Bruce Lee played a significant role in making combat sports very popular in the global south, even before they became popular among diasporas in Western nations (Bowman 2010).  6. Muslima, although not mentioned in most dictionaries, is the Arabic word for a Muslim woman, used globally by Muslimas themselves.  7. For a more elaborate account of ‘ethnic communities’ in the Netherlands, see Rath (1991).  8. At the time of the writing of this book, in 2021, the Dutch Central Bureau for Statistics is considering abandoning the binary distinction of Western and n ­ on-Western, but still uses the existing migration classification system to create new terms. https:// www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/uitgelicht/het-gebruik-van-westers-niet-westers-door-het-cbs.



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 9. The Dutch sociopolitical system has often been described as ‘pillarized’, with Protestants, Catholics, socialists and liberals running their own schools, political parties, media, etc. The transformation during the 1960s is described as ‘de-pillarization’. See also Geschiere (2009), Kennedy (1995), Van Rooden (2004). 10. Paul Mepschen, Evelien H. Tonkens and Jan Willem Duyvendak frame this discourse as a form of ‘sexual politics’ and show how representations of gay sexuality exemplifying Dutch tolerance are mobilized by right-wing anti-Islam politicians to ‘shape narratives in which Muslims are non-modern subjects’ (2010: 962). 11. See also Bracke (2012). 12. Note that ‘the idea that modern religion is subject to secularization, and hence confined to the private sphere and the inner self, expresses an ideology more than a historical reality’ (Meyer 2008: 720). 13. This is especially visible in the Muslim headscarf controversies around Europe. See, for example, Bracke and Fadil (2012), Moors (2009) and Scott (2009). 14. See also Lentin and Titley (2011), Silverstein (2005) and Vertovec (2011). 15. See Khoja-Moolji (2018) for an excellent critique of the production of the ideal Muslim woman-/girl-subject. 16. Dutch original: ‘passen niet in deze tijd’. See Wisse (2009) and, for a historical account of gender-segregated swimming, Elling (2005). 17. Debates on gender-separated swimming have taken place elsewhere. In January 2017, the Swiss government won a case at the European Court of Human Rights, a result that obliged parents to send their children to mixed swimming lessons (de Koning 2017). 18. See, for example, Chin and Andrews (2016) and Willms (2017). 19. It is also regarded as such by men (Green 2011). It should perhaps also be noted that women-only kickboxing was not a comfort for all women, for instance, those who did not return to class. 20. Asad’s essay ‘The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam’ (1986) was an intervention in a debate that had begun in the 1970s. Whereas Clifford Geertz (1968) understood local variations of Islam as expressions of a universal, symbolic religious system and Abdul Hamid El-Zein (1977: 251) criticized Geertz for assuming a universal essence of Islam and argued for the ‘native’s’ model of Islam, Asad argued that the binary approaches of scholars such as El-Zein, but also Ernest Gellner (1981), were inadequate and that an anthropology of Islam ‘should begin, as Muslims do, from the concept of a discursive tradition that includes and relates itself to the founding texts of Qur’an and the Hadith’ (Asad 1986: 14). 21. It has to be noted that there have been ongoing published debates about this issue. See also Deeb (2015); Fadil and Fernando (2015). 22. I have followed the ethical principles outlined by the American Anthropological Association. All participants were informed that I was a researcher and that I was conducting research. Although pre-teen students were present at the gyms, the research focused on students above the age of sixteen. When the participants were below the age of eighteen, verbal consent was acquired from their parents as well.

CHAPTE R 1

A PLACE FOR US Neighbourhood and Nation in a Kickboxing Gym

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When 16-year-old kickboxer Sanae and I rode our bicycles together to SaïdGym for the first time, Sanae told me about her day at school and gossiped extensively about her classmates that I had not yet met. We had been training together for over a month and after noticing that we were two of the few who travelled to the gym by bike, we discovered that our routes overlapped. She texted me an hour before training and we met in front of a popular bakery on one of the main streets to ride together. We cycled along streets lined with bakeries, small grocers, butchers and cafes, and smelled freshly baked bread, coffee and the fumes of cars. We passed the busy small streets that surround the largest open-air market in the city and larger streets that house wedding halls, mosques, garages and small businesses. The ten-­minute bike ride took us from neighbourhoods of low houses to high apartment blocks. Before we arrived at the old building in which SaïdGym is located, we passed another gym, The Lion’s Den, and I told Sanae that I was also training there as part of my research, on the days when I was not training at SaïdGym. ‘I trained there as well!’ she said, explaining that her first experiences of kickboxing took place at The Lion’s Den. ‘It’s the gym closest to my house, and they offer women-only sessions as well.’ But after the first training session, the trainer tried to convince her to join the mixed-gender training sessions. He saw potential and discussed her options in relation to becoming a fighter. If she was serious about this ambition, the best thing would be for her to train in the mixed sessions, in which she would train with more worthy opponents and like-minded ambitious fighters. Sanae said she was flattered, but that training with men was not an option: ‘I told my parents that I would go to women’s training. And I just wanted to train with other girls like me. After that I decided to join SaïdGym. Luckily it is only a couple of streets further away.’

T

he ten-minute bicycle ride took us through three different neighbourhoods, all South and Southwest of the city centre of The Hague. When looking for kickboxing and other combat sports venues in The Hague, the



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South and Southwest of the city is the place to be. Using the Dutch people’s favourite means of transportation, the bicycle, one can pass by most dojos and gyms within an hour in the neighbourhoods of Moerwijk, Schilderswijk, Groente- en Fruitmarkt, but also Stationsbuurt, Laakkwartier and Transvaal. While other neighbourhoods, such as Scheveningen and Energiekwartier, are also home to some dojos, it is not a coincidence that most dojos are located in the Southwest of The Hague, the poorest and most heterogeneous part of the city. As in other European cities, it is in these areas that kickboxing, as well as other combat sports, is thriving. The neighbourhood – wijk or buurt in Dutch – is a common spatial marker in policy and the media, as well as serving as an identity marker for people living in the Netherlands’ larger cities. Especially in The Hague, a city known to be very segregated, spatial markers are invoked when demarcating differences between citizens and their customs. As early as the eighteenth century, the population of the city was divided into people that call themselves Hagenaren, the richer members of the population who lived in parts of the city built on sand dunes, and Hagenezen, the poor who lived on the peatlands. Although these demarcations are not so marked nowadays, the symbolism of this segregation is still invoked in discussions of class differences in the city. Migration, architecture and housing policies have added new representations of social strata that reinforce the differences between rich and poor, upper and lower class in the city. In 2007, then Minister of Housing and Integration Ella Vogelaar published a list of forty nationwide probleemwijken (problem neighbourhoods) that were considered ‘disadvantaged’ and in need of extra attention from both local and national government. These are neighbourhoods that are characterized by economic and social deprivation, but stereotyped on account of their high concentration of immigrants, poverty and crime. As part of neighbourhood renovation programmes, numerous athletic programmes initiated and financed by the Dutch Ministry of Housing and Integration, along with the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports, promote participation in sports as a gateway for participation in society. These programmes emphasize the benefits of sports for ‘minorities’ and ‘deprived neighbourhoods’, suggesting that they cultivate physical health, social bonding and belonging in Dutch society. In The Hague, four neighbourhoods, all located in the Southwest of the city, were labelled as ‘disadvantaged’: Schilderswijk, Stationsbuurt, Zuidwest (including Moerwijk) and Transvaal. These neighbourhoods are all within walking or biking distance of each other and are de facto one area. The two gyms that I trained at are only separated by one long road, but they are officially part of two different neighbourhoods and districts. The majority of the students at both gyms live in the Southwest. Some strongly identify with a specific neighbourhood, or with a smaller section of the

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neighbourhood, others with the area as a whole. And while policies, but also media reports, represent this part of town as a bubble that is sealed off from the rest of the city, a bike ride to visit kickboxing gyms around the city also reminds us how the borders of neighbourhoods are fluid in the lived reality of its inhabitants. To examine how kickboxing is taken up by young Muslim girls like Sanae, it is essential to investigate their life stories, situated within a particular time and space. The choice to practise a particular sport in a particular gym is embedded in histories of class segregation, labour migration and integration politics in the country and the city. This chapter offers a detailed description of two gyms and their neighbourhoods, and outlines the relationship between sports, neighbourhood and citizenship in the Netherlands.

AT HOME IN THE ‘SHARIA TRIANGLE’ Sanae lived in the heart of Schilderswijk and cycled for ten minutes to reach the gym she liked best, but most girls choose the gym closest to home, the one they pass when they are walking to school or the supermarket. Jamila and Hind, two sisters aged fourteen and sixteen, lived only three streets away from their gym. Their high school was in the same area, as was the mosque they visited for Quran class on Saturdays. Intissar lived ‘very close to the market’. There are several marketplaces in The Hague, but the largest and most well-known is the one in Schilderswijk. ‘The Lion’s Den is so close to home for me. It almost couldn’t be closer.’ Sometimes Intissar’s father brought her and picked her up by car, especially in winter, when the days are short and cold. When the weather and daylight allowed it, she came by bike; after training, we sometimes biked around the neighbourhood. Ouarda and Yasmina were classmates, neighbours and best friends, both seventeen years old. They lived in Schilderswijk, so sometimes they walked to the gym and back again. Besides occasional visits to the city centre to go shopping or to the cinema, most of the girls’ activities – school, mosque, family, work and play – also took place in this area. Most of their family, friends and acquaintances lived in the same area as well. The majority of the kickboxers I met were born and raised in the South and Southwest of The Hague; most of their daily lives take place in the same area. Many of them do not refer to the neighbourhoods they live in, but mention the closest large street or other landmark, such as the market, the mosque, Delftse Laan, Hoefkade or Betje Wolffstraat. Different neighbourhoods are not only at a spatial distance; there is often a social distance as well. Kickboxers living outside of the South and Southwest of The Hague, including myself, experienced this physical distance



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in the way in which social contacts were established. I lived in a close-by neighbourhood that I considered to be ‘only’ a ten-minute bike ride away from Schilderswijk, but fellow kickboxers considered this to be far away and expressed that they had never been to my neighbourhood or had no reason to go there. Marieke, a 32-year-old woman living in a low-class white neighbourhood also invoked this spatial distance when differentiating between people, as did her peers. Although she has a brown skin colour and black hair (she does not know who her biological father is and jokes that she ‘could be from anywhere’), her geographical location, combined with her strong Hague lower-class accent, results in fellow kickboxers sometimes jokingly calling her boerenkaas – farmers’ cheese1 – to emphasize how culturally Dutch she is. Fouzia, who most often teams up with Marieke in training sessions, highlighted how the segregation of neighbourhoods influences interactions in the gym when she said: ‘Marieke lives in Scheveningen. That’s why I can’t get along with her. Look, we play nice, and laugh and all that, but she will never be a real friend of mine because of that.’ After training with each other for a year, a friendship did occur, but, as with other friendships, ethnic boundaries were spelled out. Márcia, a woman in her late twenties, who was born in Brazil and adopted by Dutch parents, demonstrates both how a neighbourhood shapes a person and how a neighbourhood can be chosen to help shape a new person. As a convert to Islam, her deliberate choice of the Southwest of The Hague as the location of her residence demonstrates her decision to actively affiliate herself with immigrant Muslims.2 We met several times outside of the gym. She loved to go shopping on Hoefkade and its side streets, where shops with modest clothing, such as long dresses and headscarves, were easier to find than in the city centre. Before she got pregnant with her son, she lived in my neighbourhood, Zeeheldenkwartier. Not only was her apartment there too small to raise a child in; she was also no longer happy with the atmosphere on the streets. She visited me once in this neighbourhood; we had lunch in a restaurant and walked around the streets. She was reminded of when she lived there and actively engaged with the memories that came up during our stroll: ‘When I walk here I just feel everything again. It reminds me of going out, dancing, and drinking, and laughing. And it was fun, in a way, but at the same time it also brings a certain anxiety when I walk here and think about it. Those were crazy times. But I also miss it sometimes, you know. Especially dancing and music. I’m not quite there yet.’ The city centre no longer matched Márcia’s lifestyle and a trip down memory lane showed that the area does not fit her current lifestyle and therefore creates a sense of anxiety. Márcia chose to move out of the city centre and into Moerwijk in the South of The Hague, where like-minded people live and where there are facilities that match her lifestyle and the upbringing she envisions for her son.

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While Márcia is attracted by the things the immigrant, Muslim neighbourhood has to offer, for others these would be reasons to avoid the area. The Southwest of The Hague, and the Schilderswijk in particular, is a well-known area in the Netherlands, because it has become a symbol of ‘disadvantaged’ neighbourhoods. The negative representations of the Schilderswijk in both the media and politics have created and reproduced a ‘myth of the problem neighbourhood’ (Franke, Overmaat and Reijndorp 2014). The Southwest of The Hague has a long history of migration, deprivation and stigmatization. The Schilderswijk was built in the second half of the nineteenth century and has always been a densely populated, working-class neighbourhood. After the Second World War, and later in the 1960s, the neighbourhood attracted new groups of mainly poor families, intensifying the negative image of the neighbourhood and simultaneously strengthening the ‘Schilderswijk identity’ (van den Bogert 2019). In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, both postcolonial migrants (from the (former) Dutch colonies of Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean) and labour migrants (first from the south and east of Europe, later from Turkey and Morocco) diversified the composition of the area’s population (Klein Kranenburg 2013). Largescale urban renewal in the 1990s and 2000s resulted in the improvement of public spaces, housing and social problems, but also in further increases in the number of migrant families moving into the neighbourhood (Klein Kranenburg 2013). The public image of the Schilderswijk and adjacent neighbourhoods did not improve, but rather shifted towards a portrayal of failed integration, Muslim radicalization and crime (Franke, Overmaat and Reijndorp 2014). In 2013, the neighbourhood’s negative image was intensified by an article on the Schilderswijk in the national daily newspaper Trouw by the journalist Perdiep Ramesar. He drew attention to a small triangle-shaped block of buildings in the neighbourhood and labelled it the ‘Sharia Triangle’, because orthodox Muslims supposedly ‘ruled its streets’ (Ramesar 2013). The local Socialist Party had first drawn attention to this neighbourhood on account of the triangle-shaped block (The Forgotten Triangle, as it was named) being left out of several municipal renovation and amelioration initiatives (Van Dijk and Olders 2010). After Ramesar’s report, the neighbourhood became the focus of national newspapers and politicians. Two years later, Trouw fired Ramesar because his anonymous sources for several of his articles were untraceable, leading the newspaper to retract 126 of his articles. After receiving complaints regarding accountability and the bad image it had created for the neighbourhood, Trouw extensively researched the Schilderswijk in the following months. In a twenty-eightpage special supplement, Trouw concluded that a ‘Sharia neighbourhood’ or ‘small caliphate’ did not exist in the Schilderswijk. In its extensive special



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issue, Trouw did examine other factors that might have ‘made the Schilderswijk the Schilderswijk’, such as poverty, education, facilities and the increasing ethnic diversity. It also reported that the Schilderswijk had been a poor, deprived neighbourhood before the influx of immigrants and that facilities were actually improving and crime rates decreasing. Nevertheless, most articles in the special issue continued to emphasize residents’ ethnic background. It was deemed ‘a miracle’ that things are going so well in a neighbourhood in which 90 per cent of the population has a migrant background. Then Mayor Jozias van Aartsen, claiming to be proud of the neighbourhood, stated that because The Hague will soon have a majority of people with a non-western background, we need to accept that parts of it might ‘look like Istanbul’. Although neighbourhood residents were happy with the newspaper’s apologies and positive reporting, the foregrounding of their ethnic background was striking.3 The question is whether the rectification will change public perceptions of Schilderswijk and similar neighbourhoods. In Loïc Wacquant’s (2008) words, we can speak of a spatial stigma: ‘When a district is widely perceived as an urban “hellhole” where only the detritus of society would tolerate living, when its name is synonymous with vice and violence in journalistic and political discussion, a taint of place becomes superimposed onto the stigmata of poverty and ethnicity’ (116). In this case, a small block of streets became symbolic of the larger area of the Schilderswijk and The Hague Southwest. Nationwide, the Schilderswijk became a symbol of Muslim-majority neighbourhoods in the Netherlands. There is a general tendency in the media and politics not only to foreground deprivation, but also to make unsubstantiated claims linking deprivation to integration and citizenship. This is visible in sports policies as well. The discourse in policy documents on neighbourhood sports focuses on disadvantaged, deprived or immigrant neighbourhoods such as the Schilderswijk and the Southwest, where neighbourhood homogeneity – the residents’ ethnic background – is seen as a problem. The geographical unit of ‘the neighbourhood’ becomes a symbol for immigrant populations, crime and deprivation. Not only are social problems conceptualized in relation to the space of the neighbourhood (van Gent, Musterd and Ostendorf 2009), the interaction between the media and policy turns the neighbourhood into a solid object of governance with certain exceptionally problematic characteristics (de Koning 2013: 23). To a certain extent, this can be said of all of the neighbourhoods labelled as the forty Vogelaarwijken. However, due to the attention they have received from the media and then politicians, it is more clearly the case for some neighbourhoods, such as the Schilderswijk. As we will see next, the interventions on a neighbourhood level contribute to the construction of national identity and citizenship.

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SPORTS AND INTEGRATION POLITICS IN THE NETHERLANDS Sanae was born and raised in the Schilderswijk, where she lives today with her parents and younger brother. Both her mother and father also grew up in The Hague Southwest, where they met at high school. Sanae’s grandfather was one of the first labour migrants in the Netherlands and still lives in the same neighbourhood. The Hague is home to many second- and ­third-generation children of migrant workers such as Sanae. Ironically, it was not until the 1980s that the Netherlands came to consider itself a ‘country of immigration’, even though it welcomed immigrants from the former colony of Indonesia and guest workers from Spain and Italy as early as the 1950s. Until the 1970s, immigrants from the former colony of Suriname and ‘guest workers’ (‘gastarbeiders’) recruited from Morocco and Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Sanae’s grandfather, were expected to leave in due course. A 1979 government report – the first official statement to acknowledge that the ‘migrants’ were here to stay – backed their ‘full participation’ in society (WRR 2007). The report advocated the development of a multicultural society in which immigrants would be expected to ‘emancipate’ themselves while maintaining their own group identity. Policies in the ensuing years mainly focused on reducing social and economic disadvantages. Policies shifted again in 1989 with the publication of a new report, the Allochtonenbeleid, which problematized immigrants retaining their ‘own’ identity and underlined the need for ‘integration’ (Rath 1991). While the Surinamese population had previously been portrayed as the most problematic, Turkish and Moroccan migrants, whose numbers had grown more rapidly than those of other groups, emerged as the new targets of policy. ‘Economically disadvantaged, socially isolated, geographically concentrated, and culturally different, they were the others the nation had not yet absorbed’ (Lechner 2012: 15). More and more policies were targeted at allochthones, and Turkish and Moroccan migrants more specifically. Since the 1980s, it has been claimed in the Netherlands that participation in sports stimulates social and cultural integration (Elling, Knoppers and de Knop 2001; Vermeulen and Verweel 2009). Modern sport is a symbolic means of representing the nation and constructing national identity. This idea is also evident in other Western European countries, such as France (Silverstein 2000), Germany (Braun and Nobis 2011), Denmark (Pfister 2011) and the United Kingdom (Coaffee 2008). While the Dutch state had been involved in sports since the 1950s, governmental encouragement of the engagement of minorities – including disabled people, women and ­immigrants – in sports grew in the 1980s (de Heer 2000). The idea was that membership of specific organizations, involvement in community projects and/or active engagement in sports would enable citizens to more fully



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participate in society. Citizens with a migrant background were, moreover, encouraged to participate in sports to integrate socially and culturally into Dutch society. But it was not until 1996 that participation in sports became a goal in itself and was thus more elaborately defined. Wat Sport Beweegt (What Moves Sports), published by the then newly formed Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports (VWS), stated that ‘Sport is more than just a fun and relaxed leisure activity. Sport affects the whole of society and contributes, among other things, to increasing civic participation, creating new jobs, integrating minorities, promoting public health and improving liveability in disadvantaged neighbourhoods’ (VWS 1996: 12). Besides highlighting the health benefits and possibilities for physical, psychological and organizational self-development, the socio-integrative value of sports was one of the core values of this policy. In a section on minorities, sport is mentioned as a field in which new social contacts can be established and it is stated that voluntary work in sports organizations can enhance Dutch cultural norms and values (VWS 1996: 33). And yet, the document continued to encourage the formation of separate ethnic sports associations as part of a project of ‘emancipation within their own group’ (VWS 1996: 33). In political scientist Robert D. Putnam’s (1995) words, sports policies were more focused on bonding (socializing within a social group) than bridging (socializing between different groups). This changed soon afterwards. The 2000s was a period in which discrimination against Muslims, racist discourses and nativist sentiments increased worldwide (Bangstad 2014; Rana 2011). A rise in anti-immigration and anti-Islamic rhetoric across Europe affected sports policies. Sports policies have changed in the ­Netherlands since Pim Fortuyn’s populist anti-immigration movement of 2001 and 2002 (Krouwel et al. 2006). Fortuyn’s movement – which was especially critical of Muslim immigration – led to the demise of the hitherto hegemonic multicultural model; at the very least, the integration of ethnic minorities returned to the political agenda. Recreational sports became one of the social spheres in which the presumed gap between allochthones and autochthones could be bridged. There was widespread agreement about the need for ­inter-ethnic social interaction. The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports declared in its 2005 policy, Tijd voor Sport (Time for Sports), that ‘Sport is not only an important focus area for sufficient physical exercise, but also a perfect meeting point. Sports will create possibilities for bonding, integration and social cohesion’ (VWS 2006: 17). Sport as ‘a meeting point’ implied a shift from bonding to bridging through sports. The new policy stressed integration even more, explicitly seeking to bind immigrant groups to Dutch society. As Jeroen Vermeulen and Paul Verweel (2009) suggest, it is important to point out that bonding in autochthonous sports settings is never questioned in these policies, while the homogeneity of ‘allochthone’ groups is not only

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presented as a given, but also viewed as inherently problematic. If we look at The Hague, we see that the homogeneity of a white, wealthy neighbourhood such as Benoordenhout is never questioned and nor are the populations of their hockey and tennis fields. The neighbourhoods in the Southwest of The Hague are more heterogeneous in ethnic backgrounds than any other part of the city or even the country. The ‘meeting point’ made possible by sport participation, however, assumes a joining of ‘allochthone’ citizens and Dutch ‘autochthone’ society. The locus of their meeting is supposed to be the neighbourhood.

NEIGHBOURHOOD SPORTS Many popular sports in the Netherlands, such as football, field hockey, tennis and running, take place outdoors and on the outskirts of the city. In the busy small streets of the South of the city, residents turn to fitness clubs and other indoor sport activities for leisure and health purposes, but are generally less engaged in sports than in other neighbourhoods. As early as 1992, policies suggest a correlation between low levels of participation in sports and ­socio-economic disadvantages: ‘Problems concentrate in so-called disadvantaged neighbourhoods in many municipalities. The inhabitants in many cases have to deal with unemployment, low education and low social participation. Participation in sports is also often lower than elsewhere’ (WVC 1992: 3). Non-participation in sports – in conjunction with social problems such as unemployment and low education – is presented as evidence that the people in question are lagging behind Dutch society. Participation in sports, due to its association with participation in society, became part of the social reform of deprived neighbourhoods. Social reform in disadvantaged neighbourhoods was directed towards improving liveability through a focus on education, employment and improving housing conditions (Musterd and Ostendorf 2008). Since 2000, the government has incentivized the creation of mixed neighbourhoods, or rather, it has discouraged neighbourhoods with a single minority ethnicity, with the aim of increasing liveability and decreasing deprivation. The neighbourhood became the socio-geographical setting for many social and cultural integration policies since ‘“neighbourhood resident” is seen as a transcending identity within which differences can be reconciled’ (Duyvendak and Veldboer 2001: 16). The geographical location for ‘integration through sports’ has thus been the disadvantaged (read: presumed single minority ethnicity) neighbourhood. Although ‘neighbourhood resident’ is supposed to be a transcending identity, the immigrant background of the disadvantaged neighbourhood resident unquestionably informs policies on neighbourhood sports. When



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a policy document uses the term ‘neighbourhoods’, the implication is ­deprived, disadvantaged or immigrant areas. Policy documents’ silence in relation to encouraging interaction within white upper-class (or lower-class) neighbourhoods tells us that ethnic homogeneity is not a problem in the case of autochthone citizens. This raises two issues: first, integration is a one-way street. Bridging is supposed to be initiated in immigrant neighbourhoods or in sports clubs, but not the other way around. Second, the ethnic background of the neighbourhood’s majority population is treated as representative of whether or not there are problems with education, welfare and crime. The deprivation or disadvantage experienced by a large group of people is automatically linked to their racialized ‘migration background’. Ethnic homogeneity is therefore a bad thing, but only where the Other is concerned. Since the 2000s, sport has not only been used as a tool for education and integration by sports policies; it has also been used by national policies on ‘spatial concentrations’. In the programmes that were set up for the aforementioned ‘Vogelaarwijken’, sometimes called krachtwijken (power neighbourhoods) – soft language used in place of the terms probleemwijk (problem neighbourhood) and achterstandswijk (disadvantaged or deprived neighbourhood) – ‘neighbourhood sports’ became one of the focal points. The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports has been working closely with the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and Environment to increase sport participation in these specific neighbourhoods. The main output of this collaboration was the national programme Meedoen Allochtone Jeugd door Sport (Participation of Allochthonous Youth through Sports), which ran from 2006 until 2010. The preposition ‘door’ (through), instead of ‘in’ reveals the symbolic value of sports as a means of integration into society. The programme exemplifies the move in Dutch policies from participatie (participation) to meedoen (joining in). It is important to stress this difference because of the implications it has in practice. In contrast to civic participation, meedoen is presented as a personal decision in relation to inclusion. It refers to social participation in existing and imposed structures (Tonkens 2013) rather than active political involvement in the contestation and negotiation of these structures. At the same time, participation in sports loses its status as a goal in and of itself and becomes a vehicle for urban regeneration: ‘In short, there will be three steps: more allochthonous youth participating in sport (integration in sports), thereby supporting their involvement in society (integration through sports) and thereby preventing or solving nuisance and problematic behaviour (education through sports)’ (VWS/WWI 2007: 10). These three steps – integration in sports, integration through sports and education through sports – make it clear that integration and education are, at this point, the main goals of neighbourhood sports policies. Immigrant youths are the main target group, even when the programmes and funding

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are implemented at the neighbourhood level. Interestingly, soon after its ­initiation, the programme’s name was altered to Meedoen Alle Jeugd door Sport, which translates to ‘Participation of All Youth through Sports’. The word ‘allochthonous’ was dropped, shifting the emphasis to all youth. This change in discourse coincided with the emergence of the category Nieuwe Nederlanders, which the Minister of Integration, Eberhard Van der Laan, introduced as an alternative to allochthone in an integration policy brief (Van der Laan 2009). In subsequent documents and reports, the transcendent ‘neighbourhood resident’ identity replaced allochthone. But the focus remained on deprived neighbourhoods with large populations of youths with a migrant background. In the national and municipal sports sub-programmes, ethnic and religious backgrounds have always played a significant role. This is especially true of specific programmes promoting combat sports, including kickboxing. Kickboxing, like other contact sports, has always been a low-class sport (Wacquant 2004; Weinberg and Arond 1952) and continues to be facilitated mainly in low-class neighbourhoods. If we look at sports facilities in the South of The Hague, there has been a noticeable increase in public courts, playgrounds and indoor gyms since the early 2000s. While public courts and playgrounds in ‘problem neighbourhoods’ encourage youths to exercise (Cevaal and Romijn 2012; Vermeulen and Verweel 2009), there are hardly any possibilities for engaging in sports that are popular on the national level, such as field hockey and tennis. In the South and the Southwest of The Hague, kickboxing is popular and therefore facilitated in several gyms and community centres, often partially funded by government programmes.

‘WE MOROCCANS JUST LIKE KICKBOXING’ Kickboxing has an ambivalent status in the Netherlands. Internationally, the Netherlands is known for its kickboxing champions, many of whom have a Moroccan ethnic background. At the same time, the sport is considered violent and fight events are viewed as hotbeds for criminal activity. For a long time, kickboxing only existed informally and was not institutionalized in associations and federations like most sports in the Netherlands. Moreover, the national government considered fighting sports an example – together with football hooliganism and sexual intimidation – of the norms and values of sports being challenged (VWS 1996: 30). The aforementioned policy agendas Meedoen Alle Jeugd door Sport (Participation of All Youth through Sports) and Tijd voor Sport (Time for Sports), however, demonstrate a shift in the image of kickboxing and other combat sports. The four-year programme Tijd voor Vechtsport (Time for Fighting Sports) was launched



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in 2006 and actively changed this discourse in sports policy by promoting kickboxing as a positive influence in the lives of young people: ‘fighting and power sports are eminently suitable means to reach young people. As they become acquainted with such sports, it will have a positive effect on their social life. As martial arts are increasingly popular among autochthone and allochthone youth, they are a good way to facilitate bonding between and integration of populations’ (Tijd voor Vechtsport 2006). The promotion of kickboxing among certain groups is based on its popularity among young people. Agnes Elling et al. (2010) found that it is mainly girls and boys with migrant backgrounds, as well as ethnic majority boys, who tend to engage in combat sports. The sports that are popular in the neighbourhoods are the ones that are promoted and subsidized. This has proven to be a highly successful approach. Due to Tijd voor Vechtsport, ninety martial arts associations attracted a total of 13,500 new members (NISB, n.d.). There has been an increase in the number of girls and women in kickboxing and the number of training sessions and settings in which the sport is facilitated in The Hague; the same is true of many other neighbourhoods in various medium-sized cities in which many citizens have immigrant backgrounds. Even kickboxing gyms that were not directly funded by Tijd voor Vechtsport noticed more positive attitudes towards kickboxing on the part of the municipal government. This led to other municipal subsidies, collaborations and increases in membership. Tijd voor Vechtsport (2006–10) was one of the most influential government projects to promote combat sports. It was also one of the only projects to actively work towards the third goal of Meedoen Allochtone Jeugd Door Sport: to ‘prevent or solve nuisance and problematic behaviour’. It focused on ‘the important social role of martial arts … and how these sports can contribute to and solve problems around safety, aggression and integration’ (VWS/WWI 2007: 55). Although it created a meeting point for allochthones and autochthones, the programme singled out allochthones as the main target group. However, this initial definition of the target group differed was not an accurate reflection of the group targeted in practice. As in daily life and the media, the term ‘allochthone’ is mainly used to refer to citizens with Moroccan and sometimes Turkish backgrounds who are perceived to be not well integrated. In one of its newsletters, Tijd voor Vechtsport gives prominence to Moroccan-Dutch youths: Moroccan boys and girls are an important target group in many of the projects of Tijd voor Vechtsport. … [W]e equip the trainers and associations to be able to get started with this target group. Many teachers are already trained through various trajectories. Within these training trajectories, the aims of regulating aggression among boys and empowerment training for allochthonous girls are addressed. (Tijd voor Vechtsport 2008)

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Tijd voor Vechtsport singles out this target group by emphasizing race/­ ethnicity. The characteristics of aggression and submission are directly linked to Moroccanness (the subjects’ Dutchness is never mentioned).4 The passage essentializes the identity of Moroccan girls as submissive passivity and that of Moroccan boys as unbridled aggression, demonstrating how gender and race/ethnicity are inextricably linked. I noticed how these categories are negotiated and reproduced by the kickboxers in the gyms I researched. When I asked girls and women why they chose combat sports instead of other sports, they often referred to their Moroccan background, reproducing presumptions underlying media coverage and policy. Common answers included ‘Apparently it is a sport that we Moroccans like’ and ‘We Moroccans need one outlet or another for our aggression’. The focus on participation in the Dutch government’s sports policies is based on the democratic idea of involving citizens in decision-making. But in practice, it creates a vicious circle. The government facilitates sports that ‘Moroccans’ prefer, such as kickboxing and football. ‘Moroccans’ participate in these sports because little else is offered in their neighbourhoods. Sport policies and programmes also seems to link ethnic identification to neighbourhood identification. This is also apparent in the experiences of this ‘target group’, as 19-year-old kickboxers Raja and Amina made clear to me. The two cousins do not live in or near the South of The Hague and must travel to the gym: Raja: There is really nothing at all in our part of town! If we want to practise sports, we   have to come all the way here. Amina: And we are also the only Moroccans there. Raja: Yes, and there is no kickboxing, so that’s why.

This interaction with the two cousins reminds us of how sports policies are implemented at the neighbourhood level. Raja and Amina’s engagement in sports demonstrates the positive results of neighbourhood sports policies. If there were no women-only training sessions, they would probably not have turned to kickboxing, or any other sport. Raja and Amina are the odd ones out in the gym because they come from a different neighbourhood, which highlights the segregation in the city and its sports facilities. They immediately refer to their Moroccan background when they speak about their decision to travel to The Hague Southwest to practise ­kickboxing. When residents of the neighbourhoods in The Hague Southwest participate in society through sports, it is valued differently to when residents of the white upper-class Benoordenhout neighbourhood participate in tennis or field hockey. The linking of ‘Moroccans’ to a contact sport widely perceived to be aggressive is problematic not only for the representation of



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Moroccan-Dutch youth and the sport of kickboxing, but also for the whole idea of ‘participation through sports’. In 2010, prime minister and leader of the conservative-liberal party VVD, Mark Rutte, criticized the spending of tax money on subsidies aimed at sport participation on a Dutch TV show: ‘Look at the crazy stuff that happened in a city like Utrecht, before the VVD was member of the municipal executive board. Kickboxing for Moroccan boys for example. Well, apparently we’re teaching them how to punch us even better! These kinds of things we’re not going to do. I am against all this subsidy frenzy anyway.’ Rutte directly linked the ethnic identity of a large group of Dutch kickboxers to violence and crime – aimed at ‘us’, the white Dutch population. The ‘subsidy frenzy’, as he calls it, ended in 2010 for kickboxing. After four years of promoting kickboxing and other martial arts, there was no longer any specific funding for these sports. Some gyms had to raise their fees or close. I trained extensively in two gyms in The Hague, one that only opened in the early 2010s and another that has been open since the 1990s. In the following section, we will see how these two gyms organized their training and fights during and after these tumultuous times.

COLLEAGUES AND RIVALS: TWO KICKBOXING GYMS IN THE HAGUE SOUTHWEST The Hague is an up-and-coming city when it comes to kickboxing. The number of official gyms has been growing, as has the number of fight events. Posters advertising fight events, with fierce fighters showing their muscled arms and abs, can be found all over the city and are displayed most prominently in the centre and South of the city. The sport itself, the gyms, the fighters and their practices are not as prominent in public space, because training takes place indoors, often in unidentifiable buildings and halls. The Hague Southwest is home to both SaïdGym and The Lion’s Den and the surrounding neighbourhoods are home to several other gyms. At fight events, it became apparent how both The Lion’s Den and SaïdGym are related to the larger Dutch kickboxing scene. The events were attended by people from gyms in neighbouring cities, such as Zoetermeer, Rotterdam and Leiden, and by people from gyms further away, in cities such as Den Bosch and ­Amsterdam. And, of course, other gyms from The Hague were represented as well. The Lion’s Den is one of the oldest and largest gyms in The Hague, founded by two Turkish immigrants, Kemal and Fatih, in the early 1990s. Since 2007, it has been located in a high-rise containing many offices; there is thus little interaction with direct neighbours. The building is situated just outside of the Schilderswijk and is not properly within the commercial core

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of the neighbourhood. But for many girls who live in the Schilderswijk or the surrounding neighbourhoods, the gym is within walking distance of their homes. The gym’s owners, Kemal and Fatih, explicitly state that their ambition is to provide a healthy leisure activity for the youngsters in the neighbourhood. The men know each other from when they still lived in Turkey, where they were born and raised. They remember fighting in the mountains together with wooden sticks. Both owners are trainers at the gym, as well as judges at national kickboxing competitions. The entire gym is a tribute to its success. Upon entering, one is welcomed by posters of fight events at which The Lion’s Den’s fighters have been present. On the shelves behind the counter are prizes and awards. In the dojo itself, there are more posters, also depicting fight events organized by The Lion’s Den. More prizes and awards, including belts, are displayed on the wall. Among them are several of Kemal’s and Fatih’s diplomas, proving that they are qualified to teach Muay Thai. Especially in the late 1990s, The Lion’s Den was very successful in terms of the many fighters trained there and its wins at fight events. A long wall, punctuated by windows, is covered with ten long punching bags that allow for kicking as well. A second wall is covered with mirrors, which are used for shadowboxing and perfecting techniques, while cabinets along a third wall contain other fighting gear, including punching and kicking pads, ropes and gloves. Two corners of the L-shaped hall are reserved for a small ring for practice fights and a fitness room with some weights, a bench, an elliptical machine and a stationary bike. Most of the room is empty and is used for running laps, technical exercises and sparring. The windows have blinds that can be closed and these always are closed during women-only training. A small canteen separates the entrance of the gym from the dojo. There is a see-through window through which mothers and fathers watch their kids train on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, right before the women’s training. The bar in the canteen sells water, sports drinks and snacks, as well as kickboxing gear upon request. A TV, always on, is tuned to the Eurosport channel. The women usually sit at the tables in front of the window and close to the TV; the men gather at the bar. Very often there are men, women, boys and girls, waiting for their training to start, or fathers, mothers and other family members waiting for someone to finish. From time to time, a passer-by – a family member of the owner, a former fighter or a friend of a fighter – will hang out at the bar. Adolescent girls waiting for their training sessions sometimes sit at the bar, talking to the person behind the counter – often either Fatih or Kemal or one of their relatives who sometimes help out. The women in the canteen, waiting for their kids, mainly talk amongst themselves in Turkish, while the men sometimes speak Dutch. The girls waiting for their training interact in Dutch, which is also the main language of training – for both the women-only and men’s classes. All



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pupils, however, address the trainers as Hoça, ‘master’ in Turkish.5 Owners Kemal and Fatih both train the male pupils in the dojo. Pupils at The Lion’s Den are mostly of Moroccan and Turkish descent, but there are pupils of many other different backgrounds too. Most of their male fighters are of Turkish descent, while the majority of those in the women-only training sessions are of Moroccan descent. Sanae left The Lion’s Den to train with their neighbour and rival SaïdGym. For the same reasons that The Lion’s Den is considered a Turkish gym – the background of the owners, the language spoken (besides Dutch), the flag that some of their fighters wear on their gear – SaïdGym is considered a Moroccan gym. The owner is Moroccan-Dutch, as are his trainers and most of his pupils and fighters. SaïdGym is a relatively new gym, having opened its doors in the spring of 2012, following the end of owner Saïd’s fighting career. Born and raised in The Hague, Saïd trained with other world champions in Amsterdam. After he finished his degree in international business management, he started SaïdGym. His fame as a fighter contributes to the popularity of the gym. Since he is young and ambitious, many young boys and girls see him as a role model. When the gym opened, Saïd and his family handed out flyers to people on the streets. He nevertheless thinks that most advertising occurred through word of mouth. His gym has attracted both people new to kickboxing and fighters who were already training at other gyms, including the The Lion’s Den. SaïdGym was originally located in an old multi-storey building in The Hague Southwest that housed garages on the ground floor and community centres, music clubs and church groups on the first and second floors. The gymnastics hall opened on the third floor. It is a rectangular hall with windows on both of its longer sides and it is also used by other sports clubs. The left side with windows has blinds. On the other side, there are around ten kickboxing bags. In a small corner, there is an open closet in which the pads, gloves and shin guards are piled up. Sharing a gym with another sports club or an elementary school is common; many fighters start their own ventures this way. One does not have to buy or rent a property on a full-time basis; rather, one can just rent a hall for a couple of hours in the evening. Saïd, however, was always looking to expand the premises of SaïdGym and to improve the setting in which he offered training. He soon opened a second location further away from The Hague Southwest, where only the professional fighters received their training. Other locations followed. At one point, most of the training sessions were moved to a new location in the middle of the Schilderswijk. The number of pupils, including the number of women and girls, skyrocketed after this move. In the more than twenty years that The Lion’s Den has been up and running, there have been many changes in the city council and the sports

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policies and programmes they have created. SaïdGym, on the other hand, is a new player in the field and was only established after the aforementioned programmes were implemented. Neither of the gyms depend on these governmental programmes encouraging fighting sports or immigrant sport participation, but are, rather, financially viable due to pupils paying fees. Prices for kickboxing training do not differ much nationwide and are set at around €25 a month. But there are also many pupils who do not pay a fee thanks to a municipality programme.6 The city of The Hague funds sports, culture and other leisure activities for youth through the Ooievaarspas. This pass is available for citizens of The Hague with an income no higher than 130 per cent of social assistance. At most gyms and other sports clubs, children with an Ooievaarspas do not have to pay a fee at all and get a discount on sports gear. Adults only pay half of the fee. Similar initiatives can be found in other Dutch cities, for example, the Stadspas in Amsterdam and the Rotterdampas in Rotterdam. For the gym owners and trainers, ‘societal participation’ and ‘integration’ are not direct reasons for, or goals of, their businesses. Instead, ‘keeping youth off the streets’ and providing young people with a meaningful leisure activity are an active goal for both gyms and many others like them. Training might yield some professional fighters, but for the majority of both men and women fighters, pleasure is the main goal of kickboxing. Both gyms have a solid group of trainees in all age groups: from youth to amateur adult to professional fighters. Neither The Lion’s Den nor SaïdGym would openly admit that they are rivals. However, they do, of course, fight each other in the ring at competitions. They invite each other to events and are apparently very friendly to each other. The owners claim that they do not compete for pupils, even though the gyms are near each other. Each gym has its own clientele. In both gyms, boys and girls from migrant backgrounds account for the vast majority of trainees, with Moroccan-Dutch kickboxers being the most prominent. When it comes to women’s kickboxing, rivalry is almost ­non-existent. During the year that I trained at both gyms, I only heard of one girl switching gyms. While most training sessions are open to men and women, women are a minority in the ‘regular’ training sessions. Both gyms offer separate training sessions for women and girls: so-called ‘ladies-only’ training.

WOMEN-ONLY KICKBOXING SPACES My first training sessions in The Hague did not take place in either The Lion’s Den or SaïdGym. In spring 2012, when I embarked on my search for women-only training facilities in The Hague, I explored several options. The first gym I trained in had just moved from renting the gym hall of an elementary



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school to a new building in the same area. They offered kickboxing and mixed martial arts, but also some other contact sports and yoga. The new location was much larger; the gym spent more time and money on PR and gained many more members than before. Each women-only training session was attended by approximately thirty girls, again mainly of Moroccan descent. These girls were very young, generally younger than twelve. After a summer break, I returned to this gym to find that the Moroccan-Dutch woman in charge of the women-only classes had stopped giving them for ‘personal reasons’, as the owner told me. Moreover, several young women I had met at the gym before the summer no longer seemed to come to the gym due to a change in policy. The women-only classes had previously been led by a woman and took place in a closed room, but the owner had decided that the gym should be open to everyone and that it should have an equally ‘open character’. Some parents, including fathers, wanted to watch their girls practise. Although training sessions remained gender-separated, some people might no longer have considered the training for women a women-only space. Men were allowed in (fathers who wanted to watch their daughters, boys waiting for their training to begin), the window blinds stayed open and headscarves were no longer permitted during training. When I asked why headscarves were not permitted, the trainer compared wearing headscarves to wearing caps. Neither headscarves nor caps are a part of kickboxing attire and therefore they should not be permitted. Besides, he did not want to give ‘a wrong impression to the outside world’. The outside world, to this gym owner, apparently did not include migrant or Muslim neighbours; rather, it consisted of potential ‘Dutch’ non-Muslim observers. Again, he referred to the ‘open’ character he wished to project. This resulted in a distinct change in clientele. Many Muslim women and girls, and all of those wearing veils, left because the change was at odds with their religious rationale for a women-only space. In contrast, women-only training at The Lion’s Den and SaïdGym is especially focused on Muslim girls and women. SaïdGym’s website not only mentions ‘ladies-only’ training on the gym’s schedule, but also specifically mentions that the trainer is a woman and that the windows are blinded during sessions. On the flyer they distributed, a halal stamp is visible next to the bullet points highlighting the blinded windows, the absence of men and the absence of music. Salima, founder Saïd’s sister, initiated the women-only training: We especially wanted to have the gym in this neighbourhood, because my brother and I experienced ourselves how there was no chance to participate in sports when we were young. We know that we mean a lot to the children here in Southwest. And for the ladies as well! When Saïd opened this school, I told him: ‘You need to offer ladies-only training as well.’ I personally knew so many women who would attend this training if it existed. So that’s what we did.

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Salima explained that the new kickboxing gym with women-only training sessions was purposefully established in the neighbourhood where they grew up themselves, which did not have many sports facilities. Salima promised her brother that women-only training would be a success – and it was. On average, twenty women – mainly of Moroccan-Dutch descent – attend the training sessions. Two trainers alternate between sessions. On Wednesdays, Alia, who also trains the children two days a week, trains the women. On Fridays and Sundays, Naoual is the trainer. Naoual is a 20-year-old taekwondoka who is active in competitions. She also teaches taekwondo and kickboxing at other gyms. Alia is an 18-year-old competitive kickboxer and is one of two women who train in the mixed-gender fighting group run by trainer Saïd. As is the case at SaïdGym, the women-only sessions at The Lion’s Den take place during time slots when men and children are not training. Also, training at The Lion’s Den is divided into sessions for kids, women, adult beginners and advanced adults (mainly competition fighters). The w ­ omen-only sessions are on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6 pm to 7 pm, before the kids and adult training sessions. For a while, a Turkish woman ran the training sessions. But when she quit, the training was taken over by one of The Lion’s Den’s male fighters, who injured his knee in a fight in the first month I started training there. Since then, owner Fatih has been training the women. This situation, according to Fatih, is far from ideal, but it is necessary since women trainers are hard to find. He is happy that many girls (and some women) continued to attend the women-only class. Some kept their veils on during the class. On average, ten girls attended these sessions. Three young women also attended the fighter training sessions, but none were active in competition. Among the women at The Lion’s Den, around 30 per cent have Turkish backgrounds, which is more than I had seen at other gyms. Still, the majority of girls and women had Moroccan parents or grandparents. Although the training set-up was similar at both gyms, the differences between them result in a very different atmosphere. In most gyms I have been in, I have found that the majority of girls were introduced to the sport by a relative or friend. The ties between the girls at SaïdGym are pretty tight: sisters, cousins and neighbours often join together and interaction between them was therefore quite loose. New contacts do not seem to be made easily. This may also be because women at SaïdGym do not change in a locker room. They just pick a corner in the main hall in which to change, joined by friends and relatives. At The Lion’s Den, around ten girls spend about fifteen to twenty minutes in the same small room before and after training. The exchange of hairbands, deodorant, music and, of course, stories seems to facilitate the creation of new friendships. The gender of the trainer results in an important difference in the social interactions in



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women’s training sessions. Many women who attend SaïdGym wear hijabs and abayas in everyday life, but take their head coverings and long clothing off during training. Since the space is exclusively for women, many wear shorts and tank tops; not one woman keeps her veil on during training. At The Lion’s Den, however, fewer women wear a veil in everyday life, but most of those who do keep it on during training. Long clothing, such as leggings under shorts and long-sleeved shirts, is more common at The Lion’s Den than at SaïdGym. As chapter 3 will show, topics of conversation and body language differ as well. The way in which time slots are organized (between the children’s and men’s sessions) and the way in which women’s sessions are framed as ‘less serious’ are legacies of the history of women’s kickboxing. Kickboxing and other combat sports have been quintessentially masculine spaces. The few pioneering women in kickboxing in the 1990s had to be ‘one of the guys’ and often had to engage in practices and spaces as the only women present. In that sense, fighting sports such as boxing and kickboxing became ‘mixed-gender’ when women actively and individually decided to engage in these spaces, which had previously been exclusively for men. At The Lion’s Den and SaïdGym, the organization of women’s kickboxing sessions is an extra feature and not the core business.

CONCLUSION Women-only kickboxing constitutes a leisure activity for many girls and young women in neighbourhoods where sport facilities are scarce. These girls’ and young women’s sport participation is, however, situated not only within a specific geographical space, but within a politically contested space. The neighbourhoods that the women and girls call home are sites of national contestation, played out in the media and politics, but also enabled through policies on integration, neighbourhood and planning, and sports and ­exercise. Within the context of a national civilizationalist project of integration through sports, the participation of Moroccan-Dutch citizens in kickboxing can be seen as a vicious circle. Kickboxing is promoted for ‘Moroccan’ and ‘Muslim’ young people because it is already a popular sport among them. As a result of how neighbourhood sports are implemented, it is also one of the sports to which they have easiest access. While participation, or meedoen, is presented as a means of emancipation, it simultaneously reinforces the status quo. On the one hand, the involvement of young people in sports has grown significantly over the last two decades, enabling many young men and women to allow their new leisure activity to shape their lives. On the

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other hand, although young people may gain agency through participation in sports, limiting social structures are maintained. The promotion of certain sports for specific minorities contributes to reinforcing differences between people. Sports policy documents reveal how race/ethnicity is often the basis for social categorization. Even if the words change – meedoen instead of participatie, alle instead of allochthone – the underlying discourse does not. And while implementing sports programmes  as part of neighbourhood regeneration supposedly transcends ethnic profiling, social categorizations are still implicitly reproduced in everyday practice. The positive outcome of this vicious circle is that it provides some free space, facilitates enjoyment and encourages physical health. But in terms of policies and demographic relations, the effect is to maintain separateness. Not all participation is equal. The fact that kickboxing is promoted to ‘Moroccans’ or ‘Muslims’, or in the neighbourhoods in which they live, complicates the riddle of ‘sports equals integration’. Migrants’ participation in sports is regarded as integration as such because it is a form of participation in society. But with kickboxing – subsidized for years by local and national governments and accessible to ‘Moroccans’ and ‘Muslims’ – this engagement is valued differently. The lack of professionalization and regulation in kickboxing, as we shall see in chapter 5, evinces its devaluation. In short, while minorities who participate in sports (in theory) are supposedly considered integrated, Moroccan-Dutch kickboxers (in practice) are marginalized and stigmatized. Not only are Dutch citizens expected to participate in activities that the government prescribes as healthy and civilized, the disciplined, healthy body is supposed to be an integrated body. But the social categorizations that are regularly reproduced prevent a real transformation of social, cultural, political and economic structures. This chapter has shown how neighbourhoods in The Hague Southwest organize their kickboxing gyms and their women-only training session, and how they are situated in histories of integration politics. Women like Salima changed the field of kickboxing in a significant way through the creation of training sessions for women. The women-only sessions enable young women and girls to engage in a leisurely neighbourhood activity and give them the pleasure of a sporting identity. The next chapter will continue this exploration of access to sports and the ambiguities of choosing to practise sports and become an athlete.



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NOTES  1. This is a variation on the better-known kaaskop (cheese-head) used to emphasize the ‘Dutchness’ of a person.  2. See also Özyürek (2017: 53–56) for a more elaborate account of how Muslim European converts choose (or do not choose) to live in Muslim immigrant neighbourhoods.  3. Racist incidents and police brutality are on the rise in the Schilderswijk, as demonstrated in the documentary Blauw en Bont (NPO 2014). After the chokehold death of Mitch Henriquez (Haspels 2015), riots against the police in the Schilderswijk were reported worldwide (see, e.g., Darroch 2015).  4. The essentialization of ethnic background is common in government sports programmes. The Dutch Baseball Association (KNBSB) focused on Caribbean youth, while the Dutch Gymnastic Association (KNGU) promoted ‘Bollywood dance’ for ‘Hindustani’ girls (VWS/WWI 2007).  5. Hoça means ‘master’ or ‘teacher’ in Turkish and is comparable to ‘sensei’, which is often used in martial arts. The trainer, Fatih, was Turkish and so were the majority of his students. All pupils, not only those with a Turkish background, addressed him as Hoça.  6. Some of the competitive fighters do not pay a fee as they (eventually) pay off by winning fights.

CHAPTE R 2

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Loubna, a 17-year-old high school student, joined The Lion’s Den in November. I observed her closely that day, because I was struck by her unease. I remembered how uncomfortable I had been when I started kickboxing. When the trainer loudly called for a ‘line-up’ at the start of the session, Loubna looked around, at the trainer, at her peers and at the trainer again, to understand the meaning of those words. There are so many unwritten rules and unanswered questions, even before training actually starts: how many lines are we forming? How much distance should one keep? Should a new student choose a spot at the back? These questions are neither asked by students nor answered in words by the trainers; rather, the answers are learned by doing. Loubna shuffled around a bit and chose a spot in the back. Trainer Naoual walked past the line, gently touched her shoulders and moved her a bit to make sure the line was straight. In this formation, we warmed up by performing some technique exercises: running in place, shadowboxing, high knees, jumping jacks, squats – the usual. After several years of training in various gyms, cities and countries, training sessions had ceased to surprise me. Any given session followed a certain recognizable structure in which there was just a little room for alterations and improvisations. During that first training session, and some more sessions after that, Loubna giggled during exercises, because she was out of her comfort zone. Her high knees were not high, not fast, not powerful, not moving at the right pace. Three months later, when we talked about her first moments as a kickboxer, she described how she had been nervous and excited, with no idea of what to expect. Like me and many other first-time kickboxers, the only training regime she had been familiar with was physical education at high school. By listening to the trainer, copying the moves of peers and being corrected by both trainer and peers, Loubna got the hang of it. As a beginner, she noticed how skills became incorporated in her body. The basics of the techniques are daunting at first, but become automatized quite quickly. Beginners must actively think about keeping their left foot in front, in the general kickboxing stance, and must always remember to ‘cross’ their punches: the left fist goes into the left punching bag or glove of the



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opponent in the exercise. Keeping your left foot in front becomes automatic. And while crossing punches might feel counter-intuitive for beginners, after three months Loubna stated that ‘it just wouldn’t be an option anymore to punch my left fist in a straight line into the right glove of the opponent. I think that is when you start seeing yourself becoming a kickboxer, you start feeling like you are a kickboxer, really.’

I

t is not possible to train a couple of times a week without starting to feel like a kickboxer, even if the pupil has no intention of becoming a competitive fighter. In the vignette above, Loubna reflects on the habituation involved in kickboxing – how new skills become automatic and intuitive – and how that influences students’ identification as kickboxers. Members of the ­women-only classes become recreational kickboxers through learning together. By focusing on learning in doing, rather than learning as a solely cognitive process, we can explore the relationship between the agent and the world that is implicit in the ‘internalization’ of knowledge. When we study learning, knowing and meaning in social settings, we have to approach the internalization of knowledge from a relational perspective (Lave and Wenger 1991, building on Bourdieu 1977). This implies both historicizing processes of learning (e.g. Desmond 2006) and taking into account the fact that understanding and experience are mutually constitutive. By showing how individual skilled identities and the reproduction of communities are embedded in ‘legitimate peripheral participation’, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s work paved the way for a renewed focus on apprenticeship within the social sciences. The relational character of knowledge and the ‘situatedness’ of learning have been further explored by anthropologists studying ‘enskilment’ (such as Downey 2010; Ingold 2000; Pálsson 1994), who argue that practical engagement in the world is part of how people learn. Enskilment can be understood as ‘the embodiment of capacities of awareness and response by environmentally situated agents’ (Ingold 2000: 5). The theoretical concept of enskilment helps critically investigates people’s bodily comportment, manner of movement and relation to their environment. It is through skills that cultural variations are enacted. Knowing that learning is not merely a transfer of embodied knowledge, the question becomes how women, in learning the skills and norms of kickboxing, in a different (women-only) environment, learn values and assume social identities in a different way to their male counterparts. Learning and a sense of belonging are inseparable because participation always entails membership in a community of practice. Literature on situated learning and enskilment, however, often treats community and community membership too rigidly. Although multiple authors allude to the fluid nature of communities, they approach membership generally in quite a static manner. The communities of practice and the learning processes they study often imply an ideal type of ‘full member’, such as a midwife (Lave and Wenger 1991),

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fisherman (Pálsson 1994), capoeirista (Downey 2005) or mason (Marchand 2008). Similarly, sport scholars show how habituation leads to a static ‘end product’, whether it is ‘The Boxer’ (Wacquant 2004), ‘The Wrestler’ (Alter and Alter 1992) or ‘The Tennis Player’ (Noble and Watkins 2003). The question becomes how learning kickboxing affects women’s subjectivities and how enskilment, in a religious and ethnoracial minority in the Netherlands, affects their practice of and identification with kickboxing. This chapter explores the process of acquiring bodily knowledge and techniques as a means of (re)producing group formation and a sense of belonging. Kickboxing shows us that learning is not merely a transfer of knowledge from the trainer to her pupils, nor is it merely about modelling and copying. It is a form of coordination between a person’s body, perceptions, resources, tools and environment that, in this case, is very much based on peer learning. It is precisely through learning together that group formation and senses of belonging are produced. Learning kickboxing is not a linear process, because it is imbued with ideas of race/ethnicity, gender, age and locality. This chapter therefore renders explicit the specificity of bodies and contexts, and shows that becoming a kickboxer is different in different environments.

DEFINING ‘WHAT WE DO’ ‘You have to understand the important differences between Thai boxing and kickboxing. Look, boxing is just punching, and you have to work with your feet, of course: pah, pah, pah.’ Amina punches several times and dances around in the locker room. ‘We also include kicks: low-kick, middle-kick, high-kick: h-tss, h-tss, h-tss.’ She demonstrates every move with a sound. ‘They do that in taekwondo, too. And then there are the knees, and clinching. Some include clinching, some don’t. The time when clinching is allowed is also different in various places. We, in this gym, we also clinch. And then finally, there are the elbows. But we don’t do that. Only real Thai boxers do that. After a dramatic pause she continues: ‘So Soumaya can say she is a Thai boxer – well, everybody can say that – but actually Thai boxing is only practised in Thailand. There are only like two or three Dutch guys who can compete there. And definitely no women.’

Such was the answer trainer Amina gave when a student asked, ‘What is it actually that we do?’, in the first kickboxing gym I attended in Amsterdam in 2009. To understand kickboxing, we need to look at fighting sports and martial arts more broadly. In Europe, martial arts are often divided between so-called Eastern and Western arts. The former originated in Asian countries such as Japan, China, Korea and Thailand; popular examples in the Netherlands include judo, karate and aikido (Theeboom 2001: 11–14), but also the



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Korean sport taekwondo, which Amina herself was trained in as a child. Besides their geographical origins, ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ fighting techniques are said to differ in their approaches. The goal of ‘Western’ sports, such as wrestling, boxing and fencing, is to win the match; ‘Eastern’ martial arts are often part of broader philosophies or religions that emphasize spiritual enlightenment. In any case, the mutual influence of martial arts on each other in recent decades has led to blurred boundaries. Kickboxing is a good example of these blurred boundaries. While Muay Thai or Thai boxing has been practised in Thailand for centuries, kickboxing is said to have originated in Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s as a combination of boxing and karate (Cave 2003). ‘Kickboxing’, as I use the term in this book, is an umbrella term for contact sports based on kicking and punching, with variations around the world. ‘Dutch kickboxing’ developed as a combination of boxing, Muay Thai and karate (Coenen and de Ruiter 2012; Harinck 1988). Several trainers I spoke with said that their style of kickboxing was further influenced by their training in taekwondo or karate. There is thus only a thin line between the techniques used in kickboxing, Muay Thai and Thai boxing – the use of knees and elbows being the main difference. Most online descriptions of kickboxing and Muay Thai explain that the difference is the use of knees and elbows in Muay Thai.1 However, many Dutch kickboxers do use their knees (but not their elbows). The haziness surrounding these variations is discussed both online and in locker rooms. In The Hague, some gyms offer kickboxing; others advertise Thai boxing or Muay Thai. The same applies to the promotion of kickboxing or Thai boxing events. In the absence of national or international consensus, each association has its own rules. Every fight night is different. Both gyms where I trained – The Lion’s Den and SaïdGym – use the terms kickboxing, Thai boxing and Muay Thai more or less interchangeably. But the terms are nuanced. While kickboxing is perceived as a violent sport, Muay Thai is known for its finesse and heritage, and is seen as more of an art form. Many students, both men and women, thus referred to their practice as Muay Thai or Thai boxing due to Muay Thai’s claim to authenticity, to specialness. But in practice, variations of the sport overlap. Although ‘what we do’ differs depending on the gym, the teacher and sometimes even the training session, specific rules and styles govern both kickboxing and Thai boxing in the Netherlands. While they may vary slightly between gyms and events (as we will see in this chapter), the basic fighting skills are the same. Defining ‘what we do’ also entails understanding the type of combat sports that the women practise. Starting from Alex Channon and Christopher R. Matthews’s (2015) typology of combat sports, the women-only kickboxing in the two gyms in this study might be best understood as ‘recreational martial arts’. Most participants (although certainly not all of them) are not

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interested in competitive fighting and do not reach the level of competence necessary for competitive fighting. Instead, the women are motivated more by the benefits of gym membership (Channon and Jennings 2014; Lantz 2002; Theeboom 2012), educational aims (Vertonghen et al. 2015) and, most importantly, pleasure and excitement (McCaughey 1998; Mierzwinski and Phipps 2015; Thing 2001). This particular form of recreational kickboxing does include some of the characteristics of the other four groupings of ­activities – combat workouts, purposive self-defence, competitive fighting and performative combat – that Channon and Matthews (2015) propose. Some trainers occasionally allude to the properties of self-defence involved in kickboxing, which they are particularly inclined to frame as a means of preventing sexual assault perpetrated by men. And, as will be explained in chapter 3, some women explicitly practise women-only kickboxing to shape the ‘feminine’ body, as in combat workouts. At the same time, both the practitioners and trainers in women-only kickboxing consider it very important that kickboxing is a competitive sport. Even though most practitioners will not fight competitively and some will not even participate in sparring during training, the option to fight (in the future) and the association with competitive fighting are crucial. Salma, a 20-year-old recreational kickboxer, explained that combat was the reason she chose SaïdGym. She was also a member of the women-only fitness gym in the same neighbourhood. I joined her for a gym session in which she alternated between cardio exercise on the stationary bike and treadmill and strength training on gym machines. When we left the gym, we passed a room in which a Zumba dance class was taking place. Salma explained that there were other types of group sessions as well, such as ‘something that resembles kickboxing – I don’t know what they call that nonsense’. While she frequents the fitness gym to engage in types of exercise that are not part of kickboxing, she considers combat workouts, such as ‘tae-bo’ or ­‘body-combat’, to be nonsense. Like most kickboxers and other (recreational) fighters, she does not associate combat workouts with combat. Her choice of kickboxing is very much related to the combative nature of the sport, the allure of competitive fighting and the allure of a true martial art. Part of the allure of a competitive martial art is being able to identify as a martial artist, Thai boxer or kickboxer. Rather than only being able to say ‘I work out’, these young women and girls can state, ‘I am a kickboxer’. An important part of learning kickboxing is identification with the sport and the pleasure of identifying with it. The practice actually begins before bodies move. Projection and visualization are conscious aspects of habituation and are not to be neglected: ‘every kid who kicks a ball and fantasizes that they are David Beckham is therefore involved in the imagining of a potential habitus’ (Noble and Watkins 2003: 531). The same is true of kickboxers who buy or borrow their



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first fighting gear. The next step in becoming and being a kickboxer involves learning the skills of the craft: the rules, the discourse, the techniques and acceptable social behaviour.

LEARNING TOGETHER The old building in which SaïdGym was located was not designed for sports, and the gym was not designed for gender-separated training sessions. The locker rooms – one for women and one for men – were located downstairs, on the first floor. The students were supposed to change into their sport attire, walk down a long and cold hallway, and take two flights upstairs to reach the gym. Many women therefore chose not to use the locker room, instead changing in the gym hall itself. The women’s training session took place right after the kids’ training, so the kids would still be training when the first women walked in. On the windowsills, which were used as benches, mothers and occasionally fathers waited for their kids to finish training. Some of the mothers stayed for the women’s training, in which case the kids would wait on the windowsills for the following hour. Roughly fifteen minutes before the women’s training session started, the pupils began trickling in and found their favourite spots on the windowsills. The 14- and 16-yearold sisters Zaynab and Jamila always came earlier and claimed their spot at the back. Their friends would join them shortly thereafter. It was not uncommon for the trainer to warn them not to talk and laugh too loudly while the kids’ training was finishing up. Both sisters fully covered their bodies in daily life, wearing long trousers and shirts and a hijab to cover their hair. They did not dress in the locker rooms downstairs, because they would have to walk up to the gym hall uncovered. They changed into their kickboxing gear in the gym hall, only after the men – the kids’ trainer and fathers of young kids – had left the room. Moreover, the young women who did not cover their hair and all of their bodies in daily life also changed in the gym hall, both because it was convenient and for social reasons. The women waited on the windowsills, chatting and slowly preparing for training, without changing their clothes yet. After they took their shoes and coats off and removed their gear from their bags, the young women started wrapping their hands. This preparation for training is one of the first techniques that new kickboxers have to master: wrapping a 2- to 5-metre bandage around the hands to protect wrists and knuckles from injury. The wrapping of hands before training is an act of peer learning that relies on solidarity. The more advanced students teach the ‘newbies’ the right techniques. When I complimented Semra, a 17-year-old kickboxer who had started kickboxing just three months previous, on how

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she helped a new pupil wrap her hands, she responded: ‘Sure, you help people when they’re new. I’m proud that I can do that now. I remember when I just started, someone helped me too. That’s what you do. You cannot expect someone to know it when they are new.’ Wrapping their hands, as they wait for the previous group to finish their training, is one of the most significant moments of social interaction in the gym. The students learn from each other and help each other in preparing for training. That is not to say that the trainers were not involved in this learning process and in facilitating peer learning. Trainers sometimes corrected students, explaining that the wrist should be supported more or that the bandage should not be wrinkled. They sometimes taught new students how to wrap or helped young girls as this got them ready for training faster. With more advanced students, the trainer occasionally discussed variations in technique: sometimes the wrap goes between the fingers, while in other techniques it does not, or the knuckles get extra protection, or the wrists. I overheard one trainer explaining to a more advanced student that she should ‘try this technique. But if you help others, it is better to use the standard wrapping.’ Learning the technique involved in wrapping hands demonstrates that learning is not a unilateral transmission of skills between teacher and student, but a contextual process that involves various individuals and their environments (Harris 2007). Learning in the gym is also quintessentially a social activity that enhances the feeling of group membership. Semra’s reaction shows that the acquisition of such a basic technique in kickboxing resulted in both pride and group feeling, which was a result of helping out and doing something together. In the recreational women-only kickboxing training sessions, sociability is of great importance in the way that membership is constructed. Trainers in the women-only sessions at both gyms incorporated techniques to make training interactive and fun. While warming up and stretching before each class, the trainers often tried to include new and exciting variations. Warming up usually started with running a couple of laps in the gym. During the run, several techniques of loosening the joints of the hips, knees and shoulders were practiced. At both gyms, sprinting was also part of the warm-up; sometimes this took the form of a competitive game, such as tag or a relay race. Warm-ups also consisted of exercises that students executed while standing in lines and moving in place, as we saw in the opening vignette of this chapter. The warm-up was often followed by stretching or strength exercises. Warming up and stretching were usually individual exercises, but they were executed simultaneously with everyone else. Interaction with others was not needed or allowed. However, in practice, everyone used warming up (and cooling down) as an opportunity to catch up: the girls and young women spoke about their plans for the weekend, discussed homework, gossiped, etc. While some trainers tried to implement a strict ‘no-talking’



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policy, warming up and cooling down were frequently exempted. Moreover, the trainers themselves often walked around the room and engaged in these conversations. Even during individual stretching exercises and strength training, interaction between students is essential for group formation. Strength training mainly consisted of push-ups and abdominal exercises, both of which had several variations. The trainer counted to ten, in Dutch, Korean or both, and repeated this count as many times as she pleases.2 But again, students were not merely asked to follow and imitate the movements; their active involvement was required. For example, students sometimes had to count one at a time, or all simultaneously. Occasionally, counting happened during stretching as well. While other sports might only require stretching for warming up or cooling down, stretching exercises are quite extensive in kickboxing training. Special attention is paid to the flexibility of the legs and hips because of the importance of kicking movements. The women helped each other during the stretching exercises, for example, by providing gentle pressure when doing splits or bend-overs. While most beginner kickboxers do not see the value of extensive stretching, I have seen how surprised many have been upon noticing their improved flexibility after a couple of months: It is such a big difference. Not only with the exercises on the floor, you know. Before, I could never reach your face with a high kick and now … Hold your hand beside your head? (She stops talking and shows me how high she can kick by lightly touching my hand with her foot.) And it is not only higher, you know. Now I really understand what Naoual means when she talks about turning the hip more when kicking. (Stops and kicks again.) Bam! (Raja, eighteen years old)

Raja demonstrated how the repetition of stretching techniques had a lasting effect on her body. It changed her. Again, there was a certain pride and excitement in this statement and her enjoyment showing me her kicking skills. She was consciously producing a kickboxer’s habitus. In order to understand how a kickboxer’s habitus and group feeling are created, I will take a closer look at the core of the training: the partner exercises.

PARTNERING UP The hyper-individual sport of kickboxing cannot be practised alone. More than just training together and helping each other with individual exercises, such as stretching, or preparations, such as wrapping hands, most of kickboxing training is done in pairs. The sociability of training in a group is also most apparent in exercises for which a training partner is needed. Technique exercises, of which there are many variations, form the core of all training

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at all gyms. It is the part of training in which concentration matters most and when the no-talking policy is most strictly enforced. Techniques can be practised using training pads (called Thai pads when used in other martial arts), punching bags or a sparring partner. Pads are used to practise strength and technique, punching bags for training both strength and speed, while training with a sparring partner ensures interaction and simulates a fight. Both punching and kicking techniques can be trained in all three ways. Most often, the trainer demonstrates a combination of punches and/or kicks. When using the punching bags, these combinations are usually very simple, for example, left jab, right jab, left hook. This combination then has to be repeated for one to three minutes. Sometimes the trainer asks students to perform jabs, hooks or uppercuts as fast as possible for a whole minute. The same exercises can be done with a partner holding pads. In this way, more complicated techniques can be practised and pupils can help and correct each other. Most kicking techniques are also practised with pads, but with larger pads than the ones used for punching. Depending on the way the partner holds the pad, low kicks, middle kicks, high kicks, front kicks or knee strikes can be practised. The same techniques can be practised with only the partner, wearing her gear (gloves and shin guards). This is the best way to practise combinations with punches and kicks. When training with a partner, the exercises are not only about attacking, but also about defence. Keeping your guard up (protecting your head and waist), for example, is the most important defence technique to be practised. A low kick has to be blocked by raising one knee to the side, while still protecting your head with your hands and your waist with your elbows. Knee strikes and clinching can be practised as well. When props such as pads and bags are used, the trainer times the exercises. At The Lion’s Den, a boxing clock is used. It beeps after one round of two or three minutes and again after a break of thirty or sixty seconds. At SaïdGym, the trainers use timers on their mobile phones. Fighting another body rather than a boxing bag not only increases a fighter’s skills; it also makes the sport an intimate group practice in which pupils get to know their own and each other’s bodies. Although there is minimal chatting, the movements themselves form an intimate connection between the students. Catching each other’s punches and kicks, negotiating the speed and force of the exercises through movement and breath, progressing towards learning specific skills, the partner exercises build on relationships of trust. Due to the intimacy and sociability involved in technique exercises, pupils often prefer to train with their friends and relatives when they can. While opponents in fighting tournaments are divided on the basis of gender, weight and experience, in training pupils ideally pair up with different partners each time because ‘a different body provides new challenges, a new field to carry out a fighter’s body techniques’ (Spencer 2009: 132).



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Sometimes, trainers allow students to pick their own training partners. At other times, the trainers decide who will train with whom. Partnering up, when the student can choose for herself, happens along social lines. It was not only weight, height and experience that appeared to be important in choosing partners, but so was age. For me, this had consequences for how I experienced fieldwork at the two gyms. At SaïdGym, I was one of the older students and often trained with Salima, Márcia, Salma and Marieke, all of whom were around thirty years old, like myself, and with Naima, Ghanim and Omeira, all in their twenties. I also trained with girls aged fourteen to sixteen years, such as Jamila, Zaynab and Hind. These were the best kickboxers in women-only training at SaïdGym, so the age gap was bridged by their experience. Since they were ambitious and serious during training, I enjoyed sparring sessions with them, despite the difference in age and, to a lesser extent, weight. My personal connection to them was, however, different from my relationships with the older girls, as it was not based on conversation but on our mutual love for the practice of kickboxing. At The Lion’s Den, I was the only woman in her thirties. In fact, most of the time, I was the only woman over the age of twenty. So not only was I much older than the girls in the group, the gap between us seemed even larger because there was no age group in between that could bridge the groups, as was the case at SaïdGym. Even though I participated in training, I could not participate in many interactions in the same way as I could at SaïdGym. At The Lion’s Den, I often had a hard time partnering up for one-on-one exercises. The younger girls – Yasmina, Ouarda, Mounia and many others – formed the majority and were between eight and fourteen years old. The way in which they interacted with each other and sang and danced and chatted in class was not only ‘too young’ for me, but also did not match my personality. The age difference was also apparent in the difference in height. Since one needs a partner who is about the same height to practise moves correctly, I could not do the partner or sparring exercises with most of girls at The Lion’s Den. I therefore mostly partnered up with Özge, Fatiha, Maysa and Meryem, all of whom were around sixteen or seventeen years old and about the same height as me. Inevitably, older, taller and more experienced fighters train together more often, creating divisions along these lines in the gym. This is particularly observable in the last exercise of every training session: sparring. Since kickboxing is a full-contact sport, the ultimate partner exercise in kickboxing is sparring, which is a simulation of a fight. Because of the physical risks involved, in some gyms sparring is only practised by students who have been training for more than a couple of months. Both SaïdGym and The Lion’s Den, however, train their pupils to spar from the first day. The trainers believe that pupils have to get used to sparring as soon as possible, ‘because

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that is what kickboxing is about!’ Peer learning is an inherent part of kickboxing training and sparring can be seen as the fundamental peer exercise. It not only requires pupils to practise their attacking and defending skills, following the instruction of the trainer, but also to improvise combinations of punches and kicks while protecting their own bodies. It requires respect for each other’s boundaries and reflection on each other’s bodies and movements. This is a constant negotiation with each new training partner. For example, training with Fatiha, one of the strongest girls at The Lion’s Den, was quite hard for me in my first months of training. Fatiha was only sixteen years old at the time and about the same height as me, but I did not agree with how she trained. The first couple of times I trained with her, I tried to explain why I thought she was not sparring right. I told her that I thought she was using all her force, especially in her low kicks, and that her technique was not good. I remember saying, ‘I could also kick that hard if you’re trying to kick me in my shins! You should try to aim at my thighs!’ She explained that I was not used to the pain yet and that she was really trying to ensure she did not kick as hard as she could. She said that she could not be ‘even softer’, which I thought was nonsense. I also felt frustrated because Fatiha was a notorious slacker. She kicked very hard when the trainer was around, but whenever he turned his back, she did not do much. I thought, ‘Well, I could also kick that hard if it was only for ten seconds and I could relax after that.’ She was never able or willing to be fully active for the full hour. We often trained together that year and we got used to each other’s ways. After several months, she openly recalled how much trouble we had had at the beginning of the year. She complimented me on becoming tougher as I was no longer whining about her hard kicks. I agreed with her that my body was coping with the pain better than before; her kicks no longer hurt as much. My experience of training with Fatiha showed how physical and social interaction in the gym contributes to the group experience. Partner-to-partner correction, as described in this experience with Fatiha, is part of all training. Dale C. Spencer (2009: 131) argues that partner-to-partner correction constructs the development of new habits as a social act. While I was toughened up by Fatiha’s approach to and style of kickboxing, she may have learned from my technical approach. Some girls protested when they could not choose their own sparring partner, but the trainer explained that she preferred to choose the pairs because most girls would choose to spar with their best friends. The trainer pairs them with someone else so they experience fighting with someone different. In my own practice, I noticed that the trainer sometimes paired me with a more advanced girl to challenge me and sometimes with someone who needed to be challenged. But, more commonly, she ensured that sparring partners were almost equal in their abilities to ensure that both pupils learn



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as much as possible and work towards improving their skills. Moreover, the rotation of partners in training establishes a group feeling in women-only training. In general, more experienced fighters have more leverage when correcting peers than inexperienced fighters. In this instance with Fatiha, however, each of us believed ourselves to be the more experienced fighter: I believed my technical skills were better, she believed she was stronger. In training with Fatiha, I learned that, as a new pupil in this gym, I did not leave a good impression when I started correcting peers in the first few training sessions, even though my previous experience at other gyms made me a more knowledgeable kickboxer. At The Lion’s Den, I had to adjust to the role of being the new pupil first. To establish rapport, I had to consciously allow room for others to correct me and learn from them. Peer learning and correcting happened at both the gyms – they are at the core of kickboxing training. The foundation of the training sessions, involving warming up, technique exercises, sparring, etc., is alike at both gyms, as are most of the exercises. The similarities between The Lion’s Den and SaïdGym not only show how kickboxing as a martial art is produced in the repetition of its movements, but how informal instruction is key in learning the craft. In Marcel Mauss’s terms, a ‘group feeling’ is produced through the learning of bodily techniques, maybe even more so as a result of the specific interaction between peers (Mauss 1934). The development of kickboxing habits as a social act is further reinforced by the role of the trainers and their subtle instruction.

THE ROLE OF THE TRAINER As Loubna explained in the opening vignette, one can only truly consider oneself a kickboxer when kickboxing skills become automated skills. Skill acquisition through the performance of routine activities is a key feature of enculturation (Dilley 1999). More than in. other martial arts, the habituation of embodied kickboxing knowledge is an implicit process. According to Mark Harris (2007), one should speak not of bodily knowledge, which implies a reified entity, but rather of ways of knowing. Inspired by Judith Butler’s (2011) theory of performativity, Harris emphasizes that knowledge is always a process. He argues that language is not the model for all forms of thinking (as Chomsky and others suppose); rather, all behaviour is grounded in embodied forms of cognition. The habituation of kickboxing is characterized by a learning by doing that is most often not verbally explicated. Loïc Wacquant (2004: 102) points out that a trainer or master in more codified combat sports, such as judo and aikido, demonstrates and explains moves and sub-moves in detail, but that is not the case in boxing. Learning kickboxing, which is influenced by

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boxing, Muay Thai and sometimes other martial arts, involves, like boxing, an initiation through imitation and peer learning. This became clear to me in 2014, when I signed up for a three-month course of taekwondo, which made me rethink my practice of a specific back kick. The name of the kick varies between disciplines and even between trainers in the same discipline. After some internet research, I now call it the reverse roundhouse/heel kick. While kickboxing in Amsterdam with trainer Amina, I practised this advanced kick several times. She simply called it achteruit trap (backwards kick) in Dutch. Amina has had a career as a professional kickboxer, but she began her training in taekwondo as a child. In the kickboxing scene, she is known for her precise kicks, a result of her taekwondo background. I also practised this kick in The Hague, where trainer Naima, with her background in karate, used its Japanese name ushiro mawashi geri. In Berlin, where I engaged in taekwondo training with Mustafa, I came to know the kick by its Korean name: bandae dollyo chagi. I struggled not only to remember the kick’s names in different languages, but also to master its movements – and this after three years of (irregular) training. In Amina’s training, I just had to watch and follow. Sometimes I tried to divide the move into different graspable sub-moves. Naima demonstrated each sub-move by counting its different parts. Mustafa gave the most precise instructions. He not only counted the steps of the move while demonstrating, but also demonstrated each sub-move and trained his pupils to do each sub-move first. Although I had been quite confident in my kick in Amina’s training, I felt like a total beginner in Mustafa’s class. I tried for several minutes but was unable to do it correctly. My training buddy, who had known me for several months, was just as surprised that I could not do the kick. He demonstrated the whole kick again and said: ‘Now try to do it without thinking’. Which I did. The experience made me realize that there are different ways to get to this one specific kick. Learning the kick with Amina taught me the visual imagery of the full kick, which influences the way I understand the correct procedures to get there: one fluent, automatic movement. To make it a habitual movement, a movement that feels like an automatic reaction, repetition is key. But the way one is taught to do the kick – whether through mimicking the entire move or parsing the move into sub-moves – makes a difference to its execution and the experience of the move. These differences in the bodily and mental experience with different trainers illustrate how two cognitive domains of visual imagery and representing the procedure exist and how they have trouble interacting with each other (Marchand 2007). There is one specific kick, but different ways to get there. Mimicry and repetition are the keys to its mastery. One does not learn just a single movement, but several procedures to finally get to the move the trainer demonstrates.



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The role of the trainer should, however, not be misjudged. Seemingly informal instructions during training might prove to be an educational strategy in the long run. Kickboxing is not a unilateral teaching process from trainer to pupil; interaction with other pupils can be just as important, although it is the task of the trainer to create the circumstances to make this possible. It is also important to keep in mind that the trainer remains actively involved in the exercises. This is particularly clear when we look at the ways in which new pupils are initiated into kickboxing training. After I had been training for only two weeks at The Lion’s Den, a new pupil, Siham, joined our sessions. Hoça Fatih assigned her to train with me. I was proud that he thought I was good enough to pair up with a new pupil; although I had previous kickboxing experience, I was a newbie at this particular gym. To help me get the movements right and to see what I was capable of, he had always paired me with more advanced pupils until then. Hoça demonstrated the movement several times and commented orally on specific important points. The pupils in pairs had to imitate him. Before even starting, Siham expressed her doubts about her ability to ever get this movement right. ‘Don’t worry’, I told her. ‘We’ll just do it step by step.’ I again demonstrated what Hoça had done, only more slowly. Whenever necessary, Hoça Fatih corrected me, the more advanced student – not Siham, the beginner. Siham stood in front of me and imitated my movements. We repeated this several times until I noticed that she could do it without me demonstrating. She did it on her own a couple of times. ‘See, you can do it!’ I told her. Two months later, another new pupil joined. This time, Hoça asked Siham to pair up with her. From a distance, while doing my own training, I watched Siham proudly transmitting her knowledge to a new pupil. In research on sports and habitus, the process of learning and the role of trainers are often underestimated (Noble and Watkins 2003). The trainer is nevertheless key to both creating a common base of techniques and skills and a group feeling. Team sports, in particular, are known for their potential for bonding. While team activities are understood to enhance abilities to work together, respect differences, etc. (Vermeulen and Verweel 2009; Walseth 2008), learning together is also central in individual sports like kickboxing. It is, however, the task of the trainer to create the circumstances to make this possible. In his work on the Brazilian martial art and dance capoeira, Greg Downey argues that ‘imitation is often supported by sophisticated, subtle teaching techniques, even in informal education’ (2008: 205). What might first appear to be a simple practice of imitation is, on closer examination, more complex. While the student tries to imitate, sometimes with the help of a sparring partner, there is always the assistance of the trainer. The trainer offers his or her expertise by scaffolding imitation (Downey 2008): altering or exaggerating the movement, isolating a difficult part of a sequence, or coaching students through difficult stages.

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A consideration of these scaffolding techniques allows one to recognize that imitation is not simply modelling and copying certain bodily knowledge; rather, ‘learning a skill is the development within the novice of an ability to coordinate the body with the environment’ (Downey 2008: 211, referring to Harris 2005). Taking scaffolding and other techniques into account when studying the practices of imitation leads us to understand the relation between the agent and the world in a different way. A focus on skills acquisition highlights that the performance of routine activities is a key feature of enculturation (Dilley 1999). Enculturation, however, implies that learning entails the ‘internalization of collective representation’ (Ingold 2000: 416). It is identification as a kickboxer that is collectively represented through learning kickboxing. Above all, identification as a kickboxer is produced by practising kickboxing techniques. This group feeling of ‘being a kickboxer’ crosses the borders of gyms, neighbourhoods, countries, age, class and gender. Simultaneously with this overarching identification as a kickboxer is differentiation on different levels, such as between countries, and bonds, and differences between local gyms and individual fighters. I now home in on how learning specific techniques creates the group experience of a certain gym and its fighting style.

FIGHTING STYLE When it comes to the actual practice of kickboxing, gym owners and trainers often seem to like arguing that their personal training style is their trademark. I experienced the difference in styles when I started training at two gyms simultaneously. I noticed the first difference in technique in the context of learning various ‘guards’ or defence positions. I was struck by the difference after my first mixed-gender training session at The Lion’s Den. The room was crowded, mainly with men. There was just one other woman, but she clearly did not want to associate with me as she looked away every time I tried to make eye contact. I tried to talk to her, but she walked to the other side of the gym to train with someone else. John, the Surinamese-Dutch training assistant of the Hoça, who was in the back of the room, was in charge of the warm-up. He reprimanded anyone at the back who was slacking off. When the warm-up was over, I looked around to find a suitable sparring partner. John approached me and told me I could train with him. This personal attention from the training assistant made it an intense training session for me: no slacking off, no taking turns and, of course, I tried to show off my abilities during our one-on-one session. During the training, John kept correcting my guard position. According to him, I was keeping my guard too low. He demonstrated several times how he would be able to punch me in the spleen



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or liver in a real fight since I left that area ‘open’. He corrected me by saying: ‘I can see that you have been training before, but what I don’t understand is why you don’t have a proper guard. That is the basics. Every trainer should teach his students that!’ He explained that my elbows should be covering my sides to protect my spleen and liver. ‘But how should I protect my face at the same time then?’ I asked, as I was used to keeping my guard high to protect my face. John showed me how he bends his head into his guard whenever he expects a punch in the face. The next day, I trained with Alia at SaïdGym. I first joined her women-only class, then I joined her for her own training in the gender-mixed training session led by SaïdGym’s owner Saïd. I told Alia that I had trained at The Lion’s Den the day before and that John had been my personal training partner during that session. John is known by everyone in the The Hague kickboxing scene for his enthusiasm during fight nights and his personal approach when addressing all kickboxers – not just his own. Alia wanted to know everything about the training. I told her how much I had enjoyed the training and that he had made me work really hard. However, she also wanted to know what the biggest differences were between the training techniques at the two gyms. When I demonstrated how John had told me to hold my guard, Alia explained that she had also been trained to do that when she attended another gym. But now that she was training with Saïd at SaïdGym, she believed it was not a smart technique in a fight: ‘Because everybody goes for the face! And if you have to keep your head down all the time, you cannot see what your opponent is doing, right? That’s why we, at SaïdGym, we keep our guard just a little bit higher than what John told you yesterday. Yes, protect the spleen and liver, but the face comes first.’ Alia’s response related not only to the effectiveness of one style or the other. The way she tried to convince me showed how style is part of the identity of a gym and its trainer. I was happy that I did not have to pick one style that I liked best. Alia serves as a fascinating example here because she could explain how a style of guarding became so much part of her fighting style. Not only did this guarding position become an effortless accomplishment or automatic reaction for her, but the way she talked about the techniques showed how style had become part of her persona as a fighter. This is especially true of professional fighters such as Saïd. He explained how style is partly an individual characteristic and how the nicknames of fighters are often related to their fighting styles. ‘The Hyena’ might have a sneaky way of approaching his opponent, while ‘The Beast’ might attack his opponent brutally and enjoy knocking him out in the first round. Style is also important when it comes to scheduling competitive fights. Saïd told me about one organizer who does not want two of Saïd’s pupils fighting in his competition because of their fighting styles. According to the organizer, these young men wait too long to attack and repeat

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the same techniques over and over again. While their approach might be successful, it does not excite the audience. Saïd confirms that style is very much ­g ym-related. Some fighters trained at other gyms before coming to SaïdGym. Saïd explained how this can cause difficulties for trainers: ‘Sometimes they have different skills, different attitudes. The way they train and fight does not reflect my vision. It is hard to take that old way out of them and insert my way.’ Part of Saïd’s, or any trainer’s, job is transferring his fighting style to his pupils, because they represent him and his gym. I came to understand the importance of the transfer of style during the last few minutes of a mixed-gender training session I observed. At one point, Saïd asked if anyone could come up and lead a combination technique: Saïd: ‘Ok! Last exercise. Who can come up with an exercise?’ Alia immediately came forward, smiling, and said ‘I have a nice one!’ She stood before Saïd and demonstrated a long combination of punches and kicks, while also verbally explaining what she was doing. Slowly at first, then she repeated the exercise faster.   ‘Nice!’ Saïd exclaimed, grinning. After he put everyone to work, he walked back to the bench where I was sitting and said: ‘Now that’s what I mean. That’s why I trust her as a teacher of the ladies and the kids. She is obviously and clearly one of my students.’

The specific combination that Alia demonstrated and how she explained the moves revealed to Saïd how she incorporates his teachings. Not only does Alia embody SaïdGym’s fighting style in her training with Saïd, she is also, in her turn, expected to transfer her skills to the students in the women-only and children’s classes. A certain fighting style is developed at SaïdGym, with the owner and head trainer being the greatest influence. This way of knowing kickboxing creates a group feeling that differentiates one gym from the other. Many young women in women-only training, however, will not reach the level of expertise at which fighting style actually matters. They are nonetheless very much engaged in creating other forms of group feeling. First and foremost, they are engaged in creating a general kickboxer’s habitus and identity. What sets this athlete’s identity apart from identities associated with other sports is the experience and negotiation of pain. Pain and the negotiation of pain are essential in creating this group feeling among kickboxers. In the next section, I explain how the negotiation of pain is central to the peer-learning process and the development of the group feeling of being a kickboxer.

THE SOCIALITY OF PAIN Come on, don’t think about the pain! Think about something else. What are you going to do tomorrow? What will you wear? Come on, keep going. The pain will only last for a short while. And the fat will last forever!



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Embracing the pain of kickboxing practice seems to be a common discourse among fighters. The widespread idea is that pain is good. It was not only trainer Naoual who expressed this idea, as in the quote above; Alia, Saïd and Hoça Fatih all repeated th idea over and over again to their pupils. The pupils copy this idea on their Facebook walls and in their WhatsApp profile pictures with quotes like: ‘No pain, no gain’ or ‘If it’s not hurting, it’s not working’. Muscle aches, however painful they may be, can therefore also feel like a reward: they are proof of one’s hard work. And hard work will pay off. This pain, as Hind explained to me, ‘means that I will see results later: better stamina and a more athletic body’. Pain is an inherent part of sports that is unavoidable if one wants to improve as an athlete. However, the pain of full-contact sports is distinctive. While muscle aches are normal in most sports, bruises are not. In full-contact sports, bruises are integral to the practice. Still, in the early days of my kickboxing practice, I often asked myself a question that is also often posed by those unfamiliar with the sport: ‘What is the physical pain, inflicted by others on a voluntary basis, good for?’ If we talk about the gain of pain, muscle aches are understandable. But what do we gain from bruises caused by an ‘aggressive’ or ‘violent’ other? First of all, pain is a fundamental, indisputable aspect of the practice of kickboxing and all other full-contact sports. The development of combative capacities includes receiving, but also delivering pain. An important threshold to overcome for many martial artists who are starting out is not apologizing after hurting someone. Another is the quite daunting task of experiencing new levels of pain over and over again. Martial arts scholars have demonstrated how the ability to inflict and endure pain is central in the embodiment of skills (Bar-On Cohen 2009; Channon and Jennings 2014; Green 2011; Spencer 2012). While pain is inherent to the sport, the trick is to be the one that hurts less. So, although pain is very much part of the practice, so too is avoiding pain. This realization came to me when I understood that the need to learn to defend oneself becomes apparent through pain. In my field notes, I once wrote: This session I only sparred with Amal and I hated it. I thought she kicked me too hard, again and again on the same spot. It hurt so much. And I just wanted to tell her: ‘Stop! You’re hurting me!’ I wanted to think of an excuse, but it all went too fast for that. And we weren’t allowed to punch each other in the face this time. On the one hand, I was happy with that, because I didn’t like the hits I got last time. But, on the other hand, Amal’s guarding position was so bad and I just wanted to gently punch her nose as a warning. She made me angry, but I couldn’t translate that anger into punches. Then Naoual passed by and corrected me, explaining that I should block her kick by pulling up my leg to the side. ‘Oh yes, of course’, I thought, ‘why am I not doing that?’ So that is what the pain is good for, learning to defend myself.

Since the purpose of training is not to knock someone out, but rather to learn from each other and improve one’s skills, a not-too-painful punch in

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the face during sparring is a common way of communicating that a more serious punch would be possible in a fight. As will be elaborated in chapter 4, hitting the face is off-limits in some women-only training sessions; I was therefore unable to convey to Amal that her guard was too low to defend her face. I thought that the pain I would inflict on her, if I were allowed to hit her nose, would prompt her to defend herself better. In the meantime, the pain I was receiving did not prompt me to defend myself better. Learning how to prevent an opponent from inflicting pain is key in learning kickboxing, but this excerpt also demonstrates how, within that learning process, there is a negotiation of social interactions. The biggest difference between ‘normal’ muscle aches and bruises lies in the fact that bruises are caused by another person. The infliction of pain by others – involving the diminishment or absence of control – places getting bruises in a more interpersonal context. I cause my muscles to ache myself by pushing my body to run faster, punch harder or do more sit-ups. I can decide to take it easy to avoid this pain. Because this is different with bruises, the way the pain is experienced is also different. After a painful encounter with Fatiha, I wrote in my field notes: I don’t think I can do this for a full year. I mean, I can take the muscle aches, but just not the pain they are inflicting on me. And especially not when there is no room for negotiation. Hoça kept saying to everyone: ‘this exercise is about technique, not force.’ And I repeated that to Fatiha, but she didn’t agree with me and said she was not giving 100%. At one point, I just stopped the training and told her that I didn’t want to train with her anymore. I walked away, into the locker room and tried not to cry. I took a sip of water and took some time to calmly breathe in and out. Then I returned and continued the training. And now I’m sitting here, back home, trying to write while my hands are shaking, with an icepack on my left thigh. Why am I doing this again?

Over time, my body adjusted to that level of pain. As explained earlier, I got used to sparring with Fatiha and others. But before that point, I hated sparring with Fatiha and the pain she caused me. Interestingly, the pain she caused was more disturbing than the pain caused by others. Whenever someone else kicked or punched me in a way that was too painful or unexpected, there was always room for negotiation. I was used to asking sparring partners to not be so hard on me or to try to avoid a specific body part that was already bruised. In order to learn from the pain, the intensity of training, and thus the intensity of pain, is negotiated. This negotiation is often non-verbal. Whenever I encountered a new sparring or training partner, I always tried to adjust my force and strength. I would ‘feel’ whether my opponent had any experience and whether she would be up for a good fight. With partners I had already trained with, too, I tried to feel how that person wanted to train. The following excerpts from my field notes illustrate this:



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Wednesday I was not in a good mood and felt that Zaynab was too fast and strong for me during sparring. Without talking, she noticed and backed down a bit. She took some distance and gave me some space to attack as well. If it was a real fight, she could have knocked me out that day. Instead, she took back some force and energy and helped me in the exercise. Today was different, because I felt much better and felt like fighting. Zaynab was again the one to attack first, but I countered immediately with equal force. That action told her that I was into the game much more than the other day. For her it was a sign to give all she got. We had an amazing couple of sparring rounds. Afterwards we complimented each other on how well we fought and told each other how much we enjoyed it.

Both the sparring exercises with Fatiha and Zaynab left me with bruised legs that needed to be iced afterwards, but how I experienced the psychical pain differed. Different sparring partners can cause different experiences when it comes to pain. For me, the pain of the fight with Zaynab felt much better than that from the fight with Fatiha, not because Fatiha is stronger than Zaynab (she is not), but because the sparring felt fairer. Pain is not reducible to the force of a punch or kick, or the amount of kicks and punches; the reason for the infliction of the pain, the intention behind it, the relationship with the opponent, and the verbal and non-verbal communication are all part of how much or in what way something hurts. With Zaynab, there was room for negotiation and personal preferences. Wacquant, in his study on boxers in Chicago, notes how choosing the right sparring partner is key for a successful sparring session and that ‘the principle of reciprocity … ­governs the level of violence’ (2004: 84). While we mutually consented to violence in both examples, the difference between Fatiha and Zaynab shows how the regulation and measurement of such violence requires training and knowledge of the continuous cooperation involved in sparring. Zaynab might find pleasure in feeling stronger and more dominant. The experience of pain not only comes with black-and-blue body parts, but also with the status of being a kickboxer. As the comparison with fitness forms of combative sports demonstrates, enduring and inflicting pain lends kickboxing its authenticity. Moreover, experiencing and pushing through pain leads to a feeling of pride: Look at how black and blue my shin is! But it doesn’t really hurt. I can take it. (Hanane, seventeen years old) Oh man, it hurt so much last night! I needed an icepack again when I got home, and put some tiger balm on the back of my knee. Yes, it hurt, but I also felt like an athlete, I felt tough. (Nadia, twenty-one years old)

These quotes illustrate that learning how to deal with pain is very much part of the honour and pride of being a kickboxer. Enduring pain, and

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subsequently bragging about it, is therefore part of sociability among fellow kickboxers.3 The difference between muscle aches in all sports and the pain experienced in full-contact sports creates a group feeling among fighters. Kickboxers not only endure pain for the pleasure of the game, but, as in other contact sports, painful affects are mobilized for collective belonging (see, for example, Pavlidis and Fullagar 2015). This is a productive part of gender identity that allows the young women to differentiate between themselves and women who do not go through this particular kind of pain endurance. In their review on embodiment through martial arts, Channon and Jennings (2014) demonstrate that experiencing pain is integral to the masculine identity of fighters, highlighting that women’s negotiation of bodily harm in martial arts is understudied. The quote by Naoual at the start of this section, encouraging her pupils to favour pain over body fat, exemplifies how weight loss and toning the body, instead of shaping a fighter’s body, are key to their practice and shows the feminine undertone of their practice. The same can be said of Naoual’s suggestions to think about what clothes to wear the next day: a focus on clothing and beauty can help pupils forget the pain. While pain is associated with the authenticity of kickboxing and key in producing a kickboxer’s identity and therefore embraced by pupils, it is associated with the ideal type of kickboxer, which, for many women, remains a male kickboxer. The next chapter will illustrate how, in women-only recreational kickboxing, pupils might choose not to cope with pain and resist full participation in training – and how this is a means of reproducing an ideal type of feminine body and (group) identity.

CONCLUSION This chapter has looked at the processes whereby young women and girls become kickboxers through the enskilment of sports techniques. From the more or less similar training techniques taught in all gyms to the development of a particular style, the kickboxer identity is shaped in the training sessions in the gym. Unlike previous studies on enskilment, learning the skills of kickboxing might not be essential for dwelling in a certain environment. Applying the theoretical approach of enskilment to the field of sports starts from the premise that sport participation is central to the lives of people in the European city. Not participating in sport is a deviance from the norm of aspiring to lead an active, healthy and social life. The choice of kickboxing as a leisurely sports activity is embedded in this particular zeitgeist of self-improvement, but also in the fields of power of gender, race/­ethnicity, and class. This chapter furthermore demonstrated what kind of skilled behaviour is taught, how that is embedded in larger structures, and how it



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creates a collective sense of belonging. This occurs on the level of the sport of k­ ickboxing itself, in the particularities of gyms, and within the groups. Although kickboxing is an umbrella term that is interchangeably used with terms like Thai boxing and Muay Thai, and the rules and regulations differ, the basic techniques are the same across the board. While some trainers are influenced by taekwondo or karate, the overarching specifics of kickboxing create a group feeling that differentiates kickboxers from practitioners of other martial arts and other sports. Kickboxers’ bodies and identities are produced through the imitative, repetitive bodily regimes of training and fighting. One way or another, kickboxing techniques will be inscribed in the fighter’s body after rigorous training. The kickboxers actively distance themselves from others who ‘just’ do fitness or other sports: kickboxing provides one with the status of a fighter. Only a select few are interested in becoming competitive fighters. Some strive to become fitter, stronger and healthier in general; others are less interested in physical achievement and are mainly interested in kickboxing as a social space. But unlike other popular sports in The Hague, like running, fitness and swimming, the tough, violent status of kickboxing bestows an authentic identity that many kickboxers embrace. Although kickboxing is not a team sport, peer learning is crucial in the process of becoming a kickboxer. Seemingly informal education in which pupils co-learn is scaffolded by trainers’ instructions. Partnering up with a variety of peers enhances the variety of skills and the flexibility with which they are used, as well as enhancing the group feeling among the women. Partners and trainers are an inherent part of the learning environment and have a direct influence on the skills that are being learned. This results in different fighting styles between gyms and fighters, but also recognizable individual fighting styles. The experience of pain is central in becoming a kickboxer. Enduring pain like no other athlete, as well as inflicting pain on others, gives the sport an authentic flavour. It is also key in how kickboxing is enskilled. In addition to training together, peer learning and particular fighting styles in different gyms, the negotiation of painful exercises during training leads to a form of group feeling. The space of the gym offers room not only to learn new things and meet new people, but to feel at home as well. Thus, the enskilment of kickboxing includes producing ways of belonging in the group. This chapter has argued that the enskilment of kickboxing varies per gym, generation and gender, and ‘the kickboxer’ that is produced accordingly takes multiple forms. Learning kickboxing – through partner exercises, sparring, and enduring and inflicting pain – creates a form of sociability that moves beyond an ‘athlete identity’. Together with the status of being a kickboxer, this is a collective form of belonging, in which they are differentiated from non-athletes and non-contact athletes. We have seen how recreational

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kickboxing training distinguishes itself from other sports, but many questions remain. To what extent is kickboxing, including slacking off in training, different in men’s and women’s training? Does it serve as a way of achieving a certain feminine body ideal? Or does kickboxing function as a form of female masculinity? These questions will drive the analysis in the following chapter, which examines the articulations of gendered subjectivities in women-only kickboxing.

NOTES  1. Websites like www.muaythaipros.com and www.martialwhat.com explain these differences in more detail.  2. Many trainers in kickboxing are themselves trained in taekwondo, in which Korean is the traditional and often official language.  3. Enduring pain together and the powerful sociality that comes from it is beautifully described in Einat Bar-On Cohen’s (2009) work on kibadachi, a meditative karate exercise.

CHAPTE R 3

CRAFTING GENDERED SUBJECTIVITIES IN KICKBOXING



On a rainy day in September 2014, I sat down on a bench in a dojo that smelled of sweat and tiger balm. A group of young women had just started their kickboxing training. After a vigorous warm-up of running laps, push-ups and stretching, the students were paired up for the exercises: left-right-left, left-right-left. One person jabbed, the other holding her gloves up, with her feet firm on the ground. The level of intensity in the pairs revealed the level of expertise. Some were talking, laughing, figuring out the task together. Others only made a hissing sound whenever it was their turn to jab. When the trainer stopped the training with a loud ‘OK, time for a break’, a young, more advanced fighter called Ilham sat next to me and took a water bottle out of her bag. A short interaction occurred, during which I complimented her on her style and asked if she participated in competitions. She answered laughingly, but seriously: ‘Oh no, I’ll leave that to the men! I don’t want to mess up my pretty face!’

W

hen I first started exploring women’s kickboxing in the city of The Hague, this short interaction with a young woman who, as I later learned, had been kickboxing for three years, sparked my curiosity about how women pair the masculinity of kickboxing with ideas of femininity. Ilham’s response highlights how she perceived competitive kickboxing as a masculine practice, despite her own involvement and presence in the space of the kickboxing gym. She distanced herself from men and men’s kickboxing by not engaging in competitions and emphasizing the importance of beauty as a reason for not doing so. The fact that young women and girls are taking up kickboxing and other martial arts is often celebrated in mainstream media outlets as an example of feminist agency and empowerment – a transformative force that allows them to be strong and dominant. It is assumed that physical exercise,

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especially a practice that teaches strength and self-defence, allows women to acquire traits typically associated with the physically strong – men – in society, as explained in the Introduction. The emergence and popularity of sports in the twentieth century are often conceived as a response to the perceived feminization of society (Messner 1990; Theberge 2000a). There has therefore been a direct link between physical strength and masculinity. The sporting body has always been portrayed as the naturally strong male body (Hall 1996; Hargreaves 1994). Research on the representation of sportsmen and sportswomen in the media reveals that this image prevails (Duncan 2006; Elling, Knoppers and de Knop 2001; Wilson and Sparks 1999) – in large part because women remain excluded from equal participation. This hegemonic masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005) in sports has also led to certain sports being perceived as appropriate for women and girls, mainly those that involve aesthetic norms, such as figure skating and gymnastics. The male body is the norm in kickboxing, even more than in other sports. Kickboxing gyms and events, just like the spaces of many other martial arts and combats sport, are male-dominated spaces; the gym is perceived as a masculine space and kickboxing as a masculine practice. This is partly due to the violent character of the sport. ‘Modern sport naturalized the equation of maleness with violence’ (Messner 1990: 61), which makes kickboxing even more ­‘masculine’ than other sports. The ‘violent-thus-masculine’ character of boxing, kickboxing and other combat sports and martial arts is persistent. The capacity for physical violence is perceived as the ultimate difference in power between men’s and women’s bodies (McCaughey 1997). It is therefore unsurprising that the participation of women in martial arts and combat sports has often been perceived as an act of resisting extant gender norms. Recent scholarship on women in martial arts and combat sports not only demonstrates the increasing number of women in these sports, but also how women negotiate gender in these male-dominated sport practices. Women in martial arts and combat sports challenge gender norms by embracing an ‘alternative femininity’ (Channon and Phipps 2017), which they do not experience as coercive and restrictive. Instead, women’s enactment of femininity is experienced as enjoyable and also useful, because it challenges sexist ideals of what a ‘normal woman’ is (ibid.: 32). Women strategically use their femininity in their pursuit of inclusion and acceptance in sports and see beauty as complementary to strength (Davies and Deckert 2019). Other martial arts scholars question whether this really changes power dynamics (Kavoura, Ryba and Chroni 2015, Hamilton 2021). These discussions are part of the long-standing debate in social theory, and feminist theory more specifically, on gender as part of the social structure and as part of human



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agency (Wharton 1991). How much choice do women in martial arts and combat sports have when it comes to gender expression and identification? Like Ilham, most students in women-only training sessions were attracted to kickboxing because of its masculine characteristics, but, at the same time, they were often more interested in using kickboxing to achieve a certain body ideal and to socialize with friends than they were in becoming competitive fighters: the first two objectives were, in their eyes, important for maintaining one’s claim to femininity. We will see in this chapter that the discourse in the men’s training sessions concentrated on fighting, while the women’s training highlighted bodily fitness, ‘empowerment’ and ­sociability  – revealing how gender is enacted in learning kickboxing. This reveals how the body is a medium not only in the development of or change in bodily disposition, but also in the constitution of a certain practice and a certain subject position. Through an examination of the ways in which masculinity and femininity were emphasized in practices and discourse, this chapter argues that kickboxing enskilment is gendered. Examining the narratives and practices of gendered subjectivities, including people’s motivations for practising kickboxing and the negotiation of strength and beauty, it is clear that skill takes different forms in women-only kickboxing. This demonstrates how the subject is realized and enacts her agency within the social norms and power structures in which she is embedded (Butler 2011; Foucault 1982; Mahmood 2005a). The aesthetic and discursive structures in which women’s fighting practices are situated shape the agency of the young women and girls. Their practices of slacking off or working hard, dressing in black or prink, and centralizing power or beauty illustrate how skill is developed differently in women-only kickboxing. An examination of the enskilment of women-only kickboxing reveals how new gender subjectivities are crafted in the gym.

PLAYING WITH GENDER The participation of women in martial arts and combat sports has often been perceived as an act of resisting extant gender norms, because such women embrace what they consider the masculinity of the sport: the pain, the tough attitude and the aesthetics. Choosing kickboxing over sports that are considered more feminine or more gender-neutral can be understood as a form of female masculinity (Halberstam 1998) that requires a distinct negotiation of sexual and gendered subjectivities. The women and girls themselves would not discuss their own practices or aesthetics, let alone their bodies, in terms of masculinity, even if that masculinity were female masculinity. Instead, I encountered several teenage girls who contested the

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masculine character of kickboxing by challenging the classifications of masculine and feminine: Well, I mean, what is masculine and what is feminine? They call it masculine because it has always been men. There were only men in kickboxing. But now you see that so many women like it too. Doesn’t it become feminine automatically? If it becomes a women’s practice? ( Jamila, sixteen years old) I hate it when people say it’s masculine. Why? It doesn’t make any sense. Don’t women get angry? Don’t they want to win? You know, I know so many girls that are strong, who like to fight, you know, as a game. And I also know boys who just sit and read all day. So, are those boys not feminine then? Maybe we are not, like, girly feminine or something. (Meryem, seventeen years old)

Jamila and Meryem negotiate the meanings of the Dutch labels vrouwelijk  (literally ‘womanly’, used for feminine and female) and mannelijk (literally  ‘manly’, used for masculine and male). The characteristics of kickboxing  – fighting, violence, strength, anger, the infliction of pain, ­competition – are commonly understood as masculine. In analysing their own participation in kickboxing, they resisted those labels. They are women who like to fight, so they argue that fighting can be feminine. They questioned whether the labels ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ must coincide with female and male bodies respectively and whether it is valid to label certain characteristics as masculine or feminine. Implicitly, they challenged the naturalized relation of gender and sex. Most girls, however, largely agreed with the stereotypes: Well, you know, it is a masculine sport, but I like it because it makes me tougher. Boys now know they can’t mess with me because Ik sta mijn mannetje wel (I stand my ground). (Maysa, sixteen years old) I am and I will always be a meisje-meisje (girly girl). It doesn’t matter that I do kickboxing, because my hair always looks good, ha ha! (Nadia, twenty-one years old)

Both Maysa and Nadia discussed bodily strength as a masculine characteristic of kickboxing but valued it in different ways. Maysa referred to strength and fierceness as masculine characteristics that she found useful as a girl. The pleasure she takes in sports is very much related to the masculine character of kickboxing and she claimed the sport’s masculinity as her newly acquired characteristic. She used the gendered expression je mannetje staan. A literal translation from Dutch to English would be ‘standing one’s man’; it means being able to defend oneself or stand up for oneself. The expression is often used by both men and women, but obviously has a masculine undertone when women use it.



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Nadia, on the other hand, explained that she chose kickboxing despite its masculine character. She presented herself as a meisje-meisje (girl-girl), meaning that she was not just assigned female at birth, but is also a feminine girl. By using the word meisje-meisje, she distanced herself from the opposite jongens-meisje (boy-girl, which could be translated as tomboy), a label that is used to describe girls that are (too) masculine. Meisje-meisje is sometimes used in relation to oneself; young women and girls are proud to use this label to describe themselves. Jongens-meisje, on the other hand, is mainly used to describe others and is a label that young girls do not like to use for themselves. Adult women kickboxers, however, often referred to their young selves as jongens-meisjes in hindsight. Furthermore, Nadia counteracted the sport’s masculinity by focusing on her feminine features, such as her hair. She centralized her feminine features instead of her bodily strength. This ‘emphasized femininity’ (Connell 1987) that young sportswomen display has been commonly observed in social sports studies (Bordo 1989; Halbert 1997; Hargreaves 2004; Krane 2001; Theberge 2000b; Young 2005). Raewyn W. Connell defines it as ‘the pattern of femininity which is given most cultural and ideological support at present’ (1987: 187). Although this femininity is as flexible as masculinity, Connell argues that it always complies with the subordinating effects of hegemonic masculinity. The embodiment of femininity therefore emphasizes characteristics that oppose masculinity, with the woman’s body being deemed less physically strong and with an enduring emphasis on cosmetic beauty (Markula 2003; McCaughey 1997). Sports feminists argue that femininity and the focus on heterosexuality are more than aesthetic choices; they are a way of legitimizing ‘unequal power relations between the sexes’ (Messner 1988: 203). The young Muslim women and girls in women-only kickboxing, however, challenge this by demonstrating how kickboxing provides them with a space and practice in which they can engage in performing masculine traits as well. Jack Halberstam notes that masculinity should not be equated with maleness (Halberstam 1998: 1), which is difficult to apply to the young women’s narratives since only one Dutch word exists for the two English words, mannelijk, of which a literal translation would be ‘manly’. Their narratives and practices do, however, demonstrate that the masculine characteristics of kickboxing should not be reduced to the male body. Their bodies, desires and ambitions are capable of what is considered masculinity as well. Thus, they successfully challenge hegemonic models of gender conformity. Their gender performance, however, simultaneously emphasizes heterosexuality. Many girls and women did not allude to the physical strength needed as an athlete; rather, they alluded to the effects that becoming stronger has on the aesthetics of the body. On a daily basis in the gym, the young women, in particular, discussed their own and others’ bodies in heteronormative ways:

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I want to be muscled, but not like muscled-muscled. I want to be slim, and my legs and butt to be tight, and you need muscles for that. And I like it when you see a little of my abs, but they shouldn’t be, like, super-defined. (Maysa, sixteen years old) You know there are some girls who do kickboxing and they start behaving like a man. You know, like that girl Imane. I don’t get that. Why would you do that? You know, she walks like a man, talks like a man. She just looks very masculine. I mean, she doesn’t have to wear make-up or anything, but just … I don’t know … act normal … Maybe she is a lesbian. (Hanane, seventeen years old)

Maysa wants to be tougher, but does not want to be too muscled. She wants to have a strong, muscled body, as long as it highlights her femininity. Hanane takes the same position in her analysis of the appearance of another girl. She mentions not only her appearance, but also the way in which she walks and talks. She takes a step further by linking what she perceives as the girl’s masculine features to her sexual identification. This can be viewed as part of what is called ‘the feminine apologetic’ in sports (Theberge 2000b). Nancy Theberge (1987) noted as early as the 1980s that women athletes – in her case, ice hockey players – rely on apologetic behaviour to be accepted in sports and counter claims that sports make women ‘masculine’ or ‘manly’. Women do not merely emphasize femininity; they emphasize heterosexual and heteronormative femininities. If women are ‘too muscular’, they are seen not only as ‘masculine’ but also as ‘ugly’ and ‘lesbian’. Many women athletes openly distance themselves from lesbianism and seek to create conventional feminine appearances through their make-up, hairstyles and clothing. Often women feel that they must behave in a heterosexual feminine manner in order to be accepted as athletes (Theberge 1987). We can see that both a form of female masculinity and emphasized femininity are at play here. That is because the female masculinity that is embraced in kickboxing practice clashes with social norms of heterosexuality. The knowledge that kickboxing is perceived a masculine practice that can craft masculine bodies and identities results in women actively emphasizing heterosexual femininity and differentiating themselves from others that are deemed too masculine. In her research on Pakistani-British basketball players, Samaya Farooq Samie (2013) labels this behaviour as hetero-sexy. In my research, I noticed that sexual subjectivities were narrated along the same lines of hetero-sexiness. The hetero-sexy talk occurs in locker-room banter in particular. The space of the locker room, in which women are amongst themselves, can enable women to think creatively about their sexual subjectivities, talk openly, gossip and joke about experiences and expectations. Especially on Sundays, when training was scheduled earlier in the day and plans were made to enjoy the rest of the weekend, the women and girls chatted extensively as they dressed before leaving the gym. No other class was



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scheduled after their class, so they could enjoy their time together. The teenage girls and women in their early twenties, in particular, took their time adjusting their hair and applying make-up. A clothing style that could be described as tough femininity was common: jeans with boots or sneakers, jackets with fur-lined hoods, print shirts in bright colours. The women and girls also presented this tough femininity in their kickboxing attire. Like many other sports, kickboxing requires specific attire. Punching gloves and shin guards are necessary; many pupils have their own, but beginners could borrow them from the club. Kickboxing shorts and a tank top or t-shirt complete the official outfit, but sweatpants and long-sleeved shirts are accepted as well when pupils train for leisurely purposes. Pink was the most popular colour, but it was often combined with black. There has also been an observable growth in women’s and ‘feminine’ clothing in traditional and online kickboxing shops. Some clubs sell clothing and gear bearing their club logos and they often have pink versions for women. The women and girls demonstrated how self-improvement involves building strength, losing weight and learning how to fight, but also intersects with techniques of comportment and adornment. There is an interplay between how they think a woman kickboxer should look, dress and behave. Mimicking other kickboxers is an important part of that, but such women and girls also shaped and adjusted their habits and techniques according to existing norms of women’s athleticism. Standards that are communicated through posters, flyers and (social) media find their way into the everyday practices of the kickboxers in The Hague, who adjust their styles accordingly.

AESTHETICS OF THE WOMAN FIGHTER The femininity that the kickboxers conveyed in their choice of clothing, hair and make-up, but also in their narratives on gendered and sexual subjectivities, is a reflection of a wider trend. Feminist sport scholars argue that a global post-feminist discourse is producing new articulations of femininity and shaping young women’s embodied experiences (Toffoletti, Thorpe and Francombe-Webb 2018: 15). This discourse displays a preoccupation with varying expressions of heterosexual femininity across demographics and cultures. This post-feminist discourse is first of all observable in the way that women athletes are represented in the media and social media. Agnes Elling, Annelies Knoppers and Paul de Knop point out that media outlets rarely focus on the physical strength of women athletes and, if it is mentioned, the women’s strength is compared to that of her counterparts (e.g. she hits as hard as a man) (2001: 179).

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The feminine apologetic is also evident in the promotional posters and flyers for kickboxing events and training. While it is more common now to find women in gyms and the number of women fighters is increasing, some gyms still try to keep women out of their premises and some fight event organizers will not allow, or do not encourage, women fights at their events. Thus, women fighters still have marginal roles in kickboxing competitions. Most events are still (implicitly) considered to be men-only and are portrayed as celebrations of hyper-masculinity. This is apparent in the representation of both men and women in the visual announcements of kickboxing competition. Posters announcing upcoming fighting events often only include men as competitors, even when women fights will be taking place as well. The pictures emphasize the strong, muscled bodies of the competitors, their bare chests, muscled abs and shoulders, and the competitors often have a strong, angry expression. Although most fight events are still dominated by men, the years 2005–15 witnessed a growing number of women-only fight events. In the Netherlands, two gyms organized annual women-only events: Spider Gym’s ‘Queen of the Ring’ and Team Schreiber’s ‘Girl Fights Only’. These events are mainly meant to promote competitive kickboxing among young girls and women. Women-only fighting events are portrayed very differently from the men-only events. Some posters contain pictures of the contestants, but this is not always the case, as it is with male fighters. Pink is the colour that is used most often. Girl Fights Only was held annually on 14 February, on Valentine’s Day. Girl Fights Only differentiates its fight events and the promotion thereof through the use of ‘girly’ features such as the colour pink, red hearts and the association with Valentine’s Day. This is a clear example of a strategic (Davies and Deckert 2019) and useful (Channon and Phipps 2017) application of femininity in martial arts and combat sports. The ‘girly’ approach works, according to Irma Verhoeff of Team Schreiber. The organizer of the Girl Fights Only explained that her ambition is to show the world that women fights are worthwhile and exciting, and to give young women a space and opportunity to engage in competitive kickboxing. Kickboxing training is portrayed in the same manner. Posters and flyers that aim to attract women to women-only training sessions not only mention the gender separation; ‘girly’ characteristics are also used to highlight the fact that this training is meant for women. The women portrayed on the flyers often wear pink clothing or appear against a pink background. Their lean and tight bodies are emphasized, rather than the musculature associated with this type of sport. Not only do these posters portray clearcut differences between men and women; they also represent, and may even encourage, particular types of femininity and masculinity. If women fighters are portrayed in mixed-events posters, they are often in marginal



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positions (reflecting their marginality in the event itself ). They do not display their physical strength on these posters in the same manner as they do that of men. On the rare occasion when a women’s fight is one of the event’s highlights, the women occupy a more central position on the poster. On such posters, the women – in stark contrast to the men – often smile. I attended one photo shoot for a fight event and witnessed the women being told by a bystander that ‘you could smile you know, it’s a picture’. As the men on fighting event posters demonstrate, this would never be said to or expected of a male fighter. Furthermore, pictures of women fighters on posters promoting mixed events downplay their bodily strength. Bodily strength and muscled bodies are considered male characteristics and therefore not presented as part of the women’s bodies. When an amateur woman fighter turns professional, there is even more sexualization and objectification of her body. Promotion of her fights and her persona as an athlete involve a search for sponsors, which often see the sexualized portrayal of the woman fighter as an important opportunity to make money. A professional fighter that does not comply with the expectations of emphasized heteronormative femininity will have fewer opportunities to build and maintain a professional career.1 Especially when amateur fighters turn professional, it becomes clear that femininity is not only useful and enjoyable, but also part of the feminine apologetic that makes a professional career possible. Although sponsorship is not on the minds of young recreational kickboxers, the sexualized representation of women fighters in the public domain trickles down to promotional posters for recreational kickboxing. Not only do these posters portray clear-cut differences between the two genders; they also represent, and may even encourage, particular types of femininity and masculinity. The potential for change in gender hierarchies that women fighters present by engaging in a male-dominated and masculine sport is often undermined by the ways their bodies and abilities are sexualized and objectified (Channon et al. 2018). The women themselves, however, see this form of hetero-sexiness as a choice and a form of agency. The competitive kickboxers I spoke to did not see a problem with this particular form of femininity that is part of the representation of women in kickboxing. They make sure to look their best when entering the ring (just like men): it was not uncommon to have an appointment with the hairdresser and to pay a visit to a tanning salon the week before a fight. Being asked to smile for a picture was frowned upon by some (‘I’m here to fight’), but made total sense for most (‘It will result in a prettier picture’). Kim Toffoletti (2016) describes this as the ‘postfeminist sensibility’ and argues that it conceals the gendered power hierarchies that are at play. A global discourse on hetero-sexiness influences the choices and habits of young women in The Hague, including their choice to

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practise in recreational kickboxing. As we will see next, the feminine apologetic and the hetero-sexy femininity portrayed in the promotional material not only influence the aesthetics of the kickboxers, but are also observable in the narratives of people’s motivations for practising kickboxing.

KICKBOXING FRAMED AS SELF-DEFENCE The skills of kickboxing transform a regular human being into a fighter. She endures and inflicts pain – as we have seen in chapter 2 – and knows how to stand her ground in a kickboxing fight. When young women explained their motivations for taking up this particular sport, but also when they spoke of the effects regular training had on them, physical power emerged as a very important asset. Even if competitive fighting was not among their ambitions, actively working on their own bodies was, for many women, a conscious endeavour. As 19-year-old Kaouthar explains: I feel stronger. I don’t know exactly what it is. I mean, it is not like I want to start a fight in the streets, but I am also not so afraid or insecure anymore. I just am, you know. And I don’t know, it is nice to know that I might be able to defend myself when I need to. But I think people wouldn’t mess with me that easily. It’s like they can see I know how to kickbox!

As a student of social work, Kaouthar understood her kickboxing practice as a hobby that kept her sane, healthy and fit. She was always excited when training started and expressed her feelings of satisfaction after a good training session. Kickboxing made her feel stronger. She probably is stronger, but the feeling she experienced also resulted in self-confidence that exceeded the capacity to exert physical power. Kaouthar described how the sport practice and its physical effects contributed to her feeling of control over her own body, but also her capacity to defend herself. As she pointed out, the corporeal aspects of confidence might indeed be visible to outsiders. This is important as it affects the self-images of the women themselves. I for one admired the self-confident poise of the kickboxing women I met and once wrote the following in my field notes: The way Fatiha carries herself awes me. We went downtown to get some ice cream. She proposed getting a McFlurry at McDonalds and then we walked around town, towards the train station. I tried to remember me walking down streets when I was her age. She was fearless and polite at the same time; so self-confident for a 16-year-old. I definitely did not have the same ‘openness’ back then. A car passed by, and two young men flirted with her, or us. It took me a while to notice, while she already had been making eye contact with them for a while. She turned her back on them and explained that the brand of their car did not impress her.



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A self-confident, ‘don’t-mess-with-me’ attitude was generally spoken of as a positive reward of kickboxing. Similar findings have been reported in other research on combat sports (Velija, Mierzwinski and Fortune 2013) and self-defence training more specifically (Follo 2011; Hollander 2018). The feeling of control over one’s body and the feeling of control over one’s life are often interdependent. Kickboxing involves actual work on the body; making it stronger and learning how to use it in a fight leads to an increased feeling of control. Even though a career in kickboxing is not for everyone, both the motivations for and the effects of sport participation demonstrate the importance of choice and control. The acts of signing up at a gym and showing up for training are part of the decision to improve oneself and one’s life. The pursuit, and achievement, of particular goals might give individuals the feeling that they are escaping the influence of external forces (Rapport 2003: 5) and taking control of their lives. This pursuit of self-improvement is as much part of the young women’s narratives about their motivation for practising kickboxing as it is part of governmental policies on emancipation and empowerment through sports. Their participation in this particular sport cannot, however, be analysed without taking the intersecting power dynamics of minoritization in Europe into account. Programmes to stimulate particular groups, such as young people, the elderly, ethnic minorities, women, etc., to engage in sports have been part of Dutch governmental policies since the 1980s. The target group for the promotion of the sport of kickboxing is, as we saw in previous chapters, defined by ethnic background. Remarkably, the same sport is presented as a tool that will decrease aggression in one group and promote it in the other. In political discourse, sports like kickboxing are championed as a tool for ‘empowering’ Muslim women. Empowerment in this setting is presented as a tool for the emancipation of the powerless. The discursive framing of kickboxing as empowerment and self-defence is part of governmental sports policies, as we saw in chapter 1, but it is also observable in everyday kickboxing training. While kickboxing for boys serve as a means of regulating aggression, for women it is presented as a form of self-defence and empowerment. This opposition assumes that men can (or should be able to) defend themselves without specific training. The divide between the powerful man and the powerless woman is presented as a natural given in this discourse. Most young women and girls in the gym repeated this discourse in their narratives and implemented it in their behaviour, but there were a few exceptions. Against the grain of the dominant Dutch discourse on subordinated and oppressed Muslim woman, the young women kickboxers liked that they contested stereotypes, proclaiming that they were already powerful, strong and tough. As Zaynab once said: ‘Look, they say we, Moroccan women, need to defend

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ourselves. It is partly true, and partly nonsense. Maybe it is not such a bad idea for women to know how to fight. But in the end, it is mainly for fun, we just do it because we like it. And maybe that’s enough?’ In a society in which violence against women and street harassment occur, and girls and young women are educated to be careful, Zaynab understands why kickboxing can be more than just a recreational activity. Neither SaïdGym nor the Lion’s Den promote kickboxing as a form of self-defence, but, in general, women’s involvement in martial arts carries within it a history of a gendered meaning of ‘self-defence’, which relates to martial arts’ association with fighting and masculinity. Zaynab actively steers clear of the common opinion and practice whereby kickboxing for women is seen as an empowerment tool. When young women decide to fight, she argues, it can also be for recreational purposes. The girls at The Lion’s Den like to express how strong and tough they are. Meryem, a highly motivated, 14-year-old girl, goes a step further in her narrative, boldly and enthusiastically presenting herself as the bully, rather than the victim. She told me more than once that, instead of needing self-defence training or empowerment, she had convinced her parents that kickboxing would be a good way for her to channel her aggression: At school everybody has a problem with me. I don’t know why, but there is something about me that they don’t like. And sometimes I get really mad with people that pick on me, and then I tend to become aggressive and start fighting. Like that one time there was this guy and he made fun of me and I was so mad. So I dragged him out of the classroom and wanted to push his head in the toilet or smack his head against it. But the teacher was fast enough to prevent me from doing that. … I don’t want to get in trouble, you know. So I had to find another way to deal with this aggression, and so I began kickboxing. Luckily my parents understand now and agree with me. And they see now that this is me, you know. This is who I am.

Meryem convinced her parents that kickboxing would be a healthy way for her to release tension and aggression. Although her parents thought, at first, that it was an inappropriate sport for girls, they agreed that it would be a good activity for their daughter. She claimed to be more relaxed now that she practised kickboxing, especially right after a heavy training session. Meryem therefore did not need kickboxing for self-defence or empowerment; rather, it was a way of regulating aggression. Her narrative reveals that the dichotomies of powerful/powerless and attacking/defending are not necessarily related to male/female. Instead, kickboxing gave her the confidence to come to terms with her aggression and ‘who she is’. Her narrative explicitly goes against the mainstream discourse informed by stereotypes of the submissive, subordinate Muslima. Meryem embraces the opposite of the stereotype, identifying with power, aggression and violence.



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Moreover, most girls at The Lion’s Den claim that self-defence and empowerment would not be reasons to start kickboxing. But they do refer to fighting in the streets or at school. Meryem is not the only one with stories about fights at school. So, although words like ‘fighting’ and ‘strength’ are often directly linked to masculinity, even by the girls at The Lion’s Den, the girls are simultaneously proud of being strong women themselves. Nonetheless, kickboxing is often promoted as a form of self-defence for women, especially kickboxing classes offered at fitness gyms and community centres, as opposed to kickboxing gyms. But even regular kickboxing dojos sometimes adjust their women-only training to fit into the self-defence and empowerment discourse. Some gyms adapt their training to focus on self-defence more than others. Trainer Fatih from The Lion’s Den, for example, often refers to the strength the young women may need on the street. In my field notes, I recorded this interaction: Hoça said: ‘Come on, that’s not a kick. You would not kick someone down in the street like that! Maysa, hold the kicking bag for me please.’ At this point everyone stops their exercises and turns their heads to the kicking bag Maysa is holding in front of him. He starts low-kicking the bag repeatedly, using a lot of force and speed, gritting his teeth and making a ‘hss’ sound with every kick. Maysa in turn has to use a lot of force to hold the bag and not let herself be kicked to the ground by the trainer. The girls observe with awe and astonishment at the force Hoça Fatih is using. They whisper: ‘oh my god’ and ‘Hoça, be careful’. It looks like he is not holding back. After a dozen strikes, he stops, visibly tired, and says: ‘This is what I want to see. Because this is what you need to do when someone attacks you. You don’t kick kindly, like you are just petting him. You kick! Hard!’

The young girls, impressed by this kind of exercise, sometimes referred back to ‘the attacker on the street’. A week after this training session, one girl asked if we could train without gloves, since we would not be wearing gloves on the street either. Hoça Fatih occasionally includes pure s­ elf-defence techniques in his training, techniques that are not commonly taught in kickboxing training because they are not allowed in the ring. Whenever the girls were taught such practical techniques, they were impressed and very focused on learning. The way in which self-defence was incorporated reveals how ideas of women being disempowered and in need of ‘saving’ and ‘protection’ permeate the practice of women-only kickboxing. Learning kickboxing demonstrates how enskilment is very much gendered. Framing their kickboxing participation as empowerment and ­self-defence not only perpetuates the myth that self-defence training offers a solution to violence against women (Milford 2021), it also emphasizes women’s lesser position in kickboxing. While men train to become competitive athletes, women’s participation is framed and understood as mere empowerment. Women gain physical power through sports and might feel even more

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self-confident with kickboxing skills than other sport skills, but if this is the main goal of kickboxing, women’s participation is not equal to men’s participation. The discursive framing of kickboxing as a form of self-defence and empowerment for women is a less obvious form of the feminine apologetic. Just as emphasizing their femininity legitimizes their participation in a male-dominated sport, so do the common denominators of empowerment and self-defence.

TRAINING FOR TIGHT BODIES The kickboxers in women-only sessions expressed how they hoped to shape their bodies in a certain way: ‘slim and muscled, but not too muscled.’ They trained for tight abs but did not want to be ‘super-defined’. They wanted to appear ‘sporty, but not manly’. They used these standards to evaluate the appearance of their peers as well. Just as the discursive frame of empowerment was reflected in how kickboxing becomes a site for learning self-defence, a hetero-sexy femininity was also part of learning kickboxing moves. The emphasis on bodily fitness and form and on body modification was not solely part of locker-room conversations; it was also part of the discourse in the training sessions. The difference between masculine and feminine kickboxing aesthetics, as portrayed in the promotional material, was also projected in training. At both gyms, I participated in several mixed training sessions. At these sessions, I encountered a critical difference between how these universal kickboxing skills were verbalized in men’s and women’s training. At first, I perceived the difference as varying in level. The training might be less intense in a women-only session and more pupils choose not to spar, either because of their beginner level or for personal reasons. It only became apparent to me how this difference is related to the goals of the training on an occasion when John, Fatih and Kemal’s temporary trainer at The Lion’s Den, trained the girls. At the end of the warm-up, John noticed that many girls were slacking during an exercise called ‘frog jumps’ (kikkersprongen, or kikkeren) and explained why this exercise is important. He asked Maysa to help him demonstrate how to take a kick: OK go! (Maysa gives him a low kick on his straightened leg.) If I squat … ( John squats slightly) OK go! (Maysa kicks again.) Then I can take it. If I don’t practise the frog jumps, I won’t be able to take the kicks. You need frog jumps for your legs! You need it! So just do it. Just try it. You can practise at home too. 1, 2, 3 (he demonstrates three frog jumps) and rest for a while … 1, 2, 3 (demonstrates again). We are doing these exercises as part of warming up, but they also serve a goal. So you can take kicks in the ring! Yes? Great. Gloves, shin guards, wear it all. We’ll continue.



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John usually did not train the girls at The Lion’s Den, but he substituted for Fatih on that one occasion. While I noticed that Fatih adapted his training to the level, ambitions and even the mood of the girls, John’s training was no different to the training he gave the young men and boys. In this excerpt, he explicitly explained to the girls why a seemingly silly exercise such as frog jumps, in which one squats very low and jumps around the hall, can be useful for an actual fight. The difference between this and some training sessions with Naoual at SaïdGym could not be greater. In the previous chapter, we saw how she urged people to forget the pain in order to lose fat, saying that ‘fat will stay forever’. Likewise, Alia at SaïdGym and Fatih at The Lion’s Den focused their instructions less on fighting and more on bodily fitness and form during women-only training. While the discourse in the men’s training sessions was focused on fighting, the women’s training was more about weight loss and toning the body. The kickboxing skills that are taught look identical in both men’s and women’s training: jabs, uppercuts, high kicks and low kicks, but also abdominal exercises, push-ups and cardio exercise – all of these moves are basically the same in all kinds of training. In mixed training, the discourse is focused on fighting. In teaching a move, the supposed opponent in the fight is often mentioned. Teaching an uppercut – one of the main punches in boxing and kickboxing, which follows a vertical line to the opponent’s chin – using punching bags or a pad necessitates explaining that the punch should be at a certain height to hit the opponent’s chin. Abdominal exercises and other work on the core muscles is explicated as necessary, because fighters need a strong core to be able to receive the opponent’s punches. When a kickboxer is on the receiving end of a punch to the body, the abdominal muscles need to be contracted and the breath retained to decrease the impact of the punch. Fighters strengthen their core in kickboxing technique training and sparring, but also more deliberately through floor exercises such as crunches, sit-ups and planks. Abdominal muscles are trained while the trainer talks about their usefulness in a fight. In women-only kickboxing, by contrast, instructions for abdominal exercises more often focused on losing weight and tightening the body: Doing these crunches regularly is so important. You want a fit body? You want a strong body? This is what you have to do. I know it’s not fun, but if do this regularly you will feel the difference and you will see the result in the mirror!

Here, Alia explained the importance of the ab exercises in shaping a fit and strong body. Both feeling the difference and being able to observe a physical change served as mental stimuli for the women and girls to persevere with the exercise. The same is true for other strength exercises. Doing squats,

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which involves moving the buttocks down to a sitting position with one’s knees bent at a 90-degree angle (or lower) and then moving up again, was often described as a way of tightening the buttocks in women’s training. The trainers explained it to male pupils, on the other hand, as an effective means of strengthening the legs to be able to receive kicks. In short, while the discourse in the men’s class is based on learning to do things with one’s body, the discourse on skills in the women-only class is focused on doing things to one’s body. Both are forms of body modification through enskilment; the former creates the active and useful masculine body, the latter the shapely and conditioned feminine body. Even if their trainers were often fighters themselves, the women and girls were more interested in using kickboxing to achieve a certain body ideal and to socialize with friends; both of these objectives were, in their eyes, important in maintaining one’s claim to femininity. Recreational women fighters appropriated kickboxing by altering the discourse of body modification from the ambition to fight to the achievement of a certain feminine body ideal. But because the objectives of many women in women-only kickboxing were different, the development of skills was verbalized differently. This difference affected not only how the men and women learned those moves but also how they learned to use their bodies and ultimately how they learned to value what they can or cannot and should or should not do to and with their bodies. Historically, there has been an observable division between types of sport deemed suitable for women and for men. The question of whether a type of sport was suitable for women was associated with the (gracious or ­non-gracious) movements of that sport. Beauty magazines in the 1930s, for example, commented on the appropriateness of golf for women, because ‘Golf facilitates delightful poses, poses that resemble the movements of a ballerina’ (Beauty 1934 in Stokvis and van Hilvoorde 2008). Gender stereotypes still prevail in sports. Kickboxing and other martial arts are not considered feminine: movements are far from gracious, because they involve attacking an opponent, but martial arts also involve grunts and grimaces, sweat and sometimes blood. Moreover, kickboxing can have a lasting impact on fighters’ faces and bodies, in the form of bruises, concussions and cuts. For some women, this was a reason not to engage in sparring and/or competitive kickboxing. Beauty, both as part of the sport practice and as a result of it, has become less important, but remains a reason why young women and girls alter their practice of kickboxing. While it might be the masculine characteristics of kickboxing that lead women to register at the gym and show up for training, it is now clear that there are boundaries to this masculinity. Kickboxing gives the young women and girls the opportunity to differentiate themselves not only from people



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who do not engage in sports and people who engage in non-competitive sports, but also from male fighters and ‘the men’s training’. Women-only training gives them the space to practise a masculine sport while maintaining their claim to heteronormative femininity.

SLACKING: THE ART OF NOT WORKING HARD Learning kickboxing and becoming a kickboxer is not just a matter of copying and imitating moves. The skills of kickboxing are not simply transferred from trainer to pupil. The examples above illustrate that ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing what’ – the cognitive and the physical – are inseparable. Individual abilities, ambitions and environments all play a role in the habituation of kickboxing and therefore in the role kickboxing plays in creating sociability. The women-only training, and more specifically the training of new and notso-active members, can be considered a form of legitimate peripheral learning (Lave and Wenger 1991). This part of the chapter will consider ways of wilfully resisting full and active participation in training and will show that not training hard may very well contribute to the women’s claim to femininity and creating sociability. While all the young women and girls attended classes voluntarily, many tried not to train as hard as the trainer wanted them to. The students at SaïdGym and The Lion’s Den had various ways of slacking, including posing, cheating and pretending – smokkelen, as the trainers call it in Dutch: pretending to train hard, but exerting as little effort as possible.2 Being part of a group by cheating together, pretending to train hard and continuing the locker-room banter during training not only allowed the girls to interact on a different level, it also gave them the opportunity to perform a certain identity. Slacking was practised in order not to fight too much and to not be too closely associated with fighters. There are various reasons why young women might slack off during kickboxing training instead of trying their best to memorize and practise the movements. A first reasonable explanation would be that the physical requirements are actually too high for many of them. I noticed that many of the young women had never been active in sports before, besides mandatory physical education at school. It is impossible to do twenty push-ups, for example, when one is a complete beginner at sports. Instead of telling the trainer that they were unable to follow the instructions, the girls pretended to participate fully so that the trainer would not notice. The intensity of training, its attendant pain, the necessary self-discipline and the authority of the trainer were all new to them. It is plausible that it might take time for new students to get used to this regime, which was met with resistance. However,

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in general, people are known to ‘slack in the middle’ (­Touré-Tillery and Fishbach 2011). This means that when people set a goal, they are highly motivated at the beginning of the trajectory and towards the end, when achieving the goal seems possible. Staying motivated in the ‘middle section’ seems to be difficult for most people. One of the most common manifestations of slacking in class, and maybe the most profound, was the complete cessation of effort (i.e. not doing anything) when the trainer was not watching. Whenever the trainer turned her back, some girls completely stopped doing what they had been told to do, only continuing the exercises when the eyes of the trainer returned to them. Another way of cheating was continuing the exercise but at a lower intensity, not giving it one’s all. When the trainer turned her back, she might not notice that pupils were slacking. It took experience on the girls’ part to avoid the eyes of the trainer, but the trainer also developed eyes on the back of her head. The mirror present in most gyms was used both by the trainer to check on the students and by the students to check whether the trainer was looking. The most extreme case of cheating I encountered occurred when two girls arrived ten minutes late and the trainer punished them by assigning twenty push-ups, thirty sit-ups and forty squats. The trainer continued instructing the other pupils; the two girls went to a corner of the gym and got down on their knees for the push-ups. However, instead of pushing up, they just counted loudly without moving their bodies. They kept looking at the trainer; whenever he looked at them, they pushed up once or twice and then stopped as soon as he looked away. But they continued counting out loud. Trainers were aware of the cheating behaviour of their pupils. Sometimes before the start of a new exercise, Alia would exclaim: ‘niet smokkelen!’ (no cheating!). When trainers detected cheating, there were several ways in which they responded, varying from punishment to encouragement. The trainer could punish the cheater or slacker by asking for an extra set of push-ups or extra laps. Punishing a student was also a way of emphasizing the group feeling in the gym. Trainers often used the cheating or slacking as an opportunity to stress that training is a group effort. Hoça Fatih once explained that: ‘Cheating might benefit you right now, but sabotages the group effort of a good training session.’ This group effort was also emphasized by Alia several times when doing push-ups together in a circle. When one or more students waited too long to get into the starting position of a push-up, with hands and feet on the floor and knees off the ground, she commented: ‘While you are taking it easy, we are all waiting for you.’ Or: ‘Does the whole group have to suffer for your convenience?’ It was common practice in both gyms to command the whole group to run an extra



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lap for the slacking behaviour of one person. Once, Khadija was talking and laughing with Imane while Naoual was giving instructions for the next exercise. Naoual made everyone stop the exercise she had just explained and instructed the whole group to do ten more push-ups. She said: ‘You can thank Khadija and Imane for this.’ Trainers more commonly responded with encouragement when a pupil was not training hard. Addressing the student’s perseverance, the trainer highlighted the results of following the training regimen. Usually, the trainer explained that the girls were there for their own benefit and by their own choice; if they cheated, they only cheated themselves. This discourse was also copied by some of the more advanced students: Today I was observing Nadia and Özge doing a punching exercise together, right next to the mirror. Nadia was not really working out hard, but was constantly looking around and looking in the mirror. Özge asked her: ‘What are you doing?’ Nadia replied: ‘I’m just looking to see where the trainer is at.’ Özge, who is more experienced, replied by saying what the trainer often tells the girls: ‘You don’t need to know where she is, you just have to work for yourself, not for her!’

Nadia’s failed attempt to slack off illustrates that having an accomplice is important in making the pretence convincing. Slacking off rarely happens individually since one is always training with others: the punishment and encouragement of slackers are part of the peer-learning process, while slacking itself contributes to a specific group feeling. Having a more serious partner meant that Nadia could not slack off. To avoid these kinds of confrontations, some girls negotiated with each other about how intensely they wanted to train before the training sessions. This was especially true in relation to sparring exercises. Girls would just ask each other: ‘You’re not punching really hard, right? Let’s train together.’ Or: ‘I don’t like clinching. Are you OK with doing the exercise without clinching?’ Like my peers, after a while, I also learned which training partners to choose when I only wanted to pretend to train hard. Ultimately, these alliances resulted in friendships and a specific group identity. Sports studies in general are usually focused on progress and achievement; even studies on sociability in sports privilege ‘winning together’. It is, however, safe to assume that slacking, cheating and pretending to train hard obviously also exist outside of recreational women sports.3 The extent to which ‘taking it easy’, but also the active practice of slacking, constituted a social act in this particular environment is striking. If we take the motivations and negotiations of slacking seriously, we can see that not only training for a tight, beautiful body, but also the objective of socializing  with friends support the women’s claim to femininity and gender ­conformity.

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BEING COOL After months of training, I came to understand that slacking can be employed for other reasons than to avoid pain, namely, to achieve the objectives of a certain body ideal, to socialize with friends, but also to be cool. In short, the intensive fighting practice envisaged by the trainer can stand in the way of the sociability that the young women want. Hence, it was not only new pupils that engaged in slacking practices. Some girls, who had been attending a gym for months or even years, still slacked off as a daily practice. Slacking off, I argue, can also be understood as a small form of rebellion and a way to ‘be cool’. To understand slacking as an inherent part of recreational women-only kickboxing, it is important to look at the motives for enrolling in kickboxing as a young woman. Most girls engaged in women-only kickboxing as a hobby, not a career opportunity. Having fun was therefore very important to many of them. They wanted to work out, but training hard can make kickboxing feel like an obligation and a burden. Making new friends and chatting about life restored the fun for some people. They chose kickboxing as a hobby because it gave them the opportunity to engage in a playful activity that facilitated the creation of new friendships and to gain the advantages of identifying as a fighter, not because they wanted to fight. Kickboxing, the low-threshold sport offered in their neighbourhood, offered them the safe space of a gym in which to socialize while working out. While one could think of easier ways and spaces in which to socialize, the space of the gym offered the girls a valuable identity and a feeling of belonging to a group that was considered tough and cool. One does not need to be a competitive fighter to gain from one’s association with kickboxing. Some girls therefore not only slacked off in training, but even skipped training altogether. Several girls I came to know showed off about being a kickboxer to their friends. They bragged about having three training sessions a week, how hard the training was, and the pain they endured while kickboxing. Many, however, did not train three days a week, but only once or twice. Others came one week and skipped all training sessions the following week or did not show up for two months before starting again, bragging to newer students that they had been kickboxing for far longer. It is much easier to stretch the truth with words than it is with practices. These students may have enrolled in classes to be able to say that they are kickboxers; that may have been all they wanted in the first place – kickboxing for social and cultural capital rather than real physical gain. The status of being a kickboxer, even when the intensity of training is too high, can be a reason to engage in slacking. The female masculine attitudes served the girls’ purposes. They gained the status of ‘being cool’ without having to exert too much effort.



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On the other hand, slacking as such can be perceived as cool because it can be understood as a minor way of rebelling. Slacking, cheating and pretending were often ways of deliberately questioning the authority of the trainer. For adolescents, this is much cooler than doing what you are told to do. Questioning the authority of teachers is a daily exercise for many adolescents. The psychological and social aspects of rebellion and resistance in adolescence have been well studied (see, for example, Hodkinson 2002 on clothing and Rampton 2014 on language). Rebelling is a way of bonding. Resisting teachers serves to set teachers and students apart and forms a bond among students. Since there is a hierarchical difference between the advanced and not-so-advanced students, slacking is also a way of distinguishing oneself from the more advanced students. The slackers would talk about the advanced students with a certain disdain. For example, they mentioned that the advanced students punched so hard that ‘it was no fun anymore’ and that they showed off too much. This is comparable to the findings of studies on slackers in high school, who were considered cool, in contrast to ‘the nerds’ (Bishop 2003). The main difference between sports and high school is that the latter is obligatory whereas sports are (usually) voluntarily – a possible reason why research on sports has focused mainly on winners and enthusiasts rather than slackers. As we saw earlier, kickboxing is often understood as a transgressive practice for young Muslim women because the perceived submissive woman engages in a sport that is viewed as stereotypically masculine. The girls and women break with the stereotype that they are submissive and powerless, as well as calling the stereotype that kickboxing is masculine into question. A female masculinity associated with a tough, cool, don’t-mess-with-me attitude was embraced and reproduced in their practices. At the same time, slacking can occur as a form of rebellion against the masculine character of kickboxing, as this excerpt from my field notes reveals: I was training with Raja, a girl who is very talkative and always making jokes in training. Trainer Naoual commented on the fact that we are not training hard enough, because she had never seen anyone vomit in class (while this was the case in mixed training, according to her). Raja responded by saying: ‘But we are not at the men’s training, we are girls, right?’ A more advanced student on the other side of the room said: ‘Don’t say that, I hate that.’ Naoual told an anecdote about when she was training with a new male pupil, who told her she could punch and kick as hard as she wanted, because she was a girl. So she did and she said she ‘totally destroyed him’. Raja just nodded and we continued the exercise. Then she whispered: ‘Well, I don’t want to vomit, do you?’ I shook my head and we continued taking it easy.

The endurance of physical pain (in this case vomiting) is associated with masculinity. Although the more advanced student voiced her disagreement,

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many young women saw intensive training as preparation for actual fighting, which they viewed as a masculine practice. I encountered the following phrase more than once: ‘I don’t want to train with her because she punches like a guy.’ Avoiding physical pain and framing training hard as masculine challenge the idea that kickboxing transgresses their feminine aspirations. Instead, their kickboxing practices reinforce their femininity. Taking all this together, recreational kickboxing and the inclusion of slacking can be understood as rebellion against all gender norms and ideals. Young women such as Raja demonstrate that they do not want to fit entirely into either discourse. Slacking in training sessions is common and even ambitious fighters take it easy sometimes. But the extent of slacking in these girls’ training sessions makes it an important part of their practice. Slacking thus cannot simply be seen as a form of resistance, but must be understood in relation to the girls’ objectives for practising kickboxing. For many recreational fighters, kickboxing seemed to be more of a tool to achieve goals in life other than becoming a (competing) kickboxer. While slacking implies not pursuing one’s ambitions to the fullest, it may, in reality, enable one to fulfil other aspects of one’s life project, for which a certain femininity that encompasses sociability and downplays the capacity for physical violence is crucial.

CONCLUSION Many young women and girls signed up for a kickboxing class not to become competitive fighters, but to develop a fit, healthy and attractive body and to socialize with new and old friends. While they might have been attracted to the sport in the first place because of its masculine characteristics, their objectives with regard to creating and maintaining a particular form of femininity seeped into their practices and narratives. Women’s kickboxing training emphasized bodily fitness, ‘empowerment’ and sociability, compared to the focus on fighting in the men’s training sessions. This chapter examined the ways in which femininity and masculinity intersect in crafting subjectivities through practices and narratives and demonstrated how motivation and choice in learning kickboxing are embedded in social norms and hegemonic power structures. The young women in these kickboxing classes demonstrate what Judith Butler calls gender performativity: ‘Gender is not passively scripted on the body … but gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure’ (1988: 526). In kickboxing, gender is ‘put on’ through differentiating training practices, aesthetics and narratives of masculinity and femininity. As a result of the emphasis on fitness and form, and on body modification as a goal in itself, women-only kickboxing might not result in the same



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fighting body as mixed training sessions in which the emphasis is on creating a fighting body. Since the ambitions and opportunities of the pupils differ, the enskilment of kickboxing is highly gendered. In training, the women’s strength was compared to that of her male counterparts (e.g. she hits as hard as a man). These rote-learned utterances also filled the gym. Women kickboxers expressed how they hope to shape their bodies so that they are ‘slim and muscled, but not too muscled’ and ‘sporty, but not manly’. They used these standards to measure the appearance of their peers as well. The body is therefore a medium not only in the development of or change in bodily disposition, but also in the constitution of a certain practice. Motivations for kickboxing and the ways in which the young women and girls negotiated strength and beauty demonstrate how skill takes different shapes in ­women-only kickboxing. Women instrumentalized femininity to claim space in sports through an apologetic position vis-à-vis men. Simultaneously, their way of differentiating themselves from ‘the men’s training’ and competitive fighters in general created a group feeling which accommodated their desire to practise sports. Being part of a group of recreational athletes was not only facilitated by doing exercises together; it was also produced by slacking together, pretending to train hard and continuing locker-room conversations during training. This gave the girls the opportunity to interact on a different level, as well as giving them the opportunity to perform a certain identity. Kickboxing, like other masculine sports, is often perceived as a transgressive practice when it is practised by Muslim girls. The idea is that gender norms might be challenged and stereotypes might be broken. However, the young Muslim women demonstrated how they practised slacking as a way of appropriating a cool, masculine attitude and status while maintaining heterosexual and feminine characteristics. Slacking was practised in order not to fight too much and to avoid being associated with fighters. Male fighters might even say that kickboxing training without competitive fighting is a form of slacking in itself; if one is not going to use the skills for fighting, one’s practice is already on a slippery slope. Kickboxers negotiated the boundaries of masculinity and femininity individually and collectively. While some kickboxers narrated their choices and actions as masculine and embraced the term, others contested that narrative and explained that the capacity for physical violence is not related to one’s gender. The young women’s slacking practices demonstrate that female masculinity is embraced only to the extent that it does not threaten heteronormative ideals in their everyday lives. Kickboxing is performed, enacted and enforced in such a way that one becomes, through learning skills and experiencing pain, a particular kind of woman, and not a man. The young women and girls I trained with showed that kickboxing serves as a way of crafting alternative gender subjectivities that were embraced and reproduced by the

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young women and girls in the gyms. Thus, they challenged typical gender expression and identification. At the same time, the ethnography in this chapter reveals how we – both kickboxers and scholars alike – structure our thought within the gender binary of man and woman, and masculine and feminine. This is a constant constraint, both in the language of martial arts and combat sports practitioners and in the language of (sport) scholars. We must cultivate a more nuanced view of participation in sports. Sports are not only practised for physical achievement, with practitioners constantly striving to become better and fitter; rather, in this chapter, we saw that sociability and aesthetics can be motivations and objectives for some young women who engage in women-only kickboxing, or sports in general. Recreational practitioners thereby appropriate kickboxing by altering both its objective and discourse, effecting a shift from the ambition to become a competitive fighter to the desire to train as a hobby. Kickboxing provides a source of gendered self-realization that, as the next chapter explores, ­combines secular and religious sensibilities.

NOTES  1. For an excellent example of how a woman’s sport career can be made or broken by (a lack of ) sponsorship, see the documentary following the career of black queer boxing champion Michele Aboro (Boerman and Reiziger 2004).  2. Literally, smokkelen translates as ‘smuggling’. The word sjoemelen (derived from the German word Schummeln) is used in the same manner.  3. Further research is necessary to support this claim. Anecdotal evidence was provided during a presentation at a sport conference. I asked the other sport scholars, many of whom were avid sportspersons themselves, if anyone ever slacked off in training. After a good laugh and some hesitation, almost everyone raised their hand.

CHAPTE R 4

TO FIGHT OR NOT TO FIGHT Religious Sensibilities in Sports

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Alia walked into the gym fifteen minutes before her training started. Many girls and women had arrived before her and were already preparing for training: getting dressed, adjusting shin guards and wrist bandages. When Alia walked in, sounds of admiration and surprise softly filled the room: ‘Oh look, that is Alia’, ‘Wow!’, ‘Mashallah’. She usually wore a pair of jeans or sweatpants and a hoodie or leather jacket to the gym. But, this time, Alia arrived fully covered in Muslim attire, an abaya and a hijab. ‘People here are not used to seeing me like this’, she explained while changing into shorts and a tank top. ‘But I went to the Friday prayer today and thought, “You know what? I will just keep wearing this today.”’

T

he trainer, Alia, generally wore jeans, but on Fridays, she sometimes entered and left the gym in an abaya, a long dress that covers the full length of the arms and legs, and a hijab, a veil that covers the hair. It was what she wore to the mosque earlier in the day. That first time, everyone noticed the difference in her attire. The women-only setting provided a space in which Alia could experiment with a more covered way of dressing. Whenever she did, the other women praised her for her piety and for looking good. This did not restrain her from experimenting with wearing shorts and t-shirts outside of the gym during the summer. The feminized fighting aesthetic that has developed as a result of the increased participation of women in martial arts and combat sports takes different shapes in women-only kickboxing training sessions with a Muslim outlook. Kickboxing helped Alia tap into a variety of clothing habits. Muslim women see sport as secular and may feel pressured to secularize their clothing choices. For Alia, participation in this sports setting allowed her to experiment with more overtly religiously clothing. In the lives of the young women in these classes,

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kickboxing aspirations are intertwined with their aspirations to be a good Muslim girl. On the one hand, feminist sport scholars argue that a global discourse of postfeminism is producing new articulations of femininity and shaping young women’s embodied experiences (Toffoletti, Thorpe and ­Francombe-Webb 2018: 15). These articulations display a preoccupation with expressions of heterosexual femininity that vary among demographics and cultures. Patterns of femininity are as fluid and variable as those of masculinity, but they have received little attention. Topics such as (the lack of ) beauty, physical strength and sociability are often analysed; religion and race/ethnicity are not. This chapter aims to fill this gap in the literature by examining the role of religion in the strategies and choices that Dutch Muslim women make when they attend women-only kickboxing classes and form patterns of femininity. On the other hand, the question of emphasized femininity, which has been so prevalent in feminist sport studies, is absent in the scholarly debates on Muslim women in sports. The earliest studies on Muslim women and sport (Hargreaves and Vertinsky 2007; Kay 2006; Pfister 2000; Walseth and Fasting 2003) focused on highly politicized issues and framed veiling and gender segregation as problems or constraints. They reproduced essentialist representations of ‘sporting Muslim women’ (Samie 2018). More recent studies, including one by Islamic feminists (Benn, Pfister and Jawad 2011), portray the lives of ‘religious but not so religious’ women (van den Bogert 2018) and critique the racist and imperialist epistemologies of sport studies (Ratna et al. 2018; Samie 2018). They seek to create a field that allows for more intimate accounts of women in sport, which may represent the post-secular turn in feminism (Bracke 2008; Braidotti 2008) in moving away from a conceptualization of religion as oppressive towards a recognition of its potential as a source of women’s agency.1 Most research on Muslim women’s participation in sport juxtaposes religious aspirations with secular practices, which limit the understanding of the variety of sexual and gendered subjectivities and identifications among Muslim women who play sport. Distinguishing between faith-based and ­faith-related activities, Petra Kuppinger (2015) argues that women-only swimming in Germany is organized in a faith-based community but is not a faith-related activity. However, the literature on the ‘pious turn’ and ‘everyday Islam’ has made the distinction between faith-based and f­ aith-related obsolete. In this chapter, I will discuss how gender subjectivities in ­women-only kickboxing are imbued with religious embodiment and ambition and I will argue that the ethical self is cultivated in the reproduction and performance of religious femininities in kickboxing. Through the social space of kickboxing, the young women experiment with the ways they dress, walk and talk,



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and they shape, negotiate and contest the moral ideal of the pious Muslim woman through sports. The emergence of women-only sports clubs with large groups of religious practitioners in swimming, fitness and kickboxing contests the assumption that sport is secular. Sports clubs that target Muslim women, in particular, demonstrate that sport cannot be perceived as solely secular or religious. The juxtaposition of the secular, modern feminist woman and the religious, conservative, backwards woman is based on stereotypes that do not do justice to the articulations of secularity and religion in everyday practices, such as sports. I seek to counter these stereotypes by exploring the reproduction and performance of gendered religiosities in the perceived secular and masculine space of the gym. It demonstrates how the complex interplay of secular liberalism and sexual democracy not only informs public discourse, but also affects individuals’ lives and their sense of belonging (Bracke 2012; Mepschen 2016). Sport participation is framed by this normative secular discourse that misrepresents the complexities of Muslim women’s everyday lives.

THE POLITICS OF GENDER SEPARATION Kickboxing, a relatively new sport, began as a men’s sport and remains male-dominated. The first women to engage in combat sports trained with men, thereby creating a mixed-gender training environment (see, for example, Lafferty and McKay 2004; Mennesson 2000). This mixed-gender training environment gave way to gender-separation as the number of women participants grew. Kickboxing classes in gyms and community centres that specifically cater to women have increased the popularity of kickboxing among women and girls. Some of these young women and girls in kickboxing considered activities such as sports irrelevant to their religious identity, either because religion was relatively unimportant to them or because they considered religion to be an inner state of being. For others, however, religion was an important influence in their everyday lives, including in their practice of combat sports. It was clear that these young women and girls held different viewpoints on this issue, ranging from rejection to celebration. There were ample Islamic arguments used to legitimize Muslim women’s participation in combat sports. This has been documented for sports such as archery in Iran (Pfister 2006) and in Europe, where young women employ religious arguments to gain access to sports (Kay 2006; Walseth and Fasting 2003). They refer to the importance of exercise in taking care of the body and use examples from the hadith, descriptions of the words and deeds of the prophet Muhammad. Some of the young women and girls I trained

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with told me that they had used Islamic arguments to explain to their parents why there should be no problem with them doing sports. The young women and girls who have taken the step to become active in combat sports do not revisit that discussion in the locker room or during the training. Their concern is less a question of whether to engage in such sports and more a question of how to do so. These women and girls discuss their dressing habits and, if applicable, how to behave with a male sparring partner or trainer. Gender-separated training is, however, an important qualification for feeling comfortable in a training setting. Although the Muslim women and girls presented here engaged in ­women-only sessions because they are gender-separated, gender separatism is not limited to Muslim practice. Men’s and women’s competition and training are separated in almost all team sports and many individual sports in the Netherlands. But although gender separation is the norm in sports in the Netherlands, gender separation for Muslim women specifically is highly contested. Swimming, for example, one of the few sports that has always been mixed-gender, competitions aside, has been a controversial topic in the municipality of The Hague. The Netherlands is located in a delta and finding a way to live with the water is part of the historical fabric of the country. This makes the swimming capabilities of its citizens important both practically and culturally, but also makes changes to existing swimming practices a sensitive cultural topic for conservative and right-wing politicians. In 2009, local politicians raised their concerns about gender-separated swimming in public sport facilities. In 2010, gender-separated swimming was prohibited. The city council argued that public activities organized under the auspices of the municipality should be accessible to everyone. The one-hour time slot per week for men and the one-hour time slot per week for women at one of the nine public swimming pools in the city of The Hague were cancelled. Policies have been directed towards stimulating Muslim women to participate in sports, partly because of the influence sports are supposed to have on their social-cultural integration into Dutch society. However, concerns arose when their participation deviated from the norm of mixed-gender swimming (Wisse 2009). Right-wing politicians voiced fears of Islamization and, in response, the city council called for public sports facilities to serve as meeting places. Separated swimming for (Muslim) men and women did not meet the requirement that everyone must be able meet at the same time. These discussions touch upon the recurrent conundrum in social integration studies of whether minorities should emancipate separately within their own group or within larger society. Both with regard to gender, sexuality, ability and race/ethnicity, some scholars demonstrate the importance of separate community gatherings within sports and other fields (i.e. Kuppinger 2015). On the other hand, scholars have also recently argued that



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separate sport sessions do not lead to equality in sports because segregation is ultimately a function of patriarchal logic (McDonagh and Pappano 2008; Travers 2008). When it comes to combat sports in particular, Alex Channon (2014) argues that mixed-gender training might challenge orthodox Western constructions of gender and create more inclusive environments. In the long run, gender-subversive physical practices such as martial arts might instigate a shift towards fairer and freer bodily discourse. It has to be noted, however, that Channon’s research was conducted among white, middle-class British women. His research, like that of many other sport feminist scholars, assumes that what gender equality or women’s empowerment entails or means to one group may not necessarily or equally apply to women (or indeed men) from other social, ethnic and racial or religious groups. A number of the participants in the two gyms at which I trained claimed that mixed-gender sports settings could prevent them from practising combat sport at all, because they would not feel at ease training among men. They felt strongly that it was the gender separation in combat sports that attracted them and many of their friends and could result in more involvement of women and girls in athletics. The increase in women fighters in the Netherlands demonstrates that gender-separated spaces lower the threshold for young women to become active in combat sports. While some private kickboxing gyms in The Hague followed the same line of argument as the city council and only offered mixed-gender training, others targeted Muslim women in particular and attracted groups of pious kickboxers. These gyms confront Dutch secularity, which prescribes that religion should be as invisible as possible in social life (Bakker Kellogg 2015). Unlike public sporting facilities, the kickboxing gyms are privately owned, so the presumed secular space can be imbued with religious sensibilities.

NO MEN ALLOWED After all the young boys and some of their parents had left the training hall at The Lion’s Den and entered the locker room, the young women and girls would enter the training hall. The girls ran around the hall, played tag, danced a little or just adjusted their gear while waiting for training to start. The oldest and more experienced young women, Özge and Naïma, would go to the windows to close the blinds. Thus, they blocked the male gaze, both from the streets at the back of the training hall and from the adjacent cafeteria. The two young women were wearing headscarves and kept them on during training. Two other younger girls wore headscarves in daily life, but took them off during training. Özge is the daughter of The Lion’s Den’s owner

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and trainer Fatih. She was the one who ensured that the doors of the locker rooms and the training hall were closed at all times. During mixed training and children’s training, parents and sometimes friends could observe from behind the cafeteria window without disturbing the training session. Since this window was blinded during women-only training, mothers, friends and potential new pupils who wanted to watch were invited to come inside and sit on the sides of the small ring. At The Lion’s Den, there has been women-only training for quite a number of years, with different trainers coming and going. During the period described, the training sessions were provided by one of the two owners and trainers, Fatih. He would have preferred to hire a woman to do these sessions, but there was no one available for the job at the time. Women and girls who wanted a 100 per cent men-free space might not have felt at ease at The Lion’s Den during that period, even though Fatih allowed the girls to wear headscarves during training. The majority of women and girls at The Lion’s Den, however, did not wear a headscarf in daily life. Some gyms offer special training for women but do not offer ­gender-separated spaces. Often, the trainer is a man and male pupils have access to the training hall, while windows enable people outside to look inside the gym. I found that participants at both SaïdGym and The Lion’s Den valued being able to participate in gender-separated training.2 For some Muslim women and girls in The Hague, sport becomes an option only when gender separation is practised very strictly; for them, male trainers or onlookers would be inappropriate or would make them feel uncomfortable. For this reason, SaïdGym maintained strict gender separation when women were training. This was also how they promoted their training sessions. While mainstream Dutch kickboxing flyers often depict women wearing tank tops and pink sportswear, the promotional material for these women-only classes opted to market kickboxing in a different way. For instance, promotional material mentioned where and when the training took place, alongside a small picture of the two women trainers in largely body-covering clothing. The flyers furthermore listed the special characteristics of these classes: blinded windows, the absence of men and the absence of music. The first two points relate to the full separation of men and women. Men would not be able to watch women’s bodies. The third point – the absence of music – is a prerequisite for Muslims who believe that most kinds of contemporary music are haram, not permissible in Islam (Otterbeck 2008). The list of prerequisites was accompanied by a picture of a halal stamp, like the ones used to certify halal food products. Although there is no certification for ‘halal sports’, the symbolic meaning of the stamp was used to highlight the Muslim character of the kickboxing classes. Consequently, the women-only training sessions were visited by more Muslim women and girls



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than sessions at other gyms I have visited over the years. The Muslim women who came to this gym considered the setting halal, as it was constructed as such by Salima and her brother. They made sure the gym was exclusively available for women during the women-only training. By reframing the gym as halal, the organizers challenged the secularity of the kickboxing gym. Many young women explained that the gender-­separated and religiously mindful arrangement enabled them to engage in sports in a way that would not interfere with their desire to be pious, Muslim women. Sara, a 21-year-old law student, explained her decision to attend this gym: I was at another gym before, but they couldn’t guarantee a women-only space. Most of the time, we had a woman trainer. But when she got sick, one of the male fighters would replace her because they couldn’t find another woman. And in the beginning, that was all fine with me, I didn’t care much. Most girls there are quite young and didn’t care much. But at one point, I became more serious and working out with a man in the same room was just not an option anymore. This was, for me, the reason to find a gym that takes Islam more seriously.

For Sara, women-only kickboxing was a part of her pious pursuit. In her efforts to become a better Muslima (Muslim woman), she considered gender separation a must. The choice to practise kickboxing at SaïdGym was more often a pious choice, with religious motivations, than the choice to attend women-only kickboxing at other gyms, such as The Lion’s Den. The extent to which the gym was a gender-separated space was most obvious during the transition between two training sessions, which included dressing for training. As explained in chapter 1, the dressing rooms at The Lion’s Den were right next to the training hall, while the dressing rooms at SaïdGym were one floor down, at the end of the hall, so there was a long walk between the gender-separated dressing rooms and the gender-separated training hall. Salima, the sister of owner Saïd and the instigator of the women-only classes, who wears a hijab herself, always showed new pupils where the dressing rooms were located. To Muslim women, she explained how it could be a bit of a problem that they had to go down one floor and to the end of the hall to reach the dressing room, but that they could also take their hijabs off in the training hall itself or even get dressed in the hall, as she did herself. Because the dressing room was located so far from the training hall, many girls got dressed at home before coming to the gym. They just removed their coats (and, for some women, their hijabs) right before training. One hour before women-only training began, there was usually a training session for children aged six to twelve. During this training, men were often present in the gym as several fathers picked up their children or watched their children train. By the time the children’s group had finished its training and the kids and their fathers and mothers had left the room, many women and girls had already

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changed into their training gear. The veiled women waited until this moment to remove their hijabs. Salima was the keeper of this women-only space. She made sure all the boys and men, including her brother, who leads the children’s training before the women’s training, had left the room in time for the women-only session to start. To be absolutely sure no men would enter the room, Salima put up a piece of paper with a ‘prohibition’ sign with a man on it on the outside of the door. The paper states, ‘Alleen voor Dames!’ (For Ladies Only!). Below the sign, there is an extra handwritten note: ‘Mannen niet toegestaan!’ (No Men Allowed!). All the veiled women waited until the men had left the room and Salima had closed the door before taking off their headscarves. Many non-veiled women also waited until then to get dressed. As they waited for the space to be free of men, most women and girls occupied themselves wrapping their fists, doing their hair and chatting, all on the windowsills in the room. At the end of training, most girls did not go to the dressing rooms and nobody used the showers. The girls and women quickly got dressed in the training hall since the hall was used by another (mixed-gender) sports club right afterwards. There were, however, boundaries to the women-only setting. One day, one of the women came up from the dressing room while the training of the children was still going on. She told Salima that there was a man downstairs who wanted to talk to her. Salima went downstairs and returned within five minutes, looking a bit anxious. I asked her what had happened. She explained that there was a man with a long beard who had asked if his daughter could train with the women. The daughter was with him, Salima told me. ‘She was wearing a headscarf, but she was only six years old!’ Salima explained to the man that the women-only training was for girls who were twelve years of age and older and that younger children were expected to train an hour earlier, during the kids’ training. The father told her that his daughter was not allowed to train with boys and that he wanted her to train in the women-only session. Salima told me that she found it very difficult to argue with this man, but that she stood her ground and made it clear that she could not watch over 6-year-old kids during the training of young adults. At the same time, it saddened her that the girl would have no chance to practise sport now. Usually, it is believed that girls should start covering their hair during puberty or when they start to menstruate. Salima agrees that Islam prescribes the covering of a woman’s hair, but she was astonished and sad that such a young child was covering her hair. This incident showed that women-only sports are a space where religious boundaries are negotiated, but also that the women-only kickboxing space is a place where women can be amongst themselves.3 Allowing children that young to take part in training would disturb the young women’s training, as well as the precious moment they have for themselves, among peers.



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COMFORTABLE TOGETHER There is an increasing number of sports facilities for women in the Netherlands. Often, these are the result of grassroots initiatives in neighbourhoods, but there are also instances of gyms being partly funded by national and local governments. From 2006 to 2010, many kickboxing gyms in the Netherlands were funded because of their promotion of sports for migrant girls, including gender-separated training sessions. In all of the ­women-only classes I witnessed, usually the trainer was a woman too. In some classes, I observed the presence of both Muslim and non-Muslim women, whereas in others I noticed that Muslim women made up the majority of participants. The fact that a man trained The Lion’s Den women’s session, which was also very popular among young (Muslim) women, demonstrates that, for some women, the comfort of being amongst other women is more important than the strict religious separation of men and women. Although women-only sessions may not contest the patriarchy, this does not invalidate the growth that may be encouraged in the space created in women-only kickboxing. Although religious considerations often influenced Muslim women’s decision to participate in this ­gender-separated space, it was certainly not the sole reason, nor was it the dominant reason for choosing women-only training. Often, the comfort associated with engaging in sports within one’s own gender group and the sociability involved in doing so were mentioned as reasons for choosing separate classes. Many felt that the difference in physical strength between men and women, or men’s reluctance to fight hard enough with or against women, thus making them unsuitable sparring partners, was disadvantageous for their competitive training. Others felt that men would punch and kick too hard, resulting in uneven fights. As one ambitious Muslim woman told me: I tried kickboxing with men before. In the beginning I was a bit scared that they would be too rough with me, but after half a year of training I was actually experiencing the opposite. Some guys would just not punch me in the face, or my stomach, because they felt sorry for me or something. They said things like: ‘I’m sorry, I can’t really hit you because you’re a girl.’ (Naima, twenty-four years old)

For beginners in kickboxing, the difference in (perceived) physical strength can be a reason to start women-only training. For more advanced beginners, men’s reluctance to fight women is one reason to switch to women-only classes. Many women felt that they could more easily find the right training buddy in a gender-separated setting. Others enjoyed the supposedly relaxed environment in the women-only sessions. One woman, who does not consider herself religious, told me:

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It’s just easier you know, with only women. You don’t have to worry about … I don’t know, maybe it sounds stupid, but I don’t have to care about what to wear. When I give a high kick and you can see my underwear, I don’t really care. But that’s different when there are men. Also, the atmosphere is just better. Women are kind to each other, we laugh, we gossip, we help each other. (Marieke, thirty-two years old)

In other words, comfort was a reason for women and girls to train with each other and not with men. Marieke’s words demonstrate that the experience of comfort among women and girls is very much a bodily matter. Seeing and feeling other bodies is, for many (young) women, more comfortable when those other bodies are women’s bodies. Separate sport sessions offer possibilities of social bonding through helping, laughing and gossiping and provide participants with a sense of control and autonomy (Hargreaves 1994; Walseth 2008). Comfort at SaïdGym differed from comfort at The Lion’s Den mainly because of the age of the pupils. While the young women at SaïdGym were in their late teens and twenties and ‘more serious’, the girls at The Lion’s Den were much younger, less pious and slacked off more. Religion was still an important part of their everyday lives, including their kickboxing practice, but many had an ambivalent relationship with it. For example, teenager Farida contrasted my culturally ‘half-Dutch’ Muslim background with the restrictions she experienced during her ‘fully Moroccan’ upbringing: ‘Oh if I were half Dutch I would definitely go out partying and have boyfriends and everything. Hahaha. I just can’t, you know.’ This statement did not surprise me coming from Farida, who always headed to the CD player when she entered the gym to put on a tune she could dance to. For her, being together with like-minded (including Muslim) peers also meant doing that which she could otherwise not do, such as play, dance and gossip. SaïdGym was home to quite a few teenagers as well, but it also catered to slightly older women, including, for example, young mothers who sent their kids to the children’s training an hour before the women’s training. After they watched their kids’ training session, they took out their gym clothes for their own training. Their children often stayed and waited for their mothers to finish their training. They sat on the windowsills, playing computer games on their mothers’ phones, and occasionally ran around the hall when the trainer was in a good mood and allowed them to do so. Some older mothers trained with their daughters in the women-only session. In fact, when SaïdGym started, there was a 50 per cent discount when a girl brought her mother along as a new member. The mothers came to stay fit and have fun, just like their daughters, but engaged in group work separately. In general, the mothers did not engage in full-contact sparring and took it easier during training. The gym is obviously a social space. People spend their time there working on their bodies and skills, as well as meeting new people and hanging out



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with friends. Different gyms offer spaces for different kinds of bonding and there is even bonding between generations within gyms. The characteristics of women-only training at SaïdGym, in particular, make it a place to be social in specifically Muslim ways for many women.

DOING RELIGION IN THE GYM Women who chose women-only kickboxing shared, experienced and developed their Muslim sensibilities. For 31-year-old Marcía, the decision to start kickboxing in a women-only setting was mainly a negotiation with herself. She already had some aerobic kickboxing experience at a fitness gym, but she had never attended a kickboxing club before. Marcía had been studying Islam for some time and was considering converting when she signed up as a member at SaïdGym (she had previously been secular in outlook). Her decision to join the club was informed by its gender-separated training, but also the knowledge that she would be entering a group of like-minded people. On a Friday night after approximately two months of training with us, she came to the club without intending to attend the training. She was wearing a hijab for the first time. She told the girls that she had just returned from the mosque, where she had officially converted to Islam. The girls gathered around to congratulate her, praising her decision. For the next two weeks, she experimented with wearing the hijab; soon she was wearing it on a daily basis. She explained to me how she had made the decision to become a practising Muslim: I told you my ex was a Muslim, right? I have been learning about Islam ever since I met him. I didn’t convert when I was with him, because I always believed that if I were to convert, it should be my personal decision. My conversion shouldn’t be coming from him or anyone else. And that’s why I kept actively reading and learning about Islam. Actually, at one point, I was learning more about Islam than he wanted me to. He wasn’t really a practising Muslim, not as it should be, you know. So, all these years I didn’t get to the point of conversion, of taking that step. Until I had a dream, and I was really overwhelmed by it. I called Nazira, you know … that girl … You met her, right? She explained to me what that dream could mean: that I had to surrender myself. Take that leap of faith, don’t hold back and choose Islam unconditionally. So the next day we immediately made plans to go to the mosque. … But it is a process, you know, and I see that with you as well.4 Sometimes you shouldn’t think too much and should just surrender. I’m personally still struggling with some things, such as dancing, singing and whistling. But also wearing make-up, skirts and plucking my eyebrows. Some habits are so strong that it is hard to unlearn those things.

While Marcía immersed herself in Islam by reading and researching, she also constructed her Muslim belonging in settings where she could meet

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other Muslim women. In her case, this was not only the mosque, but also women-only kickboxing in a neighbourhood in which many Muslims live. She abandoned flamenco dancing and started kickboxing when she converted to Islam: ‘to have a hobby that suits my religion better’ (een hobby die beter bij mijn religie past). Kickboxing is not a Muslim sport, but the gendered seclusion of the space and the fact that most participants, including the trainers, are Muslim allow prospective members to see how kickboxing can more easily be fashioned into a suitable recreational sport than other sports. Marcía made the decision to convert to Islam on her own; it was a ‘personal decision’. Besides wearing a veil, she also changed the rest of her attire, wearing longer shirts over jeans and sometimes wearing long skirts and dresses. With her fellow kickboxers, Marcía discussed her clothing choices, how to wear her new outfits and where to buy clothes. She also talked about some of her struggles in her quest to become a devout Muslim woman, such as not listening to music, not dancing and whistling, and having calm and sober manners. Not only did Marcía’s bodily dispositions change in relation to clothing; her way of carrying herself also changed. I noticed that this happened to me, too, when I spent most of my days with my fellow kickboxers. What I have in common with Marcía is the fact that, although I have a Muslim background, I was not observing Islam meticulously when I began visiting SaïdGym. I adjusted to the aesthetics displayed at the gym, wearing kickboxing shorts and gear and tying my hair back tightly. I also stopped wearing tank tops and (especially but not only during mixed training sessions) avoided showing any cleavage. Interaction with my fellow kickboxers was lively but calm at the same time. In short, I was also training in how to conduct myself modestly. This was even more evident when I trained in the mixed-gender sessions. I made sure to wear leggings, lowered my gaze and mainly interacted with the two or three other women present. I increasingly became one of them and together we began to belong more to the women-only training group. Especially at SaïdGym, Muslim identifications and practices were strengthened at women-only training. For many women, the gym was an important site for becoming a better Muslim and improving their ethical subjectivities. In informal ways, the young women in this gym shared religious information and practices in what might otherwise have been a presumably secular space. When waiting for training to start and while dressing, conversations often focused on religious subjects. My own religious background was an asset in this research since I was automatically ‘one of them’. When I explained that I considered myself a Muslim but did not practise much, Fatima, a mother I spoke to every week as she waited for her 8-year-old son Nourdeen’s training to end, told me: ‘Well, that you are a Muslim is the most



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important thing. That’s, like, what separates us from the rest. It is so good that you are here, among us, now. Who knows what will happen next?’ At SaïdGym, conversations before and after class often revolved around how to follow a stricter, better, more pious path in practising Islam. Fatima, for example, who had recently divorced, actively contemplated how she was changing her ways to lead a more pious life: ‘And I am willing to be even stricter, if it’s for a good man. With clothing and all, for example. I’m already, like, more into studying Islam than I used to be. Me and my family are from Casablanca, and this already gives you a bit of a reputation. And well, I did try some things in life, like going out and stuff. Because I think you should try things. That’s how you get to know about life. But now it’s time to get more serious.’

Growing up in the largest city of Morocco did not only allow Fatima to experiment with different lifestyles and hobbies, including going out, but also came with the reputation of a ‘big-city-girl’ who does not put her religion first. In her experience, practising religion can happen at a later stage. When we discussed my lack of a religious practice, many young women encouraged me to start practising: It is just like kickboxing really. You just have to start. When you start praying, for example, you will feel like a Muslim again. You will feel the connection with God. And when you have that feeling, it becomes a part of what you are, and you want to practise more. You just have to do it. If you can show up for kickboxing training so many days a week, you can also do salat (prayer).

Salma not only urged me to start practising Islam but also demonstrated to me how she understood bodily practice to be constitutive of Muslim becoming. Salma explained that my identifying as a Muslim made me ‘one of us’. Following her instructions, if I observed salat, I might feel what they already saw in me, the potential to strengthen my Muslimness. In comparing the practice of sports and the practice of religion, Salma evokes a process of self-realization, which has been theorized by Saba Mahmood (2001; 2005), Mayanthi L. Fernando (2010) and others. She hinted at the fact that knowing religion is very much related to doing religion. Inspired by Judith Butler’s theory of ‘doing gender’ (1990), Orit Avishai coined the term ‘doing religion’: ‘to see agency, one does not need to identify empowerment, subversion or rational strategizing. It suffices to note how members of conservative religions “do” – observe, perform – religion, wherever that might lead’ (Avishai 2008: 429). Drawing on these ideas, I can only agree with Salma: practising religious activities creates religious subjectivities. As these spiritual conversations unfolded in a non-religious space, the women approached the process of self-realization through sports and prayer similarly. Sports are secular practices to the extent that they have

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been constructed as not religious. However, the actual embodiment of such seemingly dichotomous sensibilities demonstrates that the categories are not fixed. In terms of the effect of the space on life outside the gym, they half-­ hopefully teased each other about how religious knowledge and norms spread and followed the kickboxers home. One day, I asked Salima if we could reschedule an interview I had planned with her so I could go to the mosque with another kickboxer to witness a friend’s conversion. She looked at me and then at another pupil, Marieke, and said, ‘Wow, everybody infects each other here! It is astonishing what’s happening here.’ Marieke responded laughingly, ‘It is contagious; it seems like it is contagious!’ What Marieke and Salima jokingly called the infection of Islam demonstrates how becoming a better Muslima is not only an existential endeavour but is constituted by communal practices. Just as sport scholars have studied gyms and sports associations as communities of practice and athletes as constituted by their practices (Downey 2008; Light and Kirk 2001), this women-only training demonstrates how a community of pious Muslim women forms in a setting and through a practice that are not inherently religious.

THE GAZE On a surprisingly sunny but cold day in February, I met up with Sanae at The Hague’s Central Station. We often biked together to the gym, but this time we both arrived on public transport because we were going shopping. We hugged and laughed about coming without our bikes. We agreed that it was difficult parking a bike in the city centre without it being taken away by municipal workers. I complimented her on her looks: she was wearing a long grey wool coat and a yellow scarf. She explained at length how hard it was to decide what to wear. It was so cold, but it seemed like spring was in the air. She said she could see that others must feel the same: after four dark, cold and rainy months, people were walking the streets smiling again, as we were. It was busy on the main shopping street, but we turned onto a quieter street at one of the main intersections. There were not many shops on this street, but we were going to a particular place where we could buy new fight gear. The small shop sold gloves, shin guards, shorts and shirts, bandages in all colours of the rainbow, jumping ropes, training pads, but also nutritional supplements, athletic tape, tiger balm and other medical ointments. We felt a little uncomfortable in the small shop as it was hard to roam around and there were so many things that were new to us. The owner noticed that we were uncomfortable and tried to put us at ease by saying, ‘Take your time to look around and call me when I can help you.’ Sanae wanted to buy shorts.



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She had been training since October and had been using sweatpants in training. Now she was convinced that kickboxing was not a crazy phase and she was ready to invest in a new outfit. The three racks of shorts presented an abundance of shiny colour combinations. Some were embroidered with Thai lettering, others with flags of Thailand, the Netherlands, Morocco or Turkey. There was a small section with pink shorts and a small section with long black shorts. I took a pair of long shorts off the rack, held them up and said: ‘They almost look like basketball shorts.’ The shop owner, sitting at the register 2 metres away, explained that they were Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) shorts. MMA, in which kickboxing is combined with judo, wrestling and other martial arts, was becoming increasingly popular in the Netherlands, although there was only one gym in The Hague that offered training sessions at that time. Sanae remarked that one of the women at the gym where she had previously trained for two weeks, before going to SaïdGym, wore shorts like those and that she had been happy to see that there were longer options. She decided to try some MMA shorts and kickboxing shorts, all predominantly black. When she tried them on, I peeked through the curtain to help her decide. She went with the MMA shorts in the end because the kickboxing shorts were ‘like really, really short. You could see my … underwear if do a high kick.’ Sanae thought she would feel uncomfortable in the kickboxing shorts or would feel she needed to wear leggings underneath. She thought the MMA shorts were cool and said jokingly: ‘Who knows? Now I can switch to MMA if I want. Just kidding!’ At the women-only training, especially in the closed space of SaïdGym, women could theoretically wear whatever they want. There was no dress code, although gym attire (mainly sweatpants or leggings and a t-shirt) was the norm. Less than half of the pupils wore kickboxing shorts, either with or without leggings. A ‘proper’ way of dressing was observable at both gyms. The tensions between women fighters and their assumed masculine fighting practices are evident in their kickboxing attire. As discussed in the previous chapter, pink is the most popular colour, often combined with black. SaïdGym even has its own pink gear for sale. Dressing is one of the ways of essentializing gender constructions with reference to Islamic ideals (Amir-Moazami and Salvatore 2003). Women fighters on promotional flyers and the internet often only wear shorts and a tank top or a sports bra, but the women in women-only training conveyed a modest aesthetic. In terms of wardrobe, they normalized modesty, wearing tops that did not show cleavage and leggings under shorts. When doing push-ups or bending down for stretching, the girls ensured that their shirts were tucked into their shorts to avoid revealing skin of the belly or back. Pupils helped each other when they accidentally showed the bare skin of their backs, bellies or chest by tucking in shirts to cover backs and bellies or pulling the fabric up at the neckline

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to cover the cleavage. Not only did I mimic the dressing habits of the girls, I also noticed how other new girls displayed the same behaviour as me. Previously, I would not have minded showing my legs or a little of my back in a training session, let alone a women-only training session, but after a while I began to feel uncomfortable showing too much bare skin. I observed how easily I adapted to such norms. The way in which I became involved in the practice of covering the body in the gym illustrates how practices become communal. Lila Abu-Lughod explains that ‘veiling became an automatic response to embarrassment’ (1988: 155) for her in her fieldwork; I made the same observation in relation to small things like tucking in my shirt. For Sanae, choosing the longer shorts for MMA was a way of ensuring that she was wearing ‘proper’ fighting attire and reducing the amount of visible skin at the same time. Most habitual clothing practices in the gym, including my own covering of my legs and shoulders, were practised without being the subject of much conversation. When asked why the young women dressed the way they did, religious argumentation was not uncommon in their answers: Well, it’s haram to show my bare legs, so it’s just easy to wear leggings. Because then I can dress in the locker room and my legs won’t be bare if there are still any men in the training hall when I enter. (Hind, eighteen years old) Uhm, I think it is written in the Quran, right? Like, we also have to wear hijab. That’s why I don’t wear shorts. And I will also wear a hijab when I’m older, insh’allah. (Loubna, sixteen years old) I know people say shorts are bad. But I think tank tops are worse. My mother says it’s OK if I wear shorts. Also, on holidays I do that. But she doesn’t want me to wear tank tops, because then my shoulders are showing, and also my cleavage. (Fouzia, seventeen years old)

These quotations demonstrate how covering is different for every individual. At the same time, women-only kickboxing provided the communal space in which clothing practices were adjusted in response to the practices of peers. In both gyms, the girls explicitly praised each other when they started wearing clothes that covered more of the body, for example, wearing a headscarf to cover hair or wearing longer dresses down to the ankles. When Amina wore a long dress over her jeans on one occasion, I asked her about the change. She explained that it felt good, but that she was not yet sure whether she would make a definite change in her dressing habits. She was afraid that she would miss wearing the clothing that she was used to wearing. And she explained that she would not be able to meet her boyfriend anymore: ‘Actually, it would be exactly the same, but still it feels different. Like, if you are dressed like this, you can’t do that anymore.’



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Mahmood argues that we should ‘examine the work that bodily practice performs in creating a subject that is pious in its formation’ (2005: 160). In her study of the pious women’s movement in Egypt, she explains how a modest bodily form was not an expression of piety, but the means through which piety was acquired (Mahmood 2005: 161). Thus, for Amina, a modest dress that covered more of the body was part of the cultivation of a pious self, especially since it encouraged her to behave with greater piety. The vignette at the beginning of this chapter is another example. At SaïdGym, the cultivation of the self was further strengthened because many girls visited the mosque together. Some went to Quran class together on Saturdays, while others attended lectures in the mosque together. So even in the women-only setting – where women do not have to worry about the male gaze – women cannot wear ‘whatever they want’. Women constantly check each other’s clothing and habits and comment on their level of modesty, which might be just as restrictive as the male gaze. Sometimes acquaintances from the mosque would participate in kickboxing training, often for a trial lesson. Two girls wearing niqabs (face veils), occasional visitors to SaïdGym, publicly asked one of their friends about not wearing the hijab daily and about kickboxing in shorts, saying, ‘I am not judging you, that is up to God. But it is also my duty to remind you of the right path.’ More often, judgements were conveyed through a subtle look at someone’s cleavage or a question about whether someone was not too cold in a t-shirt or top. The young women use one specific Dutch word to describe the ways in which a pair of eyes can gaze upon another body: beschouwen. This is interesting not only because ‘gaze’ and ‘gazing’ are not translatable words in Dutch (in fact, in scholarly language, the English word ‘gaze’ is used), but also because the practice of the gaze is not part of Dutch discourse. While there is no good Dutch translation for ‘gaze’, the noun might be translated as blik (glance, look) and the verb could be translated as staren (staring) or aanschouwen (setting eyes on). However, the word the young women use, beschouwen, literally means looking at something with attention or sometimes in an evaluative way. In general use, a person can only be the subject of this verb if it is followed by a proposition and another noun (e.g. Ik beschouw je als een vriend [I see/consider you as a friend]). But young people in urban areas in the Netherlands nowadays use the word beschouwen to refer to the way in which someone looks at them judgmentally. If a person feels gazed upon or stared at, he or she might say ‘Wat kijk je naar me?’ or, in the latest slang, ‘Wat beschouw je me?’ (both meaning: ‘For what reason are you looking at me?’). The word can also be used to mean an insult or diss: ‘Ze beschouwt je’ (She disses you). The constant checking of each other’s clothing and habits is sometimes ­referred to as ‘the female gaze’ (Lorius 1996; Salamandra 2012; Schauer

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2005; Sehlikoglu 2021), as it is women who participate in it. It differs from the male gaze, but I would question whether this difference is significant enough to make a gendered distinction between the two. Both forms of gazing judgementally consider the other, female, body in order to reproduce heteronormative bodily practices. While the ‘gazers’ might be men or women, the subject, the female body, remains the same. As Dutch youth slang might teach us, the content of the judgement inherent in the gaze might be more important.

A TIME FOR PLAY At The Lion’s Den, kickboxing is a space in which to express youthfulness: running, screaming, dancing and joking were all part of the dressing-room practices, as well as the beginning and end of every kickboxing training session. Almost every week, 16-year-old Amina joked about a boyfriend she did not have. The first time she mentioned him was when she volunteered to be interviewed by me, because she had ‘a lot of juicy stories to tell’. After I jokingly said that I was particularly interested in juicy stories, but that she should know that I would write down all the names she would mention, she said: ‘Yeah, yeah, no problem. His name is Mo and he is from Schilderswijk. You can write that down. We are going to marry soon anyway. Not! Hahaha.’ Amina’s non-existent boyfriend Mo became a running gag. When she grunted loudly during heavy workouts, her training partner said, ‘Be careful not to make Mo jealous now’, and when she rushed away quickly after a training session, she said, ‘Gotta go, Mo’s waiting!’ Single girls and young women also discussed possible future relationships with each other. Some were very open about their high standards for future husbands and said that their husbands should be stronger than they were to make sure both would feel that it was an ‘equal’ relationship. Others even mentioned that these future husbands should also be kickboxers and that being fit and muscled would not be enough. As 16-year-old Fatima remarked: ‘Sometimes you can just see that they won’t stand a chance in a fight. What would I do with a man like that? He should at least be able to handle me!’ While many martial arts and combat sport scholars agree on the capacity of the sport to undo gender norms, a closer look at women fighters’ intimate relationships demonstrates that they might in fact be overdoing gender (Hamilton 2020). It was important to them that their future partners not only appear fit but also be physically capable of ‘handling’ the woman and know how to fight. These women, who knew how to fight, wanted the man to be the stronger person in the relationship. Even though they took pride in how strong they were themselves, they held on to the heteronormative ideal that men should be stronger than women.



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While most of the young girls at The Lion’s Den joked and fantasized about future boyfriends, some of the young women at SaïdGym had boyfriends, were planning their engagements and dreamt about their weddings. Most of the early relationships I encountered were referred to as ‘nothing serious’. But even for these girls, the ultimate goal of having a boyfriend was to get married and start a family. We go to McDonald’s together or buy ice cream. We also went to the movies once, but I actually didn’t like it. It felt so awkward. I don’t know, I don’t know if he’s the one. There is actually another guy at school who also likes me. And before I never noticed him really, but now I have started having doubts. What if maybe he is nicer than Ismail? How do you know if he is the one? (Asma, sixteen years old) I’m really in love with him, you know. He makes me smile, he makes me happy and I think he would be a good husband. I mean, I did tell you that I know that he was in a shisha-lounge recently, right? But he promised me he would never do it again and I believe him, so everything is OK now. But I’m thinking about breaking up with him anyway now. Not because I don’t want him anymore, but because having a relationship with him is just not right. If I want to be with him, we have to get married. And, you know, marriages would not have the same blessing if there were a relationship before the ceremony. So, we should stop seeing each other, I guess. (Loubna, eighteen years old)

Asma and Loubna were at different stages with their boyfriends, but both were contemplating whether their partners were ‘marriage material’. Loubna had been with her boyfriend for almost eight months when we talked about him, at length, during an interview. They had been going steady and considering getting engaged. His visits to a shisha lounge, an establishment in which people, mainly men, smoke shisha (waterpipe), was, for Loubna, a sign that he might not be as serious about their engagement plans as she was. It is not only the smoking, but also the association with night life that make shisha lounges a place where she would not want her good Muslim husband to hang out. Becoming serious about marriage would also mean that the period of dating, hanging out and fooling around would end. Even before getting engaged, she would want them to stop seeing each other to demonstrate how serious they were about marriage. Upon marrying, the time for play would come to an end. Like playing around with boys and boyfriends, kickboxing is understood as a form of play associated with youthfulness and not adulthood. Many girls, especially those engaged in competitive fighting, planned to stop kickboxing once they married. They assumed that their future husbands would want them to stop fighting, but they themselves also regarded fighting as inappropriate for married women. Girls and women in the mixed training, for example, envisaged participating in women-only training once they were married. Wearing

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a headscarf, getting married and stopping kickboxing were often mentioned in the same sentence. Especially at SaïdGym, where many adult women, including young mothers, engaged in kickboxing practice, one might imagine that the dividing line between kickboxing before and after marriage was not so black and white, but in fact this dividing line was evident in the space of the gym and the exercises participants engaged in. The ambitious adolescents situated themselves on the right side of the gym: they agreed to engage in full-contact sparring, including the face. On the left were the younger girls who were not allowed to punch each other in the face yet (and did not discuss boyfriends). In the middle were the married women and the mothers; although they were not classified as such and the dividing lines were not always so stark, it was clear that age was not the only marker. Without discussing pregnancy, menstruation cycles or the like, it was made clear that not only the face, but also the stomach area was off limits in this group. Sertaç Sehlikoglu, in her research on sporting aunties in Istanbul, argues that pregnancy was pivotal in women’s gendered temporality. Whether women were situated before or after childbirth, pregnancy was a common point of reference for the Istanbulites and a reason to strive for fitness (2021: 230). Among the kickboxers in the two gyms in The Hague, this was a less common talking point. Although some women in SaïdGym commented on how they were trying to lose pregnancy weight, the younger unmarried women did not (at least out loud) imagine themselves giving birth. Instead, marriage, which often implied starting a family, was a recurring topic. The women’s temporalities were most certainly gendered and kickboxing was the site on which times of youth and adulthood were negotiated.

CONCLUSION Young Muslim women in the Netherlands negotiate and reshape their gender subjectivities through the sporting culture of kickboxing. For Muslim women in the Netherlands, kickboxing is an act of constructing identity and belonging, in which gender, race/ethnicity and religion intersect. Against a discursive backdrop of assumed subordination and a decade’s worth of governmental integration-through-sport programmes, sports are understood as a catalyst for turning ethnic minorities into palatable citizens. Muslim women’s participation in kickboxing can be ‘empowering’, but, contrary to popular belief, not because it forces otherwise religion-bound individuals to engage in secular and thus civic practice. Instead of becoming less religious, Muslim women in kickboxing actively break with the stereotype of the ‘Muslimwoman’ without agency that perpetuates the notion that disconnecting



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from Islam is empowering. Within women-only kickboxing, young women and girls challenge the dominant stereotypes of them as submissive, passive and powerless. The kickboxing gym provides a space in which to perform alternative femininities that counter a hegemonic white femininity and simultaneously enable a pious femininity. Through their sport participation, they practise a form of cultural citizenship within the national fabric while claiming belonging to the minoritized group of (Moroccan-Dutch) Muslims. We witnessed various subjectivities in the two gyms. Most studies on religious knowledge and pious selves are based on religious communities and focus on religious practices. Getting to know these young women in a place that was not entirely religious and in which people practise a non-religious activity shed new light on Muslim women’s subjectivities. By homing in on gender separation, kickboxing techniques, sartorial practices and romantic relationships, this chapter has demonstrated that women-only kickboxing is a secular means of realizing piety. These connections might seem contradictory to mainstream Dutch public opinion and might not have been anticipated by governmental policies and sports organizers. The women and their Muslim peers recognize their engagement in kickboxing as transgressive: fighting sports are considered masculine and youthful, and competitive fighting can be understood as contradicting Islamic norms. At the same time, they applaud the separation of genders at the gym. Women-only kickboxing is neither a complete act of resistance nor submission to male authority, Islamic institutional standards or Western feminist discourses. In these ‘postfeminist’ times, in which many would argue that feminism is not needed anymore because (white, secular) men and women are equal, Muslim women are still considered submissive, housebound and in need of ‘empowerment’ and emancipation. When Muslim women choose to engage in sports, this is understood by the wider society as liberating and empowering, because they are viewed as unfree and un-empowered. The ethnography in this chapter challenges and complicates this stereotype by demonstrating, on the one hand, how becoming more powerful can go hand in hand with being and becoming pious. While the wider public understand Muslim women’s participation as resistance to the backwardness, submission and/or oppression of Islam, women-only kickboxing is in, fact, a catalyst for greater observance of Islam for some women. The practice of kickboxing is not a religious practice and is not considered as such by the young women. However, the gender-separated space in which a community of like-minded people share experiences and knowledge relating to how to be and become a good, Muslim woman proves to be an important site for ethical self-formation nonetheless. Many individual decisions, such as choosing to attend a women-only or mixed-gender session, engaging in full-contact sparring or not and one’s

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level of clothing coverage, may be faith-based, as well as being determined by comfort, aesthetics and societal norms. The concepts of personal autonomy, equality, freedom and self-realization that shape the discourse around their engagement in sports have historically been framed as secular, modern counterparts to Islamic submission, unfreedom and traditionalism. Mahmood’s (2005) influential work was the instigator of the important piety turn that has highlighted Muslim’s desire for piety and virtue and that has helped shift the focus away from resistance as the sole form of women’s agency. But as Jeanette S. Jouili (2011) stated in her work on the Islamic revival movement in Europe, it is untenable to replace a desire for piety and virtue with the desire for ‘empowerment’ when it comes to young Muslim women who are born and socialized in European countries. Too much of the existing scholarship on Muslim women in Europe (in sports and in general) sensationalizes the religious aspect of their identification processes, when in reality the performance of a religious identity is just one of many expressions of a person’s beliefs, values and symbolism. The individual and collective considerations in this chapter demonstrate not only that ethical self-cultivation in religious settings is a form of agency, but also that the negotiations of national secular arrangements in this specific context of The Hague and the Netherlands are likewise a form of agency. The mutuality of secular and religious self-improvement seems to create a sense of belonging that actively counters the stereotypes to which the young women are subjected. The impetus for improving both body and mind can be oriented towards the secular, but also the religious. Both have been researched in secular and religious spaces respectively, but the cultivation of religious subjectivities within a practice – recreational sports – that is considered secular yields new insights into the phenomenology of self-­ improvement. Relatedly, the spatialization of halal in the gym shows how the secular and the religious cannot be easily divided as they are in fact intertwined in everyday practices. Whether or not to listen to music during training, informally and non-verbally agreeing on sartorial norms, or inspiring one another to strive to become better Muslims – the negotiation of what is deemed permissible in Islam happens in the space of the gym, a space that is shared by like-minded people with similar religious backgrounds and outlooks on life. The kickboxing gym is situated within a specific neighbourhood and within the minority-majority city of The Hague, which allows for a halal modality of what is considered a secular practice. Ethnicity, religion and gender intersect in the formation and execution of the halal ­environment. The specificity of the gendered experience of kickboxing in these cases points towards the temporal dimensions of women’s processes of self-­ improvement. Self-improvement through sports is embedded in anticipation and expectations of women. Striving to ‘become more serious’ or



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delaying becoming more serious involves a consideration of one’s changing body, one’s future, in terms of one’s marriage, childbirth and adult life in general, and the ways in which ‘becoming serious’ comes with gendered expectations of appropriate behaviour. The way in which young Muslim women’s desire for a sporting identity differs from that of their male counterparts becomes even clearer in the pursuit of a kickboxing career. As we shall see in the next chapter, controlling one’s temporal patterns in relation to marriage, one’s choice of clothing and gender separation in sports is an inherent part of the path to become a competitive woman fighter.

NOTES  1. In recent years, the anthropology of Islam has taken up this discussion in terms of piety. For a more elaborate account of the piety turn, see Fadil and Fernando (2015).  2. While most people in the gym agreed that gender segregation is a religious obligation for both men and women, the participation of men in mixed training sessions was not generally called into question. However, a small group of recreational male kickboxers at SaïdGym did not want to train with women because of their religious convictions. After a while, SaïdGym organized one men-only training session per week. The young women, but some men too, laughingly called it ‘the men-withbeards training’.  3. A year after this incident, SaïdGym developed girls-only kickboxing training for 6to 14-year-olds.  4. She is referring to an earlier conversation we had in the mosque, during which I explained that I did not agree with some of the things the imam had said and that such things make religion a difficult issue for me.

CHAPTE R 5

FIGHTING YOUR WAY IN Competitive Kickboxing against the Odds

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After the women-only training session led by Alia, we got on the bus together to go to another branch of the gym on the other side of town so we could join the advanced mixed training session. Alia greeted the bus driver and asked him overly politely how he was doing. When we sat down, I commented that she had been so polite to him, because not everyone greets the bus driver. She replied: ‘You always have to be nice. If you’re not, they are not either.’ The bus was almost empty. Besides Alia and me, there was only one other passenger, a man who looked and sounded like an off-duty bus driver. He was standing next to the driver so they could talk to each other. A couple of stops later, five training buddies of ours were waiting to get on the bus. The driver slowed down, but then decided not to stop and said: ‘No, they are not coming with me on this bus.’ The young men scowled at the bus as it passed. Alia asked politely but loudly: ‘Sir, why don’t you let them in? They train with us!’ He repeated: ‘They’re not getting in.’ Alia replied, ‘That’s ridiculous, they didn’t do anything wrong! You can’t just do that.’ The driver said to the other man: ‘Yesterday someone called me racist. But you know what, sometimes you almost become one.’ His colleague replied, ‘Well, I am not ashamed of it anymore.’

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fter this incident, Alia and I quietly talked about what had happened in disbelief and despair, but we decided to stay on the bus to arrive on time for training. When we arrived, Alia discreetly told trainer Saïd why five of his fighters would be late. He listened and just nodded. Saïd regularly punished late fighters, asking for extra push-ups or having them stay late to clean the hall, but on that day, he didn’t say a word when they arrived. Instead, he gave them all a kind pat on the back as they rushed into the locker room to get dressed. Since Moroccan-Dutch and Muslim boys and young men, particularly those from The Hague South and Southwest, are the most stigmatized group in Dutch society today, Saïd was not surprised



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by this incident and treated his pupils with the care and understanding they needed in that moment. Alia’s polite but stern confrontation with the bus driver and her discreet and empathic narration of the incident afterwards demonstrate her positionality in a context in which people with a Moroccan appearance are racialized and stigmatized, but in complex, gendered ways. Alia, a petite young woman with impeccably straightened brown hair, tanned light brown skin and stylish urban apparel, knew how to signal to the driver that she was virtuous and worthy. Her peers, however, did not even get this chance, because the bus driver judged the group of young men, with their particular skin and hair colour and their urban apparel, as threatening. Alia had the privilege of being able to stand up and voice her concern to the bus driver. She would not be considered a threat, because of her gender. While this book centralizes the lifeworlds of young women and girls, their experiences can only be fully understood if we see how they are entangled and co-constructed with the experiences of their male counterparts. The simultaneous, intricate construction of masculinity and femininity, as discussed in previous chapters, becomes increasingly clear when we scrutinize the masculine space of competitive fighting. As young men pursue kickboxing first as a leisurely hobby and maybe later as a prospective career opportunity, they have a different relation to participation in sports, one in which women and femininity are produced and framed as their opposite so they can maintain a hegemonic position. Their efforts to lay claim to cultural citizenship through sports is constructed through a racialized masculinity (see, for example, Carrington 1998; Thangaraj 2015), which both contests and embraces the men’s minoritized position in the Netherlands.1 Jérôme Beauchez (2017), in his study of boxers in a French banlieue, argues that boxing is an act of resistance for young immigrant men stigmatized by race and class. In this chapter, I argue that the men’s production of patterns of racialized masculinity simultaneously shapes a racialized femininity. Since women are subjects in the production of masculinity (Connell 1987), this context is an undeniable part of the marginalization of Muslim women in the Netherlands and in sports more specifically. This chapter wraps up some of the dilemmas we have encountered in the previous chapters by homing in on competitive kickboxing, a space in which these dilemmas are amplified. By following Alia’s biography as an ambitious competitive kickboxer  – a woman among men – this chapter demonstrates how racial heteronormativity ingrains social hierarchies and structures the possibilities of ­self-realization. Alia’s story is extraordinary, because so few young women aspire to a career in kickboxing and succeed. This chapter examines in finegrained detail how a young woman from a so-called ‘disadvantaged neighbourhood’ fought her way through various levels of institutional racism and

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sexism. Alia’s life story tells us about her decisions to practise kickboxing, choose a gym and become a competitive fighter, demonstrating how athletic ambitions are bound by racialized, gendered and classed ideals and expectations. The chapter also details her expectations, ambitions and relations with family and friends in her pursuit of a kickboxing career. By charting Alia’s career, emphasizing the agentic power of a young Muslim woman in a European city and her choice to become a competitive kickboxer, this chapter reveals the workings of systemic inequalities.

INVECHTEN AS PART OF INTEGRATION The children and grandchildren of migrants of the 1960s and 1970s – Dutch citizens with a Moroccan or Muslim background, name and/or physical appearance – are pigeonholed as the eternal other (de Koning 2016a). Discrimination on the job market, the housing market and in racial profiling by police has become increasingly clear.2 At the same time, neoliberal ideologies that predominate in the Netherlands highlight the meritocratic pursuit of happiness, wealth and health of individual citizens. Prime minister of the Netherlands Mark Rutte expanded this ideology, in relation to how people should react to discrimination: I have been thinking about that [discrimination] and have come to the conclusion that I can’t fix this. The paradox is that the solution lies with Mohammed. I can say to the Netherlands: ‘please don’t discriminate, judge someone on character and knowledge’. But when it does happen, Mohammed has a choice: drop out because of this insult or continue. Newcomers have always had to adapt and have always faced prejudice and discrimination. Je moet je invechten (You have to fight your way in). (Kouwenhoven 2015)

Invechten is not a very common word in colloquial Dutch. It is not even mentioned in standard dictionaries. In the 1960s and 1970s, it popped up as a popular phrase to describe how hard students had to try to become part of fraternities and sororities. Often it was related to processes of initiation or hazing (ontgroening). The term is also now used by fraternities and sororities to describe a tradition whereby one fraternity/sorority tries to take over the clubhouse of another, with physical fighting being part of this tradition (De Coster 2020). Invechten is a way for new members to prove themselves, sometimes through physical fighting, and eventually to be accepted as part of the club.3 Considering Rutte is not a fan of kickboxing and fears that it would enable Moroccan-Dutch youth to ‘punch us even harder’, as we saw in chapter 1, he most probably did not mean to suggest that ‘Mohammed’ should literally



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start fighting. ‘Mohammed’, the most common Muslim male name, is used here as trope to explain that Muslims/Moroccans/newcomers have to fight their way into society. Don’t quit, don’t drop out, but instead fight against discrimination. Prime Minister Rutte frames discrimination as an individual problem instead of a state affair. The term invechten assumes that there is a certain field to which some have less access than others. It recognizes the structural constraints, but instead of creating a level playing field for all citizens, it puts the burden on the disadvantaged. Invechten as a way of countering discrimination is analogous to integration discourses in the Netherlands. Integration policies suggest ways of establishing a sense of belonging through participation in activities, such as sports. Participation in sports is understood as a gateway to integration in society. Participation in sports, such as kickboxing, is promoted to minorities as a means of coming to belong to the majority and climbing the social ladder. Additionally, young men from ethnic minorities and low-class backgrounds, in particular, consider sports a fruitful endeavour for upward mobility (Spaaij 2009) and use it as a way of claiming cultural citizenship (Thangaraj 2015). In this context, kickboxing can be understood as a form of invechten. Beginner kickboxers usually start kickboxing as a leisure activity and a way of actively participating in neighbourhood activities, but some eventually come to understand the sport as a means of achieving success, fame and capital. In this sense, kickboxing is intriguing because it has been both praised and castigated over the past decade. Kickboxing has been promoted as an outlet for aggression and a way of teaching norms and values, thus making for safer streets. But kickboxers themselves, especially Moroccan-Dutch men, have been stigmatized for participating in an allegedly uncivilized, violent and criminal sport. What is the effect on a sport when its recreational side is promoted and subsidized while its professional side is criminalized?

REGULATION AND PROFESSIONALIZATION OF KICKBOXING COMPETITIONS Both sports policies and sport research highlight the importance of professional sports for recreational sports and vice versa (VWS 1996) due to simultaneous trickle-down and trickle-up effects (van Bottenburg and Elling 2012). Out of a mass of recreational athletes, a small group of professional athletes will emerge. These champions then encourage more people to start practising sports. Professional sports performances and sporting events have a positive effect on participation in recreational sports, while the number of recreational athletes has a positive effect on the number of professional athletes.

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For decades, the Netherlands has been very successful internationally in ring sports, including Thai boxing, kickboxing, K-1 and MMA. The Netherlands is also known for hosting some of the largest and most successful ring tournaments. Various sport scholars stress that success in professional sports on an international level creates feelings of national pride and belonging (van Bottenburg 2009; Houlihan 1997). This association has also been reiterated by national policies on social bonding (WRR 2007) and, more particularly, sports (VWS 2005, 2006). But unlike football, field hockey and speed skating, ring sports do not currently foster national pride among a broad Dutch audience. There are multiple, entangled culprits that are likely negatively effecting the cycle of trickle-up and trickle-down in kickboxing: kickboxing’s historical relation with crime, the one-sided images of ring sports in Dutch media, and such sports’ lack of structure and regulation in the Netherlands. Kickboxing remains an informal sport with a proliferation of associations, fighting styles and grading systems, but without an overarching national federation. Moreover, many organizations have sold their companies or moved their competitions to other countries due to new governmental regulations that have come into effect since 2010. For example, It’s Showtime! was banned from cities like Amsterdam and Den Bosch for being ‘a network meeting for organized crime’ (Verseput 2012). After two shootings and the unrelated conviction of famed fighter Badr Hari in three physical abuse cases (De Lange 2014), the media and politicians were eager to emphasize the connections between kickboxing and criminality (e.g. Verseput 2012). While local governments have been trying to ban major kickboxing events, the kickboxing scene has been requesting more regulation. On 26 November 2012, a national newspaper published a ‘kickboxing manifesto’ in which the signatories pleaded for a better national structure for the sport. Among the signatories were Dutch kickboxing legends Peter Aarts, Ernesto Hoost and Mousid Akhamrane. The signatories asked the national government and the Dutch Olympic Committee for structural change. At the same time, they asked the media to pay at least equal attention to the good side of ring sports (De Graaf 2012). While various parties see the lack of regulation as an urgent problem, the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports refrains from becoming involved in regulating ring sports. In an era of deregulation, the ministry is not interested in developing policy on this issue (Dortants and van Bottenburg 2013: 34). The lack of professionalization in kickboxing influences how the ideology of ‘integration through participation’, described in chapter 1, plays out in practice. The fact that kickboxing remains an informal sport without a national association and the way in which the deviant behaviour of the athletes and fans is emphasized in the media affect how kickboxing is practised in neighbourhood facilities. The majority of pupils do not actively engage with



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these debates and the politics of sports regulation and professionalization, but these developments do have consequences for them, as they colour kickboxing as a sport, as well as colouring the participation of Moroccan-Dutch and Muslim youth in society. Learning the skills of kickboxing, including its norms and values, is not enough for young men and women to become competitive athletes. The absence of a larger structure and facilities prevents youth from professionalizing, leaving them with marginalized skills. In the sport’s current state, young people’s participation in kickboxing will not generate the same possibilities as participation in other sports that provide paths to careers. The lack of professionalization and regulation in kickboxing highlight its devaluation. The promotion of the participation of a marginalized group in a marginalized sport does not attest to a possibility of invechten through participation in sports. This is especially true for women and girls, for whom competitive kickboxing is even less of an option. According to trainer and club owner Saïd from SaïdGym, there are two reasons why this is the case: Look, I really enjoy women’s fights, but there are two problems. The first is that the majority of the audience cannot appreciate women’s fights, because they just want to see two beasts that shed blood. Women’s fights are much more technical, but you have to understand the sport really well to appreciate that. Most viewers, and those are the people that make the event profitable, cannot. The other problem is that some promoters and organizers just don’t want women at their events. They still think it’s a man’s sport.

Women are only sparingly included at regular fight events, and the reasons Saïd outlines are valid and would be reiterated by other gym owners and trainers. At the same time, the devaluation of women’s fights can only be countered by more women being admitted to competitive fighting. The number of women who are active in kickboxing is relatively low, which makes it hard to organize women’s fights consistently. The masculine atmosphere of fight events, at which bare-chested men enter the ring accompanied by music, light shows and ‘ring girls’ wearing bikinis and high heels, does not encourage women to want to join these fight events either.4 For women who see themselves as pious Muslims, being in the spotlight is not something to strive for. Compared to other sports, it seems difficult not to attract attention to oneself in competitive kickboxing. Naoual, a professional taekwondoka and amateur kickboxer, pointed out: In taekwondo there are six matches in one hall at the same time. There is practically no one looking at you, so you are only there for the competition. With kickboxing, it is different because it’s a whole show around you, with the music, the lights, the show master … So basically, you’re showing yourself off.

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Naoual, who does not compete in kickboxing, explains why she – and many young women like her – do not want to participate in kickboxing events. Compared to taekwondo and most other competitive sports, kickboxing distinguishes itself with a show and entertainment. Other girls mentioned the criminal environment of competitive kickboxing and people serving and drinking alcohol as reasons why events are not the ‘right place to be’ for Muslim women. Most of the male fighters I spoke with agreed that fight events are unsuitable places for women. Even amateur and professional fighters who value women’s fights told me they ‘understand why women don’t go there, because it’s not really a good place to be’ or said that they ‘won’t let my sister fight at competitions, because, you know, it’s an honour thing’. Despite all these hurdles, 18-year-old Alia wholeheartedly chose to pursue competitive kickboxing. Together with some twenty young men and boys and one other young woman, she spent as many hours as she could, outside of work and her studies, in this space working towards a career in kickboxing. Her intense training hard, long days and sometimes stringent diets can only be understood if we look at how her practices and subjectivities are situated in the larger field of the stigmatized sport of kickboxing.

ALIA’S INTRINSIC MOTIVATIONS AND FAMILY EXPECTATIONS When I met Alia, she was a competing kickboxer and the trainer of women’s and children’s kickboxing at SaïdGym. At the age of eighteen, her life centred around kickboxing. Alia’s grandfather, born in a small Berber town in the north of Morocco, was one of the first labour migrants in the Netherlands in the late 1960s. He brought his sons, including Alia’s father, over when they were still very young. As far back as Alia remembers, her father always worked in a factory. He married Alia’s mother, who was from the same village and came to the Netherlands when she was eighteen. Alia herself was born and brought up in The Hague South and Southwest, the same area in which she lives today with her parents and four siblings. Most of her extended family members live in the same area. Her elementary school was just across the street from her house, as was the community centre she visited when she was younger. When Alia was fourteen years old, she decided she wanted to participate in sports. She often watched her brother play football and developed a liking for the sport. When she found out that the football club also had a girls’ team, she asked her father if she could join, but her father would not allow her to as he thought football was a sport for boys. Her parents understood that she wanted to do sports and asked her to choose a sport that was more



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suitable for girls. ‘They couldn’t tell me what was more appropriate and I didn’t know. When you just search the internet for “girls’ sports The Hague”, you get options for field hockey, track and even beach volleyball. Can you imagine me doing that? Can you imagine my father being OK with that?’ Alia explained that not only were these sports associations located far away from where she lived, but she would also need to wear sporting attire that revealed a lot of bare skin in a public space. She thought she had found a  solution when the community centre around the corner announced a women-only sports session, once a week, where they would mainly practise kickboxing. Alia signed up immediately, but, due to insufficient registrations, the training sessions were cancelled. Although she was bitterly disappointed, she did not throw in the towel; instead, she decided to look for alternative venues. Although she had never thought of kickboxing before, she was now motivated to explore it further. Browsing online, she found a gym not so far from her own neighbourhood. The website informed her of the location of the gym, the training schedule and the fact that a trial lesson would be free. She decided to go to a women-only session without telling her parents. That first inspirational training session, she told me, pushed her to become a kickboxer: I didn’t want to lose weight; I didn’t want to fight in the ring. I wasn’t there because I wanted to be tough. I didn’t think about it being a boys’ sport or not. I wasn’t thinking about anything. But still, something inside of me urged me to practise every Tuesday and Thursday, and I continued all my life. I wonder why I liked it. I didn’t like it! I got beaten up every time. But from the first training I watched, it spoke to me, it attracted me. My heart shines there (Mijn hart straalt daar).

She signed up immediately after the training as there was no enrolment fee for people with an Ooievaarspas.5 On the way home, she got a fine for not having a tram ticket and had to walk the rest of the way. As a result, her plan to keep this first experience a secret from her parents failed: I got home way too late. When I got home, I opened the door without a sound and went to my room silently. I sat down on my bed and waited for what I thought would be a catastrophe. But my mother just came in and sat down next to me. She was very relaxed and listened very calmly. I told her not only that I went to look at The Lion’s Den, but also that I signed up. And that I got a fine and had to walk home. She took the fine and gave it to my father. And that was it. Since then, I have been training every Tuesday and Thursday. Never talked or argued about it.

Alia practised twice a week for two years in the women’s training at The Lion’s Den: ‘I got beat up the first time, and the second time, and many other times.’ Looking back, she claims that she was very weak and lacked physical strength and perseverance. Her trainers, however, remember her early days

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as a kickboxer in a more positive light. Alia always strived to be the best. She tried to never miss training and was utterly disappointed when she was unable to actively participate because of an injury. When she sprained her ankle once, she still showed up for training and took part as much as she could. She spent most of her time doing abdominal exercises and bag work. I have never seen anyone so annoyed about not being able to train. She said things like: ‘It is torture to see you train when I can’t do anything’ or ‘kick some for me please’. She had never participated in any sports club before and was inexperienced in combat sports, but she quickly became strong and muscled and was soon one of the best pupils in her group. In addition to kickboxing training, she worked out at home and in parks as well. At home she exercised her abs and did push ups. Sometimes she went running in the park, often with her cousin and occasionally with one of her sisters. In the nearby Zuiderpark, there is an area with outdoor fitness equipment that she used as well. After two years, the trainers told her that her level was too high for her to be training in the women-only sessions and wanted to promote her to the ‘men’s training’. Even though Alia’s protective father wanted his daughter to train recreationally with other young women, Alia knew that she needed to join the advanced mixed-gender training sessions to keep improving her skills and become eligible for fights. With the help of her mother, she convinced her father to agree to this move to mixed-gender training sessions. The next obstacle, however, was to get him to agree to competitive fighting: I just worked really hard, training hard and giving everything I’ve got. He also saw me improving and understood that this is something that I am good at. I first of all thought: maybe if he trusts that I will be the winner of a fight, he will let me fight. And you know, I just have to take it step by step. In the beginning he also didn’t want me to train. But now he knows. And luckily my mother really understands. And when she agrees with me, then daddy has nothing to say anymore, ha ha!

Alia trained for a year in the advanced training session before her trainer thought she was ready for her first fight, so her father had a year to get used to the idea that his daughter would become a competitive kickboxer. She won that first fight and many other wins followed. Alia recounted her path to becoming a competitive kickboxer as one of constant negotiation with her parents. Signing up at a gym, moving up to the advanced mixed-gender sessions, her first fight – Alia remembers how every step felt like a small victory. However, she does not look back at her involvement in kickboxing as a struggle. Instead, ‘it is what it is’, as she said when reflecting on her journey. The way Alia manoeuvred her way into sports in the context of her surroundings and her parents’ expectations of how a respectable young woman should behave are not remarkable, in the sense that many women, including many other kickboxers and myself, went through similar processes of finding



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their way to sports activities. In families in which sport is not practised, or at least not by women and girls, the intrinsic motivations have to be strong enough for the women and girls to diverge from the norm. As discussed in chapter 1, access to sports, and women’s sports in particular, is more difficult in neighbourhoods in which sport is not part of the fabric of everyday life. While the sports that Alia encountered during her internet search, such as field hockey, beach volleyball and many other team sports, are separated by gender, kickboxing is (still) predominantly a men’s sport, with few opportunities for women to train and compete. The increased availability of women-only kickboxing sessions makes negotiations with parents easier for many young girls. Their hobby not only takes place close by; it also takes place in a setting with many other girls and women and no men. Negotiating parents’ expectations may be the first obstacle, but they are not the last. Part of the resistance Alia faces in her pursuit of kickboxing derives from her motives. It is uncommon for a young girl to choose to become a competitive fighter, so the choice is met with resistance and a lack of understanding. As this book has shown, most young women in women-only sessions want to lose weight and have fun and women-only training sessions give them the opportunity to do just that. Their participation in kickboxing is viewed as ‘empowerment’, which can be understood as a first, and very gendered, step towards invechten. The pursuit of a kickboxing career involves new battles, as Alia experienced: with parents, trainers and the general idea that women should not be fighting. A kickboxing career is not for everyone. Even someone like Alia, with strong intrinsic motivations, discipline, perseverance and a supporting family, has only a slim chance of being matched for a fight and an even slimmer chance of actually being able to pursue a career in this field. The lack of women in competitive fighting makes a kickboxing career a lonesome and uncertain path for a woman.

GETTING READY TO FIGHT Alia always emphasized that her kickboxing career was her one real desire, but she said that she would make other plans as well because it is not possible for everyone to make their dreams come true. Due to the physical intensity of careers in sports, they are always notoriously short. Moreover, careers are scarce and uncertain; especially for women, it is almost impossible to earn a living as a professional athlete. Alia was therefore never solely occupied with kickboxing. When she was eighteen, she had to decide on a form of vocational training in which to enrol. We talked a lot about the possibility of becoming a professional physical education trainer, but Alia was afraid that

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the variety of sports on the curriculum and the actual reality of working at a school would not suit her. Eventually, she signed up for general administrative work, a safe option, in her words, because it would be easy to find a job. In the meantime, she thoroughly enjoyed teaching kickboxing to women and children and was determined to get everything out of her kickboxing pursuit: Jasmijn: What are your ambitions? What is it that you want to achieve in kickboxing? Alia: You know, my dreams are to win an A-fight, become a top-level fighter, win titles and everything. I want to beat everyone in my weight category. Bring it on! But my plan is to become a B-fighter, because I don’t want to aim too high. But then again, I know that once I am a B-fighter, I will want to become an A-fighter!

The first time I was invited to her home, Alia showed me the awards she had won. The room she shared with her two sisters had three desks. The shelf above her desk displayed her trophies, together with some pictures of her fighting. She lost one fight; another was undecided. The remaining eleven fights, she won. Just as it is up to the trainer to decide when a pupil is ready to go into the ring for the first time, it is the trainer who decides the class in which a pupil competes. There are some unwritten rules about the number of C-fights necessary to become a B-fighter, but in the end the trainer is the judge of the pupil’s skills. Shortly after this conversation, Alia was promoted from a C-fighter to a B-fighter. However, that did not make it any easier to find worthy opponents for her. The higher the class, the fewer the number of women competing. Given the many different weight classes, opponents were becoming scarce. On a Sunday in October 2011, Alia was scheduled to fight at an inhouse event at her old gym, The Lion’s Den. The weigh-in was at 2 p.m., her fight  would be around 5 or 6 p.m. After the weigh-in, she stopped by SaïdGym to see her nieces, friends and pupils, who had a regular training session led by Naoual at 4 p.m. When she walked in, everybody admired her  hair, which was braided so that it wouldn’t get in the way during the fight. She was nervous but visibly happy about all the support from the girls. She left when our training started; some of us would go to The Lion’s Den after training to watch Alia fight. But Alia came back after half an hour and told us that the fight had fallen through. Her body posture and tone of voice made it clear she did not want to explain why. When I saw her again two days later, I told her I felt sorry for her, especially as this was the second fight in a row that had fallen through. She explained to me how devastated she was: I could throw myself away at that moment,6 you know that? Only three days in advance they asked me to fight at 52 kg, three days! I didn’t eat anything, you know, only healthy things, really just a little, even while it was Eid al Adha! And I trained so



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much these three days. So, I go there and they weigh me: exactly 52 kg! And you know what the weight of my opponent is? Sixty-four kg! Three days before, she asked for an opponent of 52 kg? What was her plan? To lose 10 kg in three days? I really don’t understand any of this.

Alia was disappointed. The strenuous work involved in preparing her body for a fight in the ring, including skipping meals and treats during the Islamic feast of Eid al Adha, had been for nothing. Alia had another fight scheduled for 3 November that year. When I asked her if she expected the fight to go ahead, she answered: ‘You know what, I don’t even dare to hope anymore.’ But working on being a kickboxer went on, of course. Even after defeat, the fighter goes back to the gym to improve his or her bodily skills and return stronger, faster and smarter. The construction of body norms in sport and physical education is often centred around ‘fit bodies’ (van Amsterdam et al. 2012; Webb, Quennerstedt and Öhman 2008). Such fitness is inherent in sports discourses more generally, but weight is particularly important in ring sports, in which athletes are divided into weight categories. Achieving and maintaining a fit body gave Alia a feeling of control over her own life. Alia’s narrative of control over her ideal weight for fighting was often infused with comments about outer appearance. The ideal kickboxing body is lean and muscular. The rationale is embedded in the actual physical practice of the sport: the flexibility and speed required necessitate a less bulky body type than boxing or wrestling. Through careful monitoring, Alia always met the weight requirements for specific fights. Like most fighters, Alia watched her weight constantly. She trained five and sometimes six nights a week and made sure her weight was stable, between 52 kg and 54 kg. At that weight, she was ‘always prepared to fight’. For several days preceding a fight, she was especially careful about what she ate. One of the older women in the gym regularly brought sweets or snacks that she shared after training. Normally, Alia would not refuse these snacks, but on the days preceding a fight, she was very strict about her diet. It was not uncommon for her to skip dinner the night before a fight to ensure that she would meet the weight requirements the next day. But she told me during our first dinner together that whenever she had just had a fight and did not have anything scheduled in the near future, she would eat whatever she liked. After leading the children’s training for an hour and the women’s training for another hour, we went out to a snackbar, a cafeteria that mainly sells fried snacks, near the gym. The owner greeted her cordially. She explained that he knew her because she regularly eats there after training. She ordered chips with mayonnaise and peanut sauce, kipcorn (fried crunchy chicken) on a bun and a lahmacun (Turkish pizza). As she waited for the food to be served, she phoned her mother to ask what she had made for dinner. She

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told her mother that she had just eaten something small at the snackbar and that she would be home soon. I laughed about the amount of food that a petite woman like her could eat. She explained that she trains so much that she does not easily gain weight. At that time, Saïd actually wanted her to gain a couple of kilograms. If her weight was around 56 kg, it might be easier to find opponents to fight her. She was afraid that those two extra kilograms would make her cumbersome, because ‘At 52 kg, I always feel ready to fight’. Being ready to fight can also be nerve-wracking, because the wait for a fight feels longer. ‘I learned to be patient’, Alia once said laughingly, ‘but I am tested again and again.’ She could react prickly to young men who were matched much more easily and therefore had more fighting experience and advanced in their careers more quickly. She once said the following behind the back of a close friend who had come to training with his arm in a cast: This guy … seriously. He has all the opportunities to become a great A-level fighter. And what does he do? Breaks his arm in a fucking street fight. Pathetic. You know it’s these guys who ruin it for others because they give kickboxing a bad name. And shit, he doesn’t know how easy it is for him to actually get a match.

Alia was well aware of the structural inequalities that made it harder for her to become a professional fighter than her male counterparts. More than family negotiations, religious and gendered expectations, and personal motivations and discipline, the lack of regulation and professionalization in the sport significantly contributes to the lack of women in competitive fighting. While it is easier for male fighters to find a match because there are more of them, even being accepted at a fight event as a woman can be a problem. At the same time, women-only fight events such as Queen of the Ring or Girl Fights Only have successfully organized full-day programmes of women and girls’ amateur fighting competitions. This demonstrates that gyms themselves, in this case Spider Gym and Team Schreiber, can play an active role in the advancement of women’s kickboxing. Not coincidentally, both gyms are co-owned by women and were, at time of this research, the only two gyms in the Netherlands with a woman in charge. Most gyms are led by men, who are the gatekeepers that young women and girls with fighting ambitions have to deal with in their pursuit of kickboxing.

MEN AS GATEKEEPERS Saïd could be considered such a gatekeeper. When this kickboxing world champion – who was Alia’s neighbour, coincidentally – opened his own gym in 2011, Alia left The Lion’s Den and joined his team. She said she was happier to be part of his gym, SaïdGym, because she felt more appreciated. An



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important difference between The Lion’s Den and SaïdGym, as explained in chapter 1, is the respectively Turkish and Moroccan backgrounds of the owners and the majority of the fighters. Although neither gym presents itself as an ethnic-identified gym, as some football clubs do (Verweel et al. 2005), The Lion’s Den is largely considered a Turkish gym and SaïdGym a Moroccan gym. Both are open to everyone, but ethnic labels are common in everyday conversation. As the mother of one of the fighting children commented: ‘I kind of like it here. It’s nice among Moroccans. We understand each other.’ But more importantly, Alia believed training with Saïd would bring her more opportunities in her kickboxing career. Saïd would be eager to make a name for himself as a trainer and would be committed to helping his pupils reach new heights. Whether Alia would be matched at a fight event was totally up to Saïd. He decided if she was ready to fight and he was responsible for finding decent opponents. While Alia had a very proactive role as a trainer, she was assigned a passive role when waiting for fights. At the same time, being too passive can be counterproductive. When Saïd organized a fight night on one occasion, he circulated a list of his fighters and their opponents among the fighters in the gym right before the start of a training session. Not everyone had been matched yet; many listings mentioned only Saïd’s fighters and their fighting class and weight categories without names of opponents. There was an excited buzz in the gym: people walked around freely, patted each other on the backs and bumped into each other out of excitement. In contrast to how she appeared at the women-only sessions, Alia behaved calmly and was always on the outer edges of the hall during the advanced mixed gender sessions. She never engaged with other students in the group or in the middle of the hall, unless it was necessary for training. She took note of her position as an outsider and behaved accordingly. In this specific instance, she waited until the buzz had died down before she looked at the list. Alia’s name was not listed at all and she did not understand why. Afterwards, she said: ‘Apparently, Saïd thinks I am not ready yet, but I don’t understand why. I never missed a training session. I have been training very hard.’ For her, it was not an option to walk up to Saïd and ask why she had not been listed. I asked her whether and how she and Saïd could discuss her future and her ambitions in kickboxing or whether her role was just to wait. She finally decided to be what she considered bold and ask him why she was not on the list. She did not talk to him after training in front of all the other fighters, but wrote a considered text message. She first sent it to me and her best friend, to check if it sounded all right: she wanted to be polite, respectful and eager to fight at the same time. Alia was very happy and proud when she texted Saïd and she was even happier and prouder upon receiving his response. He said that he was glad she had come forward to express her

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ambitions, because he could only guess if she did not talk to him. He also wrote that she was a good fighter and that she could make it as a professional. Alia was put on the list, matched with an opponent and won the fight that Saïd had organized in The Hague. Since kickboxing does not have a formal evaluation system, like the belt system in other martial arts, evaluation is unstructured, informal and personal. Alia’s career was therefore very much dependent on Saïd’s opinion. The evaluation relates not only to skills: behaviour towards the trainer and training partners plays a part in how the trainer measures whether or not ‘one is ready’. Alia had thought that being humble would elicit a certain respect, whereas her trainer wondered if she was eager enough to fight. While the young men and boys roamed around the room, discussing who was on the list and who was not, Alia assumed a passive role that she deemed appropriate in her position at that moment. ‘I did not want to be too eager, because it is up to him to decide if I am ready. I was automatically ashamed at first, but I understand now that it is part of my professionalism to stand up for myself.’ Speaking up, especially to a male superior, resulted in instant shame, as Alia explained. She was still a space invader at the gym and always would be. The only way to legitimize her presence in the space of ­mixed-gendered training was through the projection of the feminine characteristic of humility. Saïd is not only the gatekeeper when it comes to matching fighters and also giving fighters the valuable training necessary to become proper competitors. Girls and women who sign up for kickboxing at SaïdGym start in the women’s sessions or the children’s sessions, if they are younger than twelve. Since these sessions have a recreational character, those who aspire to be competitive kickboxers have to ‘move up’ to the more advanced ­mixed-gender sessions. While there are differences in levels of advancement within the women-only group, the level is generally lower than in the advanced mixed ­gender-sessions. When Alia became the best in her group, it was hard to find worthy training partners within the women-only group. To prepare her for fights, Saïd urged her to join ‘the men’s training’. To join the advanced mixed-gender training, a woman fighter has to prove herself in Saïd’s training. Girls in the women-only sessions are, however, never in contact with Saïd. They only know his name and his face, as the owner of the club. One day, Alia told me that Sanae, an eager young girl in the women-only sessions, had expressed her ambitions to become a fighter. Alia explained to me that she was the right age, had a good body type and was not afraid to train hard. She felt that Sanae could become a fighter one day. Still, Alia thought it was too early for Sanae to suggest such a thing. She told me: ‘You first have to be the best here, and then you have to be very good in Saïd’s training. You have to prove yourself in training first!’ Alia, in her own role



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as gatekeeper, wanted to see the humility, patience and endurance that she cherished in herself. But in the few months during which Sanae was training in SaïdGym’s women’s training sessions, she grew more eager and willing to do whatever it took, and Alia noticed. In spring, Sanae joined me and some other girls to support Alia at a fight. After that fight, I had a long talk with her, and she told me: ‘After seeing Alia in the ring, it became even clearer to me. This is what I want to do; I want to be there, in the ring. You know I see her as a role model? You know, how she made it and how she is just doing this? I want that too, so badly.’ She asked me what it is like, training in the advanced mixed sessions, and whether she should train in those sessions as well. I explained that women commonly transfer to mixed training when they want to engage in competition, as the training centralizes preparation for fighting and there are more sparring partners of one’s own level. I told her to talk to Alia as she had had the same experience when she was fifteen years old, transferring from women-only to mixed training sessions. Several weeks later, after having talked to her parents, Sanae told me and Alia, while we were waiting for our training to start, that they were all right with her transferring to advanced training as long as she was not the only girl there and could get home before dark. The next step was to ask for Saïd’s permission. At that moment, Saïd was in the training hall, finishing up the kids’ training, and I suggested that she just walk up to him and ask if she could join us tomorrow. ‘Nooo. That’s embarrassing’, she almost whispered, holding her hand in front of her mouth. She looked at me and Alia and said: ‘Can’t you do it?’ Later, Alia did talk to Saïd, who responded that the advanced mixed training session at the other branch of SaïdGym was totally full. If new people kept coming, he would not have enough time and space to train his fighters. If Alia thought Sanae had what it took to become a fighter, she should send her to the (not so advanced) mixed training sessions in this branch in The Hague Southwest first so she could prove herself there. Sanae did not go to the mixed training at that branch in her neighbourhood. Although she did not mind training with young men, she was reluctant to attend that training sessions because she knew so many of the young men in it; some were neighbours and others attended the same school. ‘I don’t want everybody talking about me. They already make comments sometimes when they see me with my sports bag …’ In a later conversation, Saïd explained to me that he is cautious about training girls as he had had too many bad experiences with girls who wanted to become fighters. Many of them love to fight but their parents do not agree with their plans. Others fight for a couple of years but stop when they are eighteen or nineteen years old. ‘Then they become more serious, with school and maybe marriage, wearing headscarves … It is often a big investment of time and energy, but I don’t get much back’, he said. His explanation revealed

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the importance of the business model of his gym: it obviously needed to be financially viable. In his experience, he had less control over the girls’ plans, because of their parents’ and their own gendered expectations. This highlights an important ambiguity in becoming a fighter: you have the be serious about your aspirations, but fighting is considered a youthful activity, especially for girls. ‘Becoming serious’ when transitioning from girlhood to womanhood often means quitting kickboxing. The decision not to aspire to (more of ) a fighting career is, however, not only informed by the lack of infrastructure, the devaluation of women’s fights and the hurdles presented by men’s gatekeeping. Many young women share the opinion that actual fighting is inappropriate for them, especially in adulthood.

BECOMING SERIOUS Children, women and beginners could train in their own neighbourhood, but Alia and her training buddies had to take a twenty-minute bus ride to get to the advanced kickboxing class. ‘This is serious training’, Alia told me when Saïd allowed me to join. Only competitive fighters and aspirational fighters (and a stray ethnographer) were allowed in these sessions. Not only were the training sessions serious, so were the ambitions of the pupils. Once a girl has made the move up to ‘train with the guys’, she has to adjust to the new setting, people and manners. In the beginning, Alia was reluctant to fight with a group of guys. She explained: ‘Training with men is different. They all look at you, you know? Really, those dudes … But you just have to be stronger than that.’ When Alia started participating in mixed-gender training sessions, there was only one other girl in the group and some people said she only trained in the sessions to meet the guys. She was simultaneously perceived as not ‘serious’ about training and not a respectable Muslim girl. She did not train often or hard enough. Alia did not want to make the same impression on her peers and the trainer. As part of the serious attitude she adopted for this setting, especially in the beginning, she only talked and engaging with her male counterparts when absolutely necessary. Although kickboxing is not a team sport, it is impossible to avoid engaging with your peers. She therefore ensured that her cousin Ilyas was her training and sparring partner in her first training session. During that session, the trainer assigned a clinching exercise wherein the two opponents had to hold each other’s necks in order to attack each other’s bodies with knee strokes. This exercise – which might look like a hug to outsiders – is very intimate. Two bodies are locked together in a close embrace. Upper bodies, including chest, arms and heads, touch, and each person’s breath and sweat end up on the other person’s skin. Talking about



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this first session, Alia recalled that she did not want to clinch with Ilyas, out of respect for him. She explained that the exercise involves too much physical contact for a man and a woman to perform it, especially in a public space with so many other men. Therefore, instead of clinching, Alia and Ilyas exchanged knee strokes without touching each other’s upper bodies. As usual, Saïd walked around correcting the pupils in their exercises. When he came to Alia and Ilyas, he asked why they were not clinching. She answered that she did not want to clinch with Ilyas. Saïd pushed Ilyas aside and said that she would have to clinch with him so. When she told me about this experience, Alia recalled how embarrassed she had been: ‘Do you know how red my cheeks were? Even now that I think back about it, I feel it again.’ Ever since then, she has clinched with Ilyas as she would rather clinch with her cousin than anyone else in that training session. After a while, she did start training with others as well. On one occasion, a new fighter, who quit the gym after a few sessions luckily, remarked after a clinching exercise: ‘Did you like that? I hope you enjoyed it, because that will be the only way a man will ever embrace you.’ Alia’s body became the subject of the enforcement of his masculinity. He used her body and what he deemed inappropriate behaviour for a woman to reinforce the heterosexual boundaries of the space. The more seriously Alia took her kickboxing training, the less seriously men considered her as potential romantic partner. She posed a threat to the masculine status quo of the gym as they knew it and Alia was aware that that would always be her position in that space. At the same time, she was sufficiently advanced and confident at that point not to be too bothered by it. Sometimes Alia did worry about how kickboxing could affect her future relationships. She occasionally fantasized about finding the right husband and getting married. She did not want to wait too long, nor did she want to get married just yet as she was too young. She thought that between ­twenty-one and twenty-three would be the right time for marriage. More significantly, she wanted to fulfil some of her kickboxing ambitions before getting married. Once married, she explained, she would stop fighting competitively. Her future husband probably would not want her to train with men and neither would she. When I asked her whether she thought it would be a waste of her talent and passion, she replied, again: ‘It is what it is.’ Alia responded similarly when others (family members, friends and even strangers) asked her when she would stop fighting and ‘get serious’. Sometimes veiling is implied by ‘getting serious’; at other times, studying or marrying. Alia does not initiate discussions about her reasons for training with male fighters or not wearing a hijab and responds to questions about these things politely, in a way that meets questioners’ expectations: that she will, ‘one day, inshallah’, God willing. The answer inshallah implies that what her

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future will look like is up to God, but it is also a polite way of not giving an answer and avoiding a discussion. In manoeuvring between various expectations, Alia’s narrative demonstrates a common path for young adults striving to become more serious or mature Muslims (Amir-Moazami 2010; Janson 2017; de Koning 2008). Alia moved from the playful women-only setting at The Lion’s Den to the more serious mixed space at SaïdGym. But kickboxing, even fighting in the ring, is considered an activity for young women, inappropriate for adult women. Almost every woman and girl I spoke to during my research considered fighting in the ring an activity that could not be continued after marriage. It is a serious activity, but not one for married women. Once married, women-only training becomes a means of practising kickboxing again. On the path to becoming more serious, gender demarcations pressure adolescent girls into more rigid forms of femininity. Alia received subtle and not-so-subtle signs that some of her gender expressions were accepted in her youth, but that it was impossible for a (heterosexual) ‘tomboy’ to bring her female masculinity with her into adulthood (Halberstam 1998). While men with an athletic aptitude often do not have to worry about their (hetero)sexuality (Thangaraj 2015), the opposite is true for women. The transition from childhood to adulthood is, for many young kickboxers, a transition from gender neutrality or being a tomboy to being a respectable, ‘hetero-sexy’ (Samie 2013) Muslim woman. ‘Becoming more serious’ plays an important role and was a visible change in the young women’s lives. Alia herself actively narrated and demonstrated how she chose to train in the mixed training sessions while also accommodating her religious ambitions. She joined her pupils, including her cousins and neighbours, in attending the mosque on Fridays and experimented with a more covered clothing style on those days. Alia’s more pious sartorial choices on Fridays and her verbal signifiers, such as inshallah and mashallah, revealed that religion was an important aspect of her life as she followed her kickboxing ambitions. Her behaviour nudged her towards the possibility of ‘getting serious’ later on in life, but she was actively contemplating and discussing how she dressed and interacted in the kickboxing environment as well. When I told her I had noticed that she was wearing long sweatpants more often than her regular kickboxing shorts, she narrated how she had come to that decision: Alia: So I made the change when my next-door neighbour told me that wearing kickboxing shorts is haram. She explained how a lot of men are looking at your legs, you know, that is seduction, etc. … She said that’s really haram. And I explained that shorts are obligatory in Thai boxing. What else should I wear? And she said, like: well, you can try to train in long trousers and then Allah knows your intention, you know. That I’m wearing shorts at a fight, but long trousers in training. So that’s why I now wear long trousers!



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Jasmijn: Yeah? S: Yes, for a month or so, I have worn long trousers and I told her I feel good about it. They feel like they fit better than shorts. And at a fight I will wear shorts. Because … you know? J: Because … . they are common? S: Yeah, you know? J: What about wearing leggings underneath shorts? S: I don’t like that. It’s really ugly. Then I would rather wear long trousers. Now I train with long trousers and I like it. Who knows? One day, maybe tomorrow, I might train with shorts. I really don’t mind. But you know, I can do it, right, train with long trousers. Things you are able to do … you can do them, right? J: What about fighting? S: I will fight in shorts. J: But can you … isn’t it possible … with long clothing? There was a boxer who was even wearing a hijab right? S: Yeah, Sumaya also did that. But that … I don’t think that is, eh … how do I say that? Appropriate? J: It’s not right? S: No. Because … Well, if I wore a headscarf myself, I wouldn’t be doing kickboxing. J: No? S: No, because kickboxing is haram anyway. Because you get hit in the face, right? And, uh, well, I don’t know. I just think it is not appropriate. I don’t know how to say it otherwise. That you train with a t-shirt or something and you show your ass anyway. J: Right, so you think it is haram? S: No, I don’t think it’s haram – it is haram! Let me put it that way. J: So how do you get that information? S: What do you mean? J: How do you know it is haram? S: Because there was this girl, Yousra – she also trained with us, you met her once – she said that women cannot be hit in the face. J: So, you hear that from others … It is not that you look things up on the internet, pose questions in the mosque or anything … S: No, no, in any case, I hear everything from others. For example, the girl next door tells me a lot. And I believe it, you know, because she knows a lot.

Alia’s religious behaviour not only stemmed from her upbringing and education, but was also influenced by peer learning. The authority of the girl next door, who ‘knows a lot’, affected the way Alia dressed in the gym, but Alia remained flexible. After considering religion, aesthetics and practicalities, Alia soon stopped wearing sweatpants and returned to wearing shorts. She also revised her thoughts on stopping kickboxing if or when she gets married. She came to believe that she deserves a man who will not hold her back from her kickboxing ambitions: ‘Wouldn’t it be strange if my parents were fine with me pursuing a kickboxing career and a man would have different rules for me? I see that now.’ She imagined it was still likely that she

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would stop kickboxing around the age of twenty-three or when a suitable marriage partner appeared in her life. However, it would be her own decision. Until that time, kickboxing would be serious business. She would continue to extend her youth and pursue her kickboxing aspirations. In practice, she might stop after marriage, but in theory her narrative now ‘fit[s] into the game of secularism’ (Hirschkind 2011: 643).

A QUESTION OF SUPPORT Most women fighters at SaïdGym look up to Alia; the younger girls in particular see her as a role model. Unfortunately, not many of them are able to watch her in an actual fight. The first time I went to see Alia fight, I went together with Marieke and Sabrina, two of Alia’s other pupils. I was fascinated to see my trainer, whom I looked up to during training, turn into a little girl who was nervous about her upcoming fight. Although I had only known her for three months at the time, I was nervous for her as well. She emphasized how happy she was that we had come to the event to support her and asked if one of us could record the fight on a phone. Unfortunately, Alia lost the fight. Once the fight was over and Alia had changed into her sweatsuit, I walked up to her outside the dressing room. She smiled when she saw me and we hugged. Then she bragged about the pain she felt in her shins and a bruise that was developing on her left eye. She was obviously disappointed that she had not win, but she was not upset. Instead, she discussed very tactical details with me. We talked about what she had done well in the fight and how she could improve. She was happy with her clinching and certain kicks but knew she shouldn’t have let herself be pushed against the ropes or into a corner. Alia said that Saïd’s advice was to ‘fight forwards’, meaning she should not step back when attacked. Alia wanted to know whether it had been obvious that she was the weaker party. She was happy when I told her that I thought she and her opponent were equally matched. She concluded by saying, ‘I’m not sad that I didn’t win, because I know I delivered a good fight.’ After Alia had repeated several times how happy she was that we had come to support her, I asked her if she was upset that her best friends and family were not there. She said that she could understand the event was too far away and too late for many people to watch this fight and emphasized the support she got from the guys in her corner. She was happy that her mother trusted Saïd to bring her to fights and ensure she got home safely afterwards. On a different occasion, Alia told me that she was lucky her parents were ‘chill’ since they were fine with her being a kickboxer. They did not know any different, since she had been kickboxing for five years now. Sometime



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later, she returned to our conversation about support from her family, saying that she wanted to add something: You know what? You remember that fight I had at The Lion’s Den, just around the corner? Well, in the end, I didn’t fight because my opponent didn’t match the weight, but whatever. My mother really wanted to come to that fight and I was really happy about that. But then my father didn’t allow my mother to go there, because he said there would only be men and it wouldn’t be an appropriate place for her. And then it really bothered me. At that moment I figured: my mother will never see me fight. And that’s really a pity.

Alia’s sisters never saw her fight either. Her eldest sister accompanied her to some training sessions, but no longer had time for this when she was a university student. The same was true of her best friends. Naoual, who was also her niece and a fellow kickboxing trainer, only saw Alia fight once, at their gym. She did not attend most fight nights because they were on too late and too far away. Saïd’s sister Salima had also never attended a fight night when I met her in 2011. Her brother would not let her because ‘it is his environment, his scene’. Another very close friend, Karima, was often a spectator at women-only training sessions, but, again, had never attended a fight night. Nevertheless, Alia felt supported by her family and friends. Her mother asked how each training session went and was interested in her fights. Although her mother sometimes worried when she got injured, Alia was happy that she could also joke about it. When her shins were black and blue after a fight, her mother said laughingly: ‘Good for you. That’s what you wanted, right?’ Another time, Alia broke a toe and her mother wanted to bring her to the hospital. But Alia did not want to bother her mother with something she had brought on herself and went to the hospital by herself. I started following Alia’s early career in 2012. Over the years, I noticed that she received more support from friends and pupils because special arrangements were made for women who did not want to mingle with men at such events. The first two events I attended to watch Alia fight were male-dominated spaces, as fight nights tend to be. Few of Alia’s supporters were present. But as Alia grew as a kickboxer, she became popular among her pupils at the women-only training. Many of them expressed how they would love to see their beloved trainer fight, but that the events were too far away, too late, in spaces that were too male, or that their parents would not allow them to attend (often due to a combination of the preceding reasons). So the only two women who accompanied me to the first fight events were non-Muslim women in their thirties. But things were different in June 2013, when Alia’s gym held its second event. Compared to the events I had attended, there were three main differences. It was a fight day instead of a fight night, it was located not too far from where many of the girls and

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women lived, and it was taking place outdoors. These three factors made this particular fight event more accessible to young Muslim women. As a result, two sisters, two cousins, two friends and three students of Alia supported her at the fight. There was a further development in how space was claimed at kickboxing competitions later that year. In November, SaïdGym organized the gym’s third fight night. Although it was in the same area, the event took place in the evening and indoors. Of course, Alia’s supporters from the previous fight wanted to be present this time as well. Naoual posted the following on ­Facebook: Dear Ladies, 30 November, your trainer Alia will fight again! There will be a separate space designated for women, so you don’t have to sit alongside men. The tickets cost 25 Euros, so let me know if you’re interested in coming to support her.

Young Muslim women are increasingly claiming their space in the kickboxing scene. And, as discussed in the previous chapters, they are doing so in a way that highlights the heterosexual feminine Muslim body. Approximately thirty young Muslim women came to this fight event to support Alia. The designated women-only seating area was quite close to the ring, separated from the mixed-gender (but mainly men’s) VIP tables by a fence. This was not a typical gender-separated space since there was still interaction with men who passed by on the other side of the fence. The women who were sitting behind the fence screaming frantically for Alia received a lot of attention, which could be considered counterproductive. For many women, however, the separation was a legitimization of their presence. Although this was a one-time solution, Alia finally experienced what it felt like to have her own fans present during a fight. Her popularity and how it led to so many women and girls being present at a fight night changed the role of kickboxing in the lives of many others.

CONCLUSION This chapter has demonstrated the complexity of racialization and its intersections with religion and gender through the lens of Alia’s life story. By charting her pursuit of a kickboxing career and describing the many uneven playing fields involved in this pursuit, it argued that fighting one’s way into society happens, or does not happen, on various levels. It is contested, embraced and worked through in Alia’s everyday life. The micro-sociological dynamics of Alia’s interactions reveal the array of varied, overlapping, intersecting negotiations engaged in by a woman who wants to become a competitive kickboxer.



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Young Muslim kickboxers’ marginalized status, as constructed by policy and the (dis)organization and (lack of ) funding of the sport, results in a disadvantage based on racism and sexism. Governmental ‘integration through sports’ programmes reveal how Moroccan/Muslim/allochthone men are considered the unredeemable other that can merely be contained, while ‘the Muslimwoman’ (Abu-Lughod 2002) can become a modern, liberal and liberated subject. This chapter, however, demonstrated that the gendered subjectivities of women kickboxers are always crafted alongside those of their male counterparts. Their friends, cousins and brothers face discrimination in work, housing, education and everyday life in general. Many embrace neoliberal discourses of self-making, while acknowledging the structural constraints they face. The young men are criminalized, stigmatized and treated like the unredeemable ‘Other’, while the young women, as an effect, can be emancipated, empowered and ‘saved’. Alia’s story demonstrates the typical rigours, pressures and disappointments of the sport and the sacrifices it demands, as well as highlighting the cultural norms within and outside the sport, including those pertaining to the demands of femininity and adulthood. Most of the men and women with whom I talked considered kickboxing a possible career for men but merely a pastime for young women. Most young women embraced the masculinity associated with the sport as a playful negotiation of gender expectations. The sport’s masculinity gives it a rough edge and its setting provides a way out of stereotypical forms of femininity that are often part of recreational sports. For them, kickboxing extends youth by postponing expectations relating to adult femininities. By choosing kickboxing over sports that are considered more feminine or gender-neutral, young women perform an alternative iteration of femininity through fighting (Channon and Phipps 2017), which requires a distinct negotiation of sexual and gendered subjectivities. The temporal aspect of this negotiation is striking. In her work on women’s sport in Istanbul, Sertaç Sehlikoglu (2021) argues that ‘cycles of a woman’s life, including fertility and menstrual cycles, impose specific temporal forces on her body’ (218). The kickboxing practices of teenagers and young adults show that even the anticipation of the changing body affects sport participation. The path to becoming more serious in terms of gender demarcations pressures adolescent girls into more rigid forms of femininity. Becoming more serious often demands a visible change in the young women’s lives, dictating the gendered temporalities of young adults’ pursuits. Motivations to fight competitively are often cast as the dreams of youth. In this kickboxing realm, men and women understand women’s fighting as part of a playful youth. Perhaps the kickboxers in these women-only sessions have found a way of overcoming the realization that becoming an adult means growing into the limitations associated with being a girl or a woman.

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Young Muslim women in kickboxing, especially those who aim for a career in kickboxing, encounter the disorganized and sexist structures of the sport. As well as peer-group and family dynamics, trainer–student interactions reveal how these structures affect the everyday practices of an ambitious woman, including their internal navigation of gender expectations and expression and processes of pious self-formation. In women-only training sessions (and the few women-only fight events), women do not pose a threat to the masculine space and status quo. But while women-only training lowers the threshold for many girls to participate in kickboxing, or in sports at all, it might raise the threshold for girls to participate in competition. Young women like Alia, who do everything to fight their way into the hypermasculine space of competitive kickboxing, might slowly but steadily effect change for the fighters who come after them.

NOTES  1. More research on the experience of minoritized male kickboxers in the Netherlands is needed to further understand this process.  2. See, for example, Lancee (2021) and Ramos, Thijssen and Coenders (2021) on discrimination on the labour market, Silver and Danielowski (2019) for the housing market, Çankaya (2015) for police profiling, and Van der Valk (2017) for Muslim discrimination more generally.  3. It might be no coincidence that Mark Rutte himself most probably experienced initiation in his own fraternity when he studied history at Leiden University.  4. See Lafferty and McKay (2004) and Mazer (2020) for a discussion of the sexualized position of ring girls.  5. One way in which the municipality of The Hague funds sports for young people is through the Ooievaarspas, available to children whose parents have an income that is less than 111 per cent of social assistance. At most gyms and other sports clubs, children with an Ooievaarspas do not have to pay a contribution and get discounts on sports gear.  6. Literal translation form Dutch: ‘Ik kon mezelf wel weggooien’, which is not a common Dutch expression.

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oung Muslim women in the Netherlands negotiate and reshape their racialized gender subjectivities through the sporting culture of kickboxing. Within women-only kickboxing, young women and girls work through the dominant stereotypes of them as submissive, passive and powerless. The site of the kickboxing gym provides a space in which to perform gender subjectivities that challenge hegemonic models of gender conformity by countering stereotypical forms of masculinity and femininity. Through their sport participation, young women and girls practise a form of cultural citizenship within the national fabric while claiming belonging to the minoritized group of (Moroccan-Dutch) Muslims. Kickboxing enskilment, in which strength, physical violence and endurance of pain are actively cultivated, gives rise to gendered subjectivities that have previously only been available to boys and young men. The young women and girls experiment with identities through crafting forms of femininity and masculinity during adolescence, while navigating practices of pious self-formation. This process of crafting gendered subjectivities, within larger structures in which Dutch Muslim women negotiate belonging and sociality, is the central theme of this book. When Muslim women are featured in the media or political debates in Europe, the focus is on a perceived submissive position. The Muslim woman’s body is a site of political contestation; their practice of veiling is an overemphasized bodily practice, which is read as a symbol of oppression and un-freedom. Muslim women are portrayed as if they lack agency and as if sports is a way for them to gain agency. Dutch sports policies have explicitly aimed to integrate ethnoracialized minorities into larger Dutch society through sport participation. More specifically, programmes have sought to ‘empower’ Muslim women and girls, Moroccan-Dutch women and girls, ‘allochthonous’ women and girls, and/or women and girls ‘with a migration background’. These policy aims have often resulted in certain sports, such

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as kickboxing, being marketed to ethnic minority communities with bold claims about how participation can transform the people in these communities as individuals. Sports participation in Europe is rooted in a long history of sports being used as a means of producing national citizenship. Participation in sports, specifically for minority groups, has long been presented as a gateway to participation in society more broadly. Chapter 1 argued that although some policy programmes in the Netherlands emphasize participation in sports as a goal in and of itself, we can read between the lines that participation in sports is increasingly presented as a means of producing disciplined Muslim citizens. This goal does not lessen the ‘othering’ such bodies have already experienced, which has implicitly questioned the citizenship and ‘belonging to Dutch society’ of a group of people that is still categorized based on the migration histories of their parents and grandparents. The reification of their Moroccan, Muslim and/or ‘allochthone’ categorizations and how these are used in integration-through-sports programmes represent the enduring effect of coloniality in a postcolonial period (Silverstein 2004: 124). The neighbourhoods that the women and girls call home are sites of national contestation in the media and politics, but also enabled through policies on integration, neighbourhood and planning, and sports and exercise. Even the implementation of sports programmes as part of neighbourhood regeneration efforts, which supposedly transcends racial profiling, implicitly reproduces the same racialized categorizations in everyday practice. In fact, participation in sports creates a vicious circle for Moroccan-Dutch Muslim young people, which reproduces race and gender power imbalances. Many of the athletic programmes initiated and financed by local and national governments in the Netherlands seek to bestow social benefits upon the participants, improve their health, enhance social bonding and strengthen their sense of belonging. These campaigns, however, are also based on the assumption that people from minority communities – and especially Muslim and/or Moroccan-Dutch youth – have somehow been ‘deprived’ of these benefits. These portrayals do not help us understand either their processes of self-formation or their sport participation; instead, they reinforce stereotypes of Muslim women as being in need of help and rescue (Abu‐Lughod 2016), suggesting that they are submissive and lack the agency to take up sports on their own terms and in their own ways. This book foregrounded the lived realities of young Muslim women and girls in kickboxing to demonstrate how they transgress gendered, ethnoracialized and classed norms and stereotypes. Their life stories help us understand young Muslim women’s experiences in the urban contexts of Europe and how Dutch Muslims challenge and reconfigure racialized gender subjectivities.



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Anthropologists of Islam have been applying themselves to this task since the early 2000s. Saba Mahmood (2005), Lara Deeb (2006), Humeira Iqtidar (2011) and others had taken up the important task of demonstrating and arguing for women’s agency beyond resistance, rebellion and liberation. Their work has challenged modern liberal ideas of feminist agency by theorizing piety as a form of self-realization and arguing that ordinary Muslims partake in everyday ethical practice. At the same time, the pious turn resulted in an overemphasis on religious practices and sites and a neglect or at least an artificial separation of secular or un-Islamic aspects of Muslims’ everyday life. Rather, self-formation is a complex, messy interplay of religious and ­non-religious pursuits. The persistence of gendered orientalism in discourses surrounding Muslim women’s bodies and their corporeal practices demands a new approach in which it is not only women’s religious subjectivities that are foregrounded, but also their broader being-in-the-world. While studies on self-formation among Muslims – and Muslim women in particular – have largely focused on the achievement of the exemplary model of the pious self (with the notable exceptions of Beekers and Kloos 2018; Kloos 2018; Sehlikoglu 2021), studies on self-formation in sports have mainly focused on the achievement of the exemplary sportsperson. Sportspersons’ bodies and identities are produced through the imitative, repetitive bodily regimes of training and fighting. Chapter 2 demonstrated how becoming a kickboxer requires kickboxing enskilment, from the more or less similar training techniques in all gyms to the development of a particular fighting style. One way or another, kickboxing techniques will be inscribed in the fighter’s body after rigorous training. Kickboxing training, however, not only enskils young women (and men) in kickboxing techniques and attitude, but, through engaging with the capacity for physical violence and the endurance of pain, which are considered masculine traits, it also crafts alternative gender subjectivities. Adolescent girls, in particular, take up kickboxing not only to pursue a fighting career or as a healthy hobby, but also to cultivate a strong, tough, cool and not-too-feminine, not-too-masculine persona. Some embrace the label of masculinity, while others would say that kickboxing does not challenge their meisje-meisje (girly girl) identity, but, in both cases, the masculine characteristics of strength, the capacity for violence, and the aesthetics of toughness are displayed. As Jack Halberstam (1998) aptly argues, ‘masculinity becomes legible as masculinity where and when it leaves the white, middle-class body’ (2). The young adults and adults contest certain white femininities and Muslim femininities by embracing the masculine practice of kickboxing. While some young adult kickboxers narrate their choices and actions as masculine and embrace the term, others contest that narrative, explaining that the capacity for physical violence is not related to one’s gender.

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The choices the girls and women make to become kickboxers, and where and how to participate in training, are embedded in bodily dispositions related to different fields of power, such as gender and religion. Kickboxers negotiate the boundaries of masculinity and femininity individually and collectively. Working on one’s body in the gym is not disconnected from ­self-realization in general. The active, agentic voices of the girls and women tell us, in their narratives, how they pursue their lives as they manoeuvre through broader social and cultural schemes. Their decisions to attend ­women-only training or to train with men, to wear kickboxing apparel and to conduct themselves in a more masculine or feminine manner are all dispositions that are further cultivated in the setting of the gym. Their self-realization through kickboxing encompasses feeling connected to the sport, practising for long hours, connecting to other kickboxers and presenting themselves as kickboxers. Becoming and being a kickboxer involve identifying as a strong, independent young woman and a fit person. Kickboxers therefore negotiate the boundaries of gender collectively and individually. Heteronormativity based on a cis-binary gender system currently seems to be in flux globally, but remains hegemonic in the neighbourhoods in question. Chapter 3 demonstrates how women instrumentalize femininity to claim space in sports through an apologetic position vis-à-vis men. This starts with the incentives and goals of the pupils in recreational women-only kickboxing. Only a few are interested in becoming competitive fighters. Some strive to become fitter and healthier, while others are less interested in physical achievement and are mainly interested in kickboxing as a social activity. The young women’s slacking practices reveal how female masculinity is embraced only to the extent that it does not threaten the heteronormative ideals in their everyday lives. When we look at kickboxing motivations and the ways in which the young women and girls negotiate strength and beauty, it becomes clear that skill takes different shapes in women-only kickboxing. Femininity is not only emphasized through clothing and language, but also through the gendered enskilment of kickboxing, the discourses and practices of which are infused with self-defence, empowerment, sociability and training for beautiful bodies. As regards competitive kickboxing, they ‘leave that up to the men’. Through embracing female masculinity, with a heterosexual feminine touch, the young women and girls appropriate kickboxing by shifting from the objective and discourse of the ambition to fight to training as a hobby. The girls transgress norms and stereotypes – not only those of Muslim and Moroccan-Dutch families, but also those of mainstream ­kickboxing. The emergence of gender-separated classes has given many young women and girls in the Netherlands the opportunity to engage in sports. Muslim girls, in particular, found in women-only kickboxing a safe and



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suitable space in which to engage in physical activity. Kickboxing was taken up differently by the pupils at the two different gyms, but gender-separated training sessions provided a way for both to cultivate religious sensibilities. Is it suitable to listen to music or not? Does my religion allow me to hit someone else in the face? Various Muslim subjectivities arose in the space of the two gyms. By scrutinizing the practices of gender separation, kickboxing techniques, sartorial practices and romantic relationships, chapter 4 argued that the social space and practice of women-only kickboxing can be a way of realizing piety. Moreover, femininity can be emphasized through pious ­self-formation. The desire to become a kickboxer cannot be separated from ethical ­self-formation for women especially. This book has sought to examine how the realm of (recreational) sports is an important site for the cultivation of religious sensibilities. It demonstrates how religion is to be understood not as a separate sphere, but as an inherent part of all social realities. The process of becoming a better a Muslim is lifelong (Kloos 2018), but it is set in different life phases. The ethnographic material presented in this book brings to the fore how sporting temporalities are gendered through religious pursuits and expectations. While it may be tempting to think along the lines of ‘ways of being a Muslim woman kickboxer’ or a ‘Muslim women kickboxer’s habitus’, these categorizations do not do justice to the intersectional complexities of the lives of the women in this study. Although there are many different ways of incorporating kickboxing into one’s life, the few women that are determined to have a kickboxing career exemplify the complexities in extremis. It is for this reason that Alia’s story, presented in chapter 5, is extraordinary compared to the stories of her pupils; the ways in which she performs humility, piety, femininity and masculinity reveal the workings of gendered racialization. Alia consciously contemplates the context of gender dynamics and its intersections with religion, ethnoracial minoritization and time. The transition from a certain gender neutrality or female masculinity in kickboxers’ youth to an emphasis on femininity in (young) adulthood is embedded in larger structures of heteronormativity that reinforce the racialized heterosexuality of young Moroccan-Dutch Muslim men. The way in which kickboxing is taken up by girls and women demonstrates the gendered temporalities at play. While fighting competitively is understood as a viable career opportunity for young adult men, young adult women are expected to leave the youthful play of kickboxing behind when they become ‘more serious’ and reach the age of marriage. As such, kickboxing women cease to be a threat to the masculine space of kickboxing and the status quo of the sport. Only when we see the connection between women-only kickboxing and the larger field of kickboxing training and competition can we understand the ‘relationality of racializations’ (Thangaraj 2015: 114). Alia’s life story

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demonstrated how the subjectivities of adult women fighters are always crafted alongside those of their male counterparts. Moroccan-Dutch, Muslim young men are criminalized and stigmatized through a racialized lens by the media, politics, police and society at large. But while they are considered the unredeemable other, the women are redeemable when ‘saved’ from their male peers. This reveals how racialization is gendered through its intersections with religion. As Talal Asad (2002) argues, ‘[Muslims] are included within and excluded from Europe at one and the same time in a special way’ (209). This also happens in a very gendered way. In these ‘postfeminist’ times, in which some argue that feminism is no longer needed because men and women are equal, Muslim women in Europe are considered submissive, housebound and in need of ‘empowerment’ and emancipation. When Muslim women choose to engage in sports, this is understood by the wider society as liberating and empowering, because they are viewed as unfree and un-empowered. The ethnography in this book challenges and complicates this stereotype by demonstrating how getting more powerful can go hand in hand with being and becoming pious. Although feminist (sports) scholars have often argued that true empowerment is only established when a feminist consciousness is developed, my research suggests that the mere participation of young women in kickboxing challenges the male masculine dominance in the sport. The young women’s ideals of being physically strong, powerful and self-confident are developed in women-only kickboxing training through a combination of female masculinity, emphasized femininity and piety. Their life projects depart from both hegemonic Western feminist ideals and the common notion that the ­self-formation of Muslim women centres on pious practices. Muslim women’s negotiation of piety while learning to kickbox presents a construction of subjectivities that deviate from discourses on integration and empowerment through sports. The way they do kickboxing contests discourses that seek to keep Islamic adherence in opposition to Western assumptions about sports and martial arts. Their embrace of this combat sport constructs subject positions that actively contradict the stereotype of the submissive, disempowered ‘Muslim woman’, without detaching the women from their religious aspirations. The women-only setting provides a space for young women and girls to experiment with modest dressing, overtly spiritual deliberations and the formation of friendships based on religion. Kickboxing aspirations intertwine with desires to be good Muslim girls. While traditional integration and empowerment paradigms presuppose that submissive, religiously minded women lack power, kickboxers in ­women-only sessions do not resist their religion. Their agentic power lies in their submission to religion through sports practice.



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The specificity of the gendered experience of kickboxing in these cases reveals the temporal dimensions of women’s processes of self-improvement. Self-improvement through sports is embedded in women’s anticipation and expectations of adulthood. Striving to ‘become more serious’ or to delay becoming more serious involves a consideration of the changing body, a future of marriage, childbirth and adult life in general, and how this future comes with gendered expectations of appropriate behaviour. This illustrates a particular temporalization of gendered experience. The timing of the women’s training sessions, which took place between the 6pm kids’ class and the 8 pm men’s session, highlights the liminal position of women in kickboxing. The expectations of women are bound by the temporalization currents of their lives: their adolescent kickboxing practice is youthful play, which mostly does not result in a kickboxing career, instead centralizing health, fitness and fun. The popularity of kickboxing among Muslim women in the Netherlands, as in other European countries, is an important social change for women that breaks stereotypes of submissiveness, on the one hand, and stereotypes of secularity on the other. Religious self-realization takes place in unexpected moments and with a rationale that transcends sport practice as such. Secularism shapes the interplay of self-realization, spatialization and temporalization, but simultaneously encounters limits. Practices of self-improvement in a kickboxing gym are practices of belonging – within gendered, ethnoracialized and religious minorities and the ways in which they are embedded within the nation.

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INDEX

 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 15, 110 ‘the Muslimwoman’, 9, 24, 141 ‘saving Muslim women’ 5, 15, 19, 83 adulthood, 113–14, 117, 134, 136, 141, 147, 149 aesthetics, 23, 72, 73, 75, 77–80, 84, 92, 94, 95, 109, 116, 137, 145 agency, 3, 11, 13, 14, 16, 71, 73, 79, 96, 107, 116, 120, 143, 145, 148 aggression, 12, 15, 37, 38, 65, 81–82, 121 ambitions, 2, 23, 26, 75, 80, 86, 92, 134, 135, 136, 138 Amsterdam, 7, 20, 42, 122 apprenticeship, 20–21, 49 Asad, Talal, 17–19, 25n20, 148 authenticity, 51, 67–69 autochthony and allochthony, 7, 33–35, 143 authority, 87, 91, 115, 37 autonomy, 9, 11, 16, 17, 104, 116 Beauchez, Jérôme, 119 beauty, 68, 71–73, 86, 93, 146. See also aesthetics belonging, 3, 6–11, 23, 27, 49–69, 97, 105, 116, 121, 122, 143 body modification, 84, 86, 92 body techniques, 18–20, 37, 107, 146 body weight, 56, 68, 77–78, 85, 127, 128–30 bonding and bridging, 33

Bourdieu, Pierre, 19 Butler, Judith, 59, 92, 107 career, 24, 79, 81, 90. 94n1, 119–120, 124, 127, 145, 147 categorization, social, 7, 24n8, 38, 46, 47n4, 144 Channon, Alex, 51, 99 children, 44, 53, 100, 101, 102 citizenship, 5–7, 10, 33, 144 cultural, 6, 115, 121, 143 class, social, 11, 27, 35, 36, 38, 119, 121, 145 clothing, 29, 45, 68, 76–78, 95, 100, 101, 104, 106–7, 109–11, 116, 125, 136 combat sports. See martial arts comfort, 15–16, 25n19, 98, 100, 103–104, 116 community. See group formation competitive fighting, 52, 63, 71, 78, 83, 98, 113, 115, 118–123, 126, 128, 130, 140, 142, 146 Connell, Raewyn W., 12, 75 crime, 30–31, 122 criminalization, 8, 141, 121, 148 diet, 124, 129 discipline, 10, 87, 127, 130, 144 discrimination, 8, 33, 120–21, 141, 142n2 dojo. See gym Downey, Greg, 61–62



Elling, Agnes, 37, 77 emancipation, 4, 5, 14–15, 45, 98–99, 148 ethnic, 32–33, 121 women’s, 11, 81, 141 embodiment, 9, 19, 49, 77, 108 gender, 12, 23, 75 knowledge, 19, 21, 49, 59 religious, 96 empowerment, 2–6, 12, 71, 81–84, 99, 107, 114–16, 148 enskilment, 20, 49, 68–69, 73, 86, 93, 145 environment, 23, 49, 62, 99, 103, 116 ethical formation, 16, 17, 96, 106, 115, 116, 145, 147 ethnic minority, 4, 6–8, 15, 33, 46, 114, 144 ethnography, 16–18, 20–21 Europe, 3, 5, 9–11, 15, 81, 116, 120, 143, 144, 148 family, 28, 104, 120, 124, 138–39, 142 feminism, 12, 115, 145, 148 and anthropology, 19 colonial, 15 post-, 77, 79, 96, 115, 148 femininity, 13, 15, 52, 71, 74–79, 86–87, 89, 92, 93, 96, 119, 132, 136, 141 alternative, 72, 115 apologetic, 23, 76, 78, 84, 146 emphasized, 13, 75–76, 79, 84, 96, 146–48 fighting style, 62–64, 69, 145 friendship, 1, 44, 56, 86, 120, 135, 139 full-contact sparring, 1, 65, 103, 104, 114 gaze, 99, 106, 108–11 gender, 86, 92, 93, 99, 109, 136 expectations, 130, 134, 136, 141, 142, 146 identity, 38, 143 mixed, 45, 62, 106, 113, 124, 132, 134 separation (see women-only) group feeling, 54, 55, 59, 61, 62, 69, 88 group formation, 50, 55, 89–90, 142 gyms, 39–42, 62–63, 73, 90, 99 interior, 40, 41

INDEX 

167

membership, 42, 101 rivalry, 39–42 habit(us), 19, 49, 52, 55, 58–61, 64, 87, 105, 110, 147 halal/haram, 23, 43, 100–1, 110, 116, 136–37 Halberstam, Jack, 75, 145 Harris, Mark, 59 headscarf. See hijab heteronormativity, 2, 24, 75–76, 79, 87, 93, 112, 119, 146, 147 hijab, 1, 3, 4, 43, 45, 53, 95, 99–102, 105, 110, 111, 114, 133, 135, 137 identity, 2, 5, 12–15, 87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 106, 143, 145–46 kickboxing, 62–64, 69, 87 Muslim, 17–18, 107, 116 national, 10, 32 neighbourhood, 30, 34 injury, 126, 138, 139 integration, 5, 9–11, 30–36, 45, 98, 121, 122, 148 intersectionality, 5, 9, 15, 19, 81 114, 147 intimacy, 56, 112 Islam, 3, 97–98, 100–1, 106–7, 109, 115, 148 in the Netherlands, 8 anthropology of, 16–18, 25n20, 117n1 conversion to, 29, 105–6 Islamophobia, 5, 8. See also racism kickboxing, 4, 50–51, 106 champions, 4, 36, 121 gear, 40, 53, 56, 77, 106, 108–9 motivations, 80, 81, 92–95, 120, 127, 130, 146 partner work, 1, 55–59, 66–67, 69, 98, 103, 132 positive effects of, 37, 80–81 professionalization of, 121–23 promotion of, 84, 100, 103, 109 sparring, 1, 56–59, 66–67, 86, 89, 133 techniques, 53–56, 61–64, 134–35, 138

168

INDEX

kickboxing (cont.) training, 44, 48, 53–60, 63–64, 84–89, 100–2, 125, 131–35 See also trainers knowledge, 49, 59, 108, 115 Lave, Jean and Etienne Wenger, 49 learning, 48–50, 53–54, 59–62, 86, 87 with peers, 23, 58–60, 69, 89, 137 through correction, 54, 58–59 through mimicry, 60, 61, 69, 77, 87, 110, 145 leisure, 45, 119 lifestyle, 29, 107 locker room, 44, 53, 76, 101–2 Mahmood, Saba, 16, 17, 107, 111, 116 marriage, 113, 133, 135, 136, 138, 147, 149 martial arts and combat sports, 37, 50–52, 65, 72, 82, 99, 109, 112, 122, 132, 148 masculinity, 72–76, 79, 82, 83, 92, 93, 119, 135, 141, 145 female, 73, 75–76, 90–91, 136, 146–47 hegemonic, 12, 72, 75, 143 Mauss, Marcel, 19, 59 media representation, 8, 30, 72 of kickboxing, 122 of Muslim women, 14, 143 Mepschen, Paul, 7, 25n10 migration background, 7, 33, 35, 124, 143 modesty, 109, 111, 132 Moroccan-Dutch, 6–8, 12, 37, 41, 120, 131, 144, 148 Muay Thai, 4, 40, 51, 69. See also kickboxing muscularity, 76–80, 84–85, 93, 129 multiculturalism, 10, 32 Muslima, 5, 11, 24n6 neighbourhood, 11, 27–36, 38, 45, 106, 116, 127, 144 ‘disadvantaged’, 5, 10, 27, 30–31, 34, 119 See also The Hague neoliberalism, 13, 120, 141

‘othering’, 11, 14, 120, 141, 144 orientalism, 15, 18 pain, 21, 58, 64–69, 73, 91, 138, 143, 145 participant observation, 6, 22, 110 participation. See sport participation performance, 59, 87, 92, 93, 96, 116 piety, 16, 17, 101, 107, 111, 115, 116, 123, 142, 143, 146, 148 play, 99, 113, 136, 141, 149 pleasure, 2, 42, 46, 52, 74, 104, 149 policies, 18, 32–38, 12, 141 postcoloniality, 10–11, 144 power, 12–13, 16, 72–75, 80–83, 146, 148 prayer, 95, 107 race/ethnicity, 9, 38, 46, 119 racialization, 3, 7, 9, 23, 35, 119, 140, 143, 144, 147, 149 racism, 7, 47n3, 118, 119, 141 rapport, 59 rebellion, 90–92 recreation, 51, 80, 92, 106, 116, 121, 132. See also leisure religion, 18, 136, 147, 107 observance of, 16, 102, 115 and self-cultivation, 16, 96, 107, 111, 145, 146 See also Islam respect, 58, 132 romantic relationships, 112–13, 115, 135 Rutte, Mark, 39, 120–21, 142n3 Samie, Samaya Farooq, 14, 76 Schippers, Edith, 11 secularity, 9, 95–97, 99, 101, 115, 149 and de-confessionalization, 8 embodiment of, 9 and modernity, 9, 11, 14 vs. religion, 3, 9, 97, 106, 108 Sehlikoglu, Sertaç, 15, 114, 141 self-confidence, 80–81 self-defence, 52, 65, 80–84 self-improvement, 16, 77, 81, 101, 116, 149 self-realization, 4, 5, 6, 94, 107, 116, 119, 146, 149



INDEX 

sensibilities, 4, 95, 99, 105, 108, 147 seriousness, 101, 113, 116–17, 134–36, 141, 149 sexism, 120, 141 sexuality, 75, 76 sexualization, 79, 142n4 shame, 118, 132 skill, 51, 53, 59, 62, 64, 84–85, 93, 123, 129. See also kickboxing technique slacking, 58, 87–93, 104, 146 sociability, 54–56, 87, 90–92, 94, 103, 146. See also group feeling social interaction, 33, 44, 54, 58, 71, 86, 89, 93, 140 space, 9, 42–46, 99–102, 105–7, 135, 139–42, 146, 148 sport facilities, 36, 44, 98, 122–23, 125. See also gym sport participation, 15, 27, 32, 39, 45, 97, 121–23, 143–44 stereotypes, 3, 9, 82, 86, 93, 114, 116, 141, 143, 148 strength, 12, 71–74, 77, 79, 83, 85, 93, 103, 125, 143 stigmatization, 30–31, 46, 119, 148 subjectivities, 20, 24, 50, 71, 92, 93, 96, 107, 114–16, 124, 141–48 submissiveness, perceived, 3, 13, 38, 82, 115, 143, 148 subsidies, 22, 37, 39, 46, 121 support, 128, 138–40

169

taekwondo, 50–51, 60, 69, 70n2, 123–24 team sports, 61 temporality, 14, 114, 141, 147 technologies of the self, 16 Thai Boxing. See Muay Thai The Hague, 7, 20, 39, 99, 116, 125, 142n5 Schilderswijk, 22, 27–31, 47n3 Southwest, 27–31, 39, 133 Toffolettti, Kim, 79 trainers, 54, 59–62, 69, 88, 98, 100, 103, 104, 128, 142 trust, 56, 64 Turkish-Dutch background, 6–8, 32, 37, 40, 44, 131 violence, 4, 21, 65, 67, 72, 82, 83, 92, 93, 145 Wacquant, Loïc, 31, 59, 67 ways of knowing, 59, 64 whiteness, 8, 11, 35, 38–39, 115, 145 women-only, 38, 42–45, 52, 73, 75, 78, 83, 87, 95–97, 99–103, 105, 113, 136, 146, 148 women’s fights, 78, 123, 124, 130, 138–39 youth, 8, 11, 23, 35, 37, 114, 123, 136, 138, 141, 147 youthfulness, 15, 112–15, 134, 149