Real knockouts

Unprecedented numbers of American women are today learning how to knock out, maim, even kill men who assault them. From behind the scenes of gun ranges, martial arts dojos, fitness centers offering "Cardio Combat," and in padded attacker courses like "Model Mugging," Real Knockouts demonstrates how self-defense trains women out of the femininity that makes them easy targets for men's abuse. And yet much feminist thought, like the broader American culture, seems deeply ambivalent about women's embrace of violence, even in self-defense. Investigating the connection between feminist theory and a woman's balled fist, McCaughey found self-defense culture to embody, literally, a new kind of feminism, one that will change forever the way we think of gender politics, the female body, and feminism itself.