Friendships worth fighting for: bonds between women and men karate practitioners as sites for deconstructing gender inequality

Sport is argued to be one of the few remaining domains for constructing masculine identity and reproducing ideas of men’s (hierarchical) distinction from women. As a shared emotional (yet ‘masculine’) experience, sport lays the grounds for building close, intimate, friendships which, in men’s single-sex sport, are suggested to be underpinned by sharing sexist ideology. This paper argues that sex-integrated karate practice not only challenges the expectations/interpretations of women’s bodies, but can also situate women and men within mutually respectful, cherished relationships which diverge from conventional sexualized and unequal ways of ‘doing gender’ in mixed-sex relationships.