'You must hit your mother!': re-evaluating gendered family structures through shared karate practice

Both sport and the family have been sociologically reflected on as key institutions in reproducing ideas of male dominance and of men's (hierarchical) distinction from women. Indeed they are deemed to be highly gendered spheres with distinct roles for women and men within. Karate is a sport often associated with men and masculinity due to it's combative practice, however, in practice is an arena where women, men, and families often train together.Through it's mixed sex, and often mixed-age practice, the conventional power dynamics embodied between family members are shaken as mother's correct partners techniques, daughters out-punch their brothers, and children are asked to hit their parents. As such, in the close-spaced, fast-paced, sweaty body-to-body exchanges of kicks, punches, and throws, how do families participating in karate together negotiate 'doing family' and 'doing gender' within such a field?
This paper argues that the vast presence of karate families both reinforces karate practice with a patriarchal gendered framework which karate practitioners draw on to understand their mixed-sex, mixed-age relations; and challenges conventional ways of doing gender by enabling women's participation in a conventionally masculine practice, and their subsequent capacity to out-perform their male family members.