ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how engaging in exercise has the potential to increase awareness and initiate questioning of gendered embodiment. Based on an ethnographical study of female beginners’ experiences of learning a Japanese self-defense sport, Aikido, I will discuss the changes in gendered bodily dispositions and relation to movement that occurred as a result of doing this exercise. Employing a phenomenological framework, I will illuminate how the female Aikido beginners developed an understanding of ‘the body’ as the means through which one relates to and experiences ‘the world around her’ (Davis 1995; Merleau-Ponty 1962).
