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

Ways of doing our relationships are embedded with ways of ‘doing gender’ (Jamieson 1997 ; West and Zimmerman 1987 ). Doing gender is a social, interactive, act, done relationally to the specifi c setting and people present, and embedded with ways of performing diff erences that re/create the distinct categories of man and woman (West and Zimmerman 1987 ). Th e perceived diff erences between what it is to ‘be a man’ and what it is to ‘be a woman’ not only entail distinct expectations of what women and men should do and how

they should present themselves in social situations, but are also used to legitimize a gender hierarchy that subordinates women, and what women do (Connell 2009 ). As a woman doing gender thus entails doing/being subjected to subordination. Th e extent to which our relationships refl ect traditional, hierarchically distinct, ways of doing gender vary – some relationships may strongly recreate notions of diff erence that subordinate women, whilst others might render certain notions of diff erence unviable, and in the process, begin to ‘undo’ gender (Deutsch 2007 ). As such, how we ‘do’ our relationships can impact the extent to which we recreate a gender hierarchy that subordinates women.