ABSTRACT
This chapter explores women’s self-defence manuals, the discourses through which British women were encouraged to engage in this self-fashioning, that is to say that it explores the politics and poetics of women’s self-defence, the cultural grammar through which the idea of women defending themselves was made conceivable, the conditions of possibility that made something that we might call ‘spatial justice’ meaningful and realisable. The chapter recognises the ambivalence of such texts, but adopts a more pragmatic approach and that the texts on women’s self-defence discussed clearly depend for their meaningfulness on engagement with poetic resources that are often associated with conservative discourses on ‘fear of crime’ and the ‘urban nightmare’, liberal ‘responsibilisation’ and its emphasis on individual coping strategies rather than social transformation, and encouragement of situational prevention rather than a search for justice.
