14    Fighting Out

Fractious Bodies and Rebel Streets

Jamie Magnusson

Fighting Out began in downtown Toronto as an Adult Education and Community Development program offering qigong and civil self-defence to the LGBT2Q community. In this chapter, I explain how the collective practice of civil self-defence can be an effective way to build social movements and transform social relations organizing political violence. From practicing civil self-defence in a community space, LGBT2Q collectives can go on to organize events that hook into social movements and work toward solidarity building. In contrast to traditional self-defence curricula, the Fighting Out pedagogy encourages collective grassroots action against state violence—a frequently experienced form of violence for Indigenous, racialized, queer, and trans women. Soon after Fighting Out was initiated, it became integrated into a program for sex workers operating out of the All Saints Church and Community Centre in downtown Toronto. In this context, qigong and self-defence became an extension of a harm-reduction philosophy of community engagement and adult education.

Fighting Out is examined as an example of embodied social movement learning in the tradition of Marxist feminist grassroots community organizing. Fighting Out, I argue, is organized in the context of a project of reclaiming urban spaces from global financialized imaginaries which are characterized by gentrification and state violence against poor women via criminalization, incarceration, and expulsions from public housing that are slated for closure, and then redeveloped as privatized condos. Fighting Out fits into efforts to reclaim and decolonize urban spaces and engage in feminist community development.

Some Background

My own interest in bringing together civil self-defence practice with political organizing began many years ago. Through practicing a particular Okinawan martial art, goju ryu, I came into contact with women from various martial arts styles who shared a vision of connecting what they had learned within traditional masculinist and often militarized martial arts spaces with feminist, queer, antiracist grassroots organizing. Many of these women had been politicized during the second-wave feminist movement and had been very active in the student movements of the time. Living within a zeitgeist of social movements sweeping the globe, they participated in the civil rights, peace, LGBT, labour, socialist, Red Power, and prison abolition movements, among others. Many are dykes who, in the 1950s and 1960s, were some of the first women in North America to become highly trained in various martial arts.

Fighting Out was fashioned after the feminist-inspired community programs developed by many of these women over the years. I was able to study these programs initially through discussions with Wendi Dragonfire, an early innovator in this area, who then introduced me to other women practitioners and training collectives. Although many excellent programs emerged and continue to emerge, in developing Fighting Out, I borrowed extensively from Brooklyn Women’s Martial Arts (BWMA), founded by Annie Ellman and Nadia Telsely in 1974 and later renamed the Center for Anti-violence Education (CAE). The CAE continues to run programs and remains very active in political organizing, thereby providing a space wherein women, youth, and LGBT2Q folk can build community and become involved in antiviolence activism. For example, in the 1970s, the BWMA became involved in supporting black women in the United States who were prosecuted for defending themselves in domestic assault situations. More recently, CAE has been active in the Occupy Movement and in post-9/11 anti-imperialism activism, as well as supporting Muslim women through self-defence training when they became targets of street-based Islamophobic violence. CAE activism has thus kept pace with the political times, offering opportunities for meaningful civic engagement in and through civic self-defence training.

Fighting Out was initiated specifically for LGBT2Q folks in Toronto, but it has since been extended to include sex workers. For the LGBT2Q community, I offer workshops on the goju ryu form known as tensho—which involves deep breathing and continuous, flowing movement—and on the self-defence practice associated with tensho movement. These are usually offered in spaces I am able to access because of my connections within the martial arts community and the Centre for Women’s Studies in Education (CWSE) within the Faculty of Education at the University of Toronto. For sex workers, I generally enter into their women’s-only trans-positive space at Friday morning drop-ins at a community centre. In this boisterous and warm space, I simply demonstrate some helpful counters against common attacks and then move into the auditorium and do the tensho movement series, or “form,” and self-defence practice with whoever cares to join me. Over the past couple of years of doing this work, women have often consulted with me privately about incidents that occurred in their work, and I have offered some possibilities for self-defence. I have also been drawn into much more outreach work with street-based sex workers, including participatory action research with youth who have been trafficked in the domestic sex industry.

Through a wonderful development of working across these community sites, one of the women from the LGBT2Q workshops now joins me on Friday mornings to help with the drop-in for sex workers. Janice Clanfield is a lesbian trans woman who transitioned later in life and did not have the opportunities earlier in her life to work in women’s-only spaces and participate in feminist collectives. She has enthusiastically embraced opportunities to develop as a feminist activist later in life. Since we have been working together in the LGBT2Q and sex work context, we have often discussed feminist anticapitalist politics, and I have had an opportunity to learn more about trans politics. We have also “taken to the streets” with sex workers and allies, many of whom are trans.

One such event was a Reclaim the Streets march bringing together sex workers and allies, street-involved youth, Indigenous activists from the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement, antiracist and trans activists, the Toronto Anti-Poverty Coalition, and the general community. This particular event raised awareness of a profound increase in violence against women in the area, including rapes, murders, domestic sex-trafficking, police violence, and transphobia. The action also continued an ongoing mobilization effort to advocate for a twenty-four-hour women’s shelter in the area. Two weeks after the event, Toronto City Council passed a motion to establish such a shelter. The primary shelter in that particular locale has operated for years as a men’s shelter, and so the historical redress is significant.

The Fighting Out initiative, then, offers an opportunity to build community and participate in local grassroots organizing and global social movements that offer possibilities to dismantle multiple and integrated hierarchies that organize violence. It offers an alternative to trauma-centred interventions that have had their own institutional histories and have spawned an industry of institutionally based trauma professionals who focus on post-trauma stress disorder and psychological healing. Many of the concepts from these trauma-centred approaches came from work with military veterans and were later extended as a medicalized-psychiatric model to women who have experienced sexual and domestic violence.

Many women-centred martial arts and self-defence programs and interventions also work within this framework. For some Indigenous and racialized women, however, this could be viewed as a colonial model, especially because it individualizes the systemic problems of racism and colonialism as a personal psychiatric problem. Fighting Out, in contrast, honours personal histories of resilience and offers a means of community building and a collective framework for addressing historically shaped violence. It works from a materialist framework flowing from Marxist feminist activism. As such, it problematizes psychologically based approaches that privilege individualizing ontologies that Marxist feminists recognize as forms of alienated consciousness located in capitalist histories. That is, this framework always refers back to the social relations organizing violence, rather than pathologizing individual women as victims and assigning them “psychological diagnoses”. As discussed in the chapter in this volume by Alannah Young Leon and Denise Nadeau as well as that by Candace Brunette-Debassige, trauma healing work must address historically shaped violence as part of a decolonizing and antiracist framework for Indigenous women. In the sections that follow, I explain some of these concepts and approaches by outlining and unpacking some of the guiding concepts used in the Fighting Out initiative.

Feminist Civil Self-Defence Collectives Versus Martial Arts Regimes

Following Patrick McCarthy (1995), I distinguish between “civil self-defence arts” and “martial arts.” Whereas martial arts are located in ruling regimes and are part of militarized apparatuses of ruling, civil self-defence arts belong to the people. Unlike militarized martial arts, arts of civil self-defence are not regimented, standardized, or practiced in hierarchized, enclosed spaces. Rather, they come together as a multiplicity of shared genres and practices that intersect and fuse and are practiced in popular spaces. In contrast to a standardized curriculum that can be institutionalized or commodified, practicing civil self-defence arts, like street-based breakdancing, encourages sharing, blending, creolization, experimentation, and innovation.

I see myself more as a busker than as a “head teacher.” The busker inhabits popular spaces rather than the enclosed hierarchized spaces through which the term “martial arts master” is typically articulated. I have a repertoire of skills acquired over two decades of diligent practice, but I share these skills with my peers in community drop-in spaces and parks, much like how breakdancers practice together, showing one another new moves and polishing tried and true moves. When I hold classes in a space that is donated to us by a nonprofit community club, I leave my hat by the door. After class, if people have a toonie or two to spare, and if they are so inclined, they drop a donation into the hat. Generally, folks drop enough into the hat so that nonprofits get a little extra for the kindness of hosting us. When I show up to the drop-in for sex workers, I get coffee and the best breakfast in Toronto.

However, feminist civil self-defence collectives are more than breakdancers. They are more like “war machines” as described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their treatise on “nomadology” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Deleuze and Guattari used the term “nomadology” to describe noninstitutionalized epistemology that evolves when those participating in the knowledge process are connected to the creative process of life and survival in ways that are not “territorializing”—that is, not formed through hierarchies of control characterizing “the state apparatus”—but rather are “de-territorializing.” For the purpose of this chapter, we can think of the state apparatus as constructed through the accumulation of interests of the ruling class and as consisting of regimes of imperialism and colonialism that are part and parcel of the racist, heteronormative nation-building project. The state war machine is characterized by hierarchical arrangements through which territorial control is achieved and a war is carried out against those who have been exteriorized by the state. For example, “the university” is a part of the systems of knowledge constructed through the territorializing agenda of the state apparatus and is characterized by epistemologies woven through social relations that are hierarchical and subjectifying. To concretize this idea, think of the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) and how relationships to nature are constructed through reductionist positivism. STEM academics are taught that prediction and control are the most valued standards against which to validate truth claims. Prediction and control are critical to territorializing projects.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argue that those who are exteriorized by the state do not have a “territory” that is “home” and are therefore nomadic (queers, sex workers, diasporic people, Indigenous people, and agricultural peasants, for example, as well as many other folks). They are necessarily “on the move” because the state seeks to eradicate them in its territorializing project. The material relations of nomadic existence emerge in and through territorialization, the exteriorization that results, and the survivalist imperative to fight back against eradication. Fighting back against eradication requires “warring” tactics that are not institutionalized, not regimented, and that are oriented to deterritorializing imperatives. The cumulation of knowledges, technologies, and so on, and indeed the entirety of knowledge-making connected to the material social relations of nomadic war machines, is referred to as “nomadology.” Whereas state apparatuses have “epistemologies” (woven through subjectifying relations of imperialist territorializing), nomadic groups have “nomadologies” (woven through tactical survival, the will to thrive, and the material social relations of deterritorialization by which state heirarchies are dismantled). In contrast to state war machines (i.e., the military apparatus), feminist self-defence collectives are nomadic war machines.

The Production of Fractious Bodies in the City

Whereas Deleuze and Guattari talk about war machines as pre-existing, as well as being defined by their exteriority to the state, I am emphasizing how the enclosures connected with the primary accumulation of capital (as described by Marx) produce exteriorization and hence the fractious body. That is, class dialectics is very much a part of the analysis I am developing, in distinction from the (anti-Hegelian) nondialectical approach developed by Deleuze and Guattari. The argument is laid out as follows.

If martial arts are located in the territorialized state ruling apparatus, then fractious bodies emerge from their expulsion from the territorialized state. Queers and sex workers are produced as outlawed rebel collectives, ontologically defined through exteriority. Fractious bodies emerge in antagonistic relation to the territorializing state and are in constant motion and change relative to state strategies of containment, control, and extinction.

Silvia Federici (2004) explains how historical enclosures of common land for the purpose of primitive accumulation were productive of exteriorized bodies and gendered migrations to cities. These expulsions were part of the historical process by which “prostitution” (I am using the term that came to be used to denigrate women) became massified and poor women became criminalized. She further explains that this process of accumulation through enclosures and dispossession—what Marx referred to as “primitive, originary, or primary accumulation”—was productive not only of a concentration of landless workers, who now had to sell their labour for subsistence and reproduction, but also of an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class. Hierarchies built on gender, race, and sexuality became constitutive of class rule and the historical formation of the proletariat. However, these hierarchies also became the basis for exteriorizing processes and the production of the fractious body.

In Red Skin, White Masks, Indigenous scholar Glen Coulthard (2014, 7) takes up the issue of violent dispossession of lands in connection with First Nations people:

In thinking about colonialism as a form of structured dispossession, I have found it useful to return to a cluster of insights developed by Karl Marx in chapters 26 through 32 of his first volume of Capital. This section of Capital is crucial because it is there that Marx most thoroughly links the totalizing power of capital with that of colonialism by way of his theory of “primitive accumulation.”

Coulthard applies this to Canada:

In this respect, Canada is no different from most other settler-colonial powers: in the Canadian context, colonial domination continues to be structurally committed to maintain—through force, fraud, and more recently, so-called “negotiations”—ongoing state access to the land and resources that contradictorily provide the material and spiritual sustenance of Indigenous societies on the one hand, and the foundation of the colonial state-formation, settlement, and capitalist development on the other. (6–7)

In the contemporary version of this analysis, expulsions continue to occur as imperialist and neocolonial land-grabbing takes place for territorial control over natural resources, leading to a global intensification of gendered and racialized migrations to megacities. Coulthard therefore suggests a conceptual shift that “takes as its analytical frame the subject position of the colonized vis-à-vis the effects of colonial dispossession, rather than from the primary position of ‘the waged male proletariat [in] the process of commodity production,’ to borrow from Sylvia Federici’s useful formulation” (11; emphasis in the original). The mass migrations to cities have now produced the urban landscape as a site of accumulation through programs of austerity. That is, within cities, austerity programs are forcing the poor from what has become prime real estate for speculative developers, resulting in housing insecurity. As Federici (2012, 103) puts it:

Where “austerity” programs and land grabbing could not reach, war has completed the task, opening new grounds for oil drilling and the harvesting of diamonds or coltan [an ore]. As for the targets of these clearances, they have become the subjects of the new diaspora, siphoning millions of people from the land to the towns, which more and more resemble encampments. Mike Davis has used the phrase “Planet of Slums” in referring to this situation, but a more correct and vivid description would speak of a planet of ghettos and a regime of global apartheid.

As I have written recently in a chapter on the financialized economy, the transformation of cities as described above is proceeding rapidly as global accumulation becomes increasingly financialized and cities become a site of accumulation via ongoing acts of dispossession facilitated through austerity politics (Magnusson 2015). Raymond Lotta (2013) points out that by the year 2000 more than half of humanity lived in cities. Mike Davis (2006) provides evidence that slum growth throughout the Global South is surpassing urbanization. Productive stagnation has become a stable characteristic of our current economy (often referred to as monopoly-finance capitalism), normalizing underemployment and low wages globally (Magdoff and Foster 2014). The most accessible employment opportunities, particularly for women, are in the informal and illegal economies within cities.

Migration to cities is also productive of a queer diaspora characterized by LGBT2Q folks seeking community within sprawling megacities undergoing fractionalization and erosion of stable infrastructures under neoliberal and austerity policies. Cities such as Toronto, where homosexuality has been decriminalized, are simultaneously desired destinations for the queer diaspora and spaces where racialized LGBT2Q folk continue to be exteriorized through laws that threaten to revoke citizenship of racialized peoples who can be labelled as “terrorists” for challenging the racist heteropatriarchal state (Bain 2014).

The pandemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women reveals how the violence of dispossession and migration to cities is gendered and is an aspect of the racialized project of genocide that is embedded within colonialism (see Arvin, Tuck, and Morill 2013; Simpson 2014; Smith 2005). Martin Cannon (2012) extends this analysis to the regulation of sexualities through historically specific policies such as the Indian Act, showing how Euro-Christian values around gender, sex, and reproduction entered into the colonial nation-building project, institutionalizing rigid forms of gender binaries and social relations of Euro-patriarchy. Similarly, in a postcolonial setting, Jacqui Alexander (1991) explores the reconceptualization of sexual behaviour in terms of morality, offering a decolonizing reading of Trinidad and Tobago’s 1986 Sexual Offences Bill, which outlawed homosexuality and sodomy.

The contemporary urban landscape provides the context for programs such as Fighting Out. The Reclaim the Streets action described above would have occurred without Fighting Out. However, the Fighting Out initiative contributes an embodied learning dimension to these politics, as well as access to the means by which a safer life can be secured for members of the queer diaspora and for increasing numbers of racialized women and homeless youth involved in street-based sex work. It functions as a queer, feminist, antiracist commons constructed against the enclosures and privatization of safe spaces to inhabit. Speculative real estate in the urban context requires the production of unsafe spaces within the city in order to accumulate through the enclosure and commodification of safe gentrified spaces. Initiatives such as Fighting Out can contribute to a revolutionary project along the lines of Henri Lefebvre’s (2003) “urban revolution”—a vision that has been revived by contemporary urban activists and writers. To rephrase David Harvey (2012), when exteriorized fractious bodies come to constitute a critical mass for whom the struggle over the city as a whole frames the struggles of many groups, including the queers and sex workers. The Fighting Out initiative provides a forum for embodying politics of anticapitalist social movements that may have possibilities to intervene in the neoliberal fragmentation, homogenization, and hierarchization that is part and parcel of urban gentrification under monopoly-finance capitalism.

An intriguing possibility raised by Glen Coulthard (2014) and Leanne Simpson (2014) in connection with the Idle No More movement is that interventions into such neoliberal and financialized urban design can be infused with resurgent Indigeneity, which, as Simpson argues, can be a queer resurgence. We can imagine urban landscapes being restored to communities that lend each other interregional and international solidarity. Similarly, the recent tent-city set up by Black Lives Matter Toronto exemplifies the kind of social movement building and pedagogies of solidarity by which urban space is reclaimed. The communities would be able to draw from life genres informed by historical land-based and contemporary urban community practices. Transnational connectedness could be the basis of a kind of grassroots “globalization,” as a counter practice to global financialized imaginaries. As Coulthard (2014, 172) explains,

We also have to acknowledge that the significant political leverage required to simultaneously block economic exploitation of our people and homelands while constructing alternatives to capitalism will not be generated through our direct actions and resurgent economies alone. Settler colonization has rendered our populations too small to affect this magnitude of change. This reality demands that we continue to remain open to, if not actively seek out and establish, relations of solidarity and networks of trade and mutual aid with national and transnational communities and organizations that are also struggling against the imposed effects of globalized capital, including other Indigenous nations and national confederacies; urban Indigenous people and organizations; the labor, women’s, GBLTQ2S (gay, bisexual, lesbian, trans, queer, and two-spirit), and environmental movements; and of course, those racial and ethnic communities that find themselves subject to their own distinct forms of economic, social, and cultural marginalization.

The Fighting Out initiative is very small in scale compared to these visionary challenges to urban space shaped through apartheid capitalism. However, the initiative affords a pedagogy of community and solidarity building that challenges the various forms of violence—including state/colonial/capitalist violence—that shape the lives of LGBT2Q people. It works at the intersections of movements such as Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Black Lives Matter, and Trans Pride for example. In the next section, I review some aspects of Fighting Out as a community praxis.

Qigong, Self-Defence, and Embodied Politics

In this section, I describe Fighting Out as a praxis, detailing what happens in a typical Fighting Out class session, how community is formed through the initiative, and how the activities of a Fighting Out class come to be linked to activism and social movements. I show how a collective civil defence qigong practice can be theorized through an ontology of “the social,” in distinction from the idea of individual empowerment.

There are countless examples of women’s self-defence programs, usually set up as a workshop series, that offer a collection of de-escalation skills, boundary-setting exercises, and physical self-defence techniques. Some of these programs are characterized by trauma-centred approaches, as explained in the previous section, and there are surprisingly few examples of programs such as the Center for Anti-violence Education in Brooklyn, which coordinates the activities of civil self-defence learning such that they hook into relevant social movements for radical change. Moreover, while self-defence workshops are wonderful, the physical self-defence techniques are typically not presented as an integrated art form but as a disconnected series of moves such as groin kicks, release from grabs, and strikes. The practices that are a part of the discipline of meditation and breath work are seldom, if ever, a part of women’s self-defence training packages.

The Fighting Out curriculum is grounded in the Okinawan goju ryu art form and flows from a particular kata (“form”) known as tensho (“rotating palms”). Kata are sets of movements that, when practiced on one’s own, embody self-defence applications against various kinds of attacks. The form is also an Okinawan self-defence qigong exercise learned from families of Chinese merchants and modified within a context of Okinawan fighting arts. That is, it is already a cultural fusion of material practices rather than a static, essentialized spiritual methodology, as it is sometimes represented. The Fighting Out practice sessions begin with tensho as a qigong exercise that involves a moving breath meditation. From a movement and body memory perspective, the tensho form is simple and is easily learned over the course of about four to six sessions. After that, this beautiful moving meditation can be practiced every day for a lifetime to promote health and mindfulness.1

Incorporating mindfulness into qigong practice is explained by Andy James (2004)—who is my shifu (someone who is adept at and teaches the practice) and also my vipassana meditation teacher. In his text The Spiritual Legacy of Shaolin Temple, he examines the complex historical and philosophical interconnections represented by Buddhism, Daoism, and the energetic arts:

Within the qigong and internal martial arts stream, it is important to remember that the ultimate goal of “mind regulation” is enlightenment and “return to the Dao.” For this, surrender is unavoidable and an enlightenment practice necessary. In this book, I have suggested vipassana as an enlightenment practice that would fit seamlessly with qigong and the internal martial arts and at the same time recall the urgency for enlightenment for which Chan is famous. Prajna, or insightful wisdom, is an important element in both Chan and vipassana. (171)

Hence, James advocates vipassana meditation for his students, to be practiced separately but as part of a daily practice that includes qigong: “I am not of the opinion that other meditation practices including concentration, samatha, visualizing, and qigong detract from vipassana, as long as these are not done during vipassana meditation to make the sitting more interesting or to obtain ‘higher’ states” (167).

In this respect, certain qigong practices such as goju ryu tensho, like practices such as vipassana meditation, orient the practitioner to the present moment via the breath and attention to the subtle sensations emanating from the body in movement. As James (2004, 167) suggests, “A less intense form of body mindfulness, suitable for everyday activities, is noting your body’s every change in posture: sitting, standing, walking, running, reclining, kneeling, and lying.”

With this in mind, when teaching tensho, I encourage participants to practice tensho mindfully. This is an important practice for some of the women who are involved in sex work and who experience almost daily violence, including forced confinement, rape, and brutal beatings. Some of the youth with whom I have been involved talk about being on constant alert after running away from their pimps and being in constant fear of being spotted and kidnapped to be brought back into trafficking. The women who have been street involved for years seldom “stay in the moment” because their survival depends on continually thinking through every possible future scenario and making moment-to-moment decisions based on what could go wrong in the future.

Tensho is a “fighting art” breath form that orients participants to their breath and their body in the present moment. It is a moving meditation. When practiced mindfully on a regular basis, tensho may lead to other forms of mindfulness practice, including sitting meditation with breath (such as vipassana). Today, a great deal of research is available about the plasticity of the brain and the possibility for these kinds of practices to mitigate the kind of emotional-physical reactivity that develops through unrelenting exposure to stress (see Schmidt and Walach, 2014). Moreover, practicing as a collective teaches about creating and living in social relationships that are woven through an ethic of antiviolence and mutual nourishment.

Because the tensho series of movements only takes about five minutes, we are able to practice it a few times per session; each time, I offer feedback to improve the breath and bodywork dimensions. After practicing the set, each class session focuses on one to two self-defence applications and on partner practice. As we wind down the class session, there is opportunity for discussion and relationship building.

Discussions can take the form of political pedagogy. These can include organizing for upcoming political actions, such as a trans march during Pride Week or talking through the politics of state violence, colonialism, or family violence. Discussions can also include productive solidarity building and moving toward appropriate action. For example, as mentioned earlier, one Take Back the Streets action at a local LGBT2Q community centre was organized as an antiviolence event extending solidarity “From Turtle Island to Palestine,” thereby connecting the international dots of colonialism, imperialism, and the violence of white heteropatriarchal capitalism.

The self-defence applications are interesting for me as teacher/busker, because I have always practiced tensho in the way it was taught to me by my goju ryu teacher, Bill Hind, with a soft breath and soft body. Tensho is just as likely to be practiced as a “hard” form by other practitioners, with a loud, hard, long breath and muscle tension. However, my teacher emphasized the importance of tensho as a soft, slow practice that allows the body to experience mindful breath work as a circulating flow, to contrast with breath work as “kime practice,” or projecting energy into a singular focal point, as is practiced with the other foundational breath kata in goju ryu, namely sanchin. Sanchin—performed with hard breath, muscle tension, and energy focused into a single point of intentionality—is referred to as “external practice.” Tensho is often practiced this way as well, but in my own practice, I perform tensho as an internal art, with soft breath, soft body, and continuously moving, circulating energy. As Shifu James suggests, the internal martial arts are not based on opposing force with force, as one might evidence in external martial arts, but rather on a flowing combination of yin (yielding) and yang (opposing) energy. There is circularity and flow rather than the staccato, start/stop of, say blocking and punching.

I found early on that class sessions flowed much better when qigong was introduced through a soft breath form such as tensho rather than a hard breath form such as sanchin or even a combination of sanchin and tensho. Hard breath forms appear to be difficult for the absolute beginner and can detract from learning a qigong set within the space of four to six workshops. Currently, our practice sessions follow a predictable pattern: a warm-up much like that used in tai chi, tensho instruction and practice, self-defence and partner practice, a cool-down, and discussion. The irony is that tensho practiced with soft breath and soft body is generally considered a sophisticated beginning point for learning the goju ryu art form. The self-defence applications require meeting an attack with a relaxed yet ready-to-spring-into-action mind-body, and the counters require learning how to flow with the attacker’s energy and redirecting through spiralling. Even after twenty-plus years of practice, I am still learning how to greet hard energy with alert softness. Nevertheless, I have been able to offer many kinds of self-defence applications that make street sense while at the same time helping participants develop a “fighting art” moving meditation practice with breath work.

I think of the qigong practice in terms of materially framed, embodied breath concepts through which mindfulness practice can extend to political activism. In terms of political activism, mindfulness practice can encourage “right action” and “right speech.” For example, right action and speech in an activist context can take the form of social activism through a consciousness that mindfully avoids reproducing violence in the process of dismantling hierarchies through which relations of subjectification are produced.

This praxis of building collectives—practicing moving meditation that incorporates learning self-defence, talking through politics that structure violence, building capacity for political engagement, and so on—works through the dialectics of deep personal transformation and social change. The pedagogy flows from materialist praxis that connects qigong to civil self-defence, social movements, transformative political processes, and historical consciousness. We practice the tensho set as moving meditation with breath work but not as an essentialized spiritual practice and not as a sacred methodology alienated from our historical locations. From breath flows to body throws, from deterritorializing the body to reclaiming the city streets, the practice works through the dialectics of politically organized violence to dismantle relations of subjugation that organize the day-to-day actualities of racialized queers and sex workers in the city.

Dialectics of the Mind-Body

Queers and sex workers may encounter insurmountable difficulties trying to train in a traditional martial arts school. Not only do tuition fees and trans/homophobia pose significant barriers, but the martial arts are often, at best, mostly irrelevant to the daily encounters of violence negotiated by fractious bodies and, at worst, a reinscription of that very violence. Civil self-defence collectives of the sort described here interrupt exclusionary enclosures of practice space and provide a space for wellness practices that resignify dominant cultural scripts and practices of “the desired body,” “the disposable body,” “the hateable body.”

The city streets can be unforgiving for homeless LGBT2Q youth, street-based sex workers, trans folk facing housing and food insecurity, and the queer diaspora struggling to negotiate a new urban landscape. Substance abuse, partner abuse, and so on can come to form part of the daily struggle. Qigong is a practice that has been used successfully in substance abuse contexts; Jan Parker, an artist and tai chi practitioner on Bowen Island, British Columbia, is an early innovator in this respect. Qigong can also be used in connection with other kinds of healing and wellness practices. I am currently learning medical qigong, which, as my teacher Shifu Donna Oliver suggests, “strengthens the whole unit consisting of body, mind, breath and spirit” (pers. comm., 2015). The “fight” can be in the form of, say, yiquan practice, which is loosely translated as “mind boxing.” As Donna Oliver puts it, “This to me implies a perhaps different form of fight. The battle of the conditioned, acquired mind and the spiritual conscious mind, which through constant practice of yiquan qigong triumphs.” Life as, say, a racialized LBT woman can be rife with microsociologies of violence that are experienced as body-damaging stress. At the same time, qigong practice can promote resilience. Through regular practice, queers and sex workers can write their own scripts of what is beautiful and desirable: big beautiful women, muscular bois, elegant elderly women, feminine men, beautifully multiracial, gracefully differently bodied, and so on. As bodies are engaged as “social bodies,” the social politics of “the city” also transforms: that is, the struggle over cities cannot be separated from the struggle over the social body or from a democratic project involving enfolding fractious social bodies into a politics of rightful belonging.

Cultural Expansion of Civil Self-Defence Collectives

Last year, I had the opportunity to develop a series of Fighting Out workshops for the first ever Pan-Caribbean Women and Sexual Diversity Conference, strategically held in conjunction with Curacao’s first ever Pride Week. The purpose of the workshops was to introduce the idea of qigong and civil self-defence collectives to women activists working in diverse Caribbean contexts of women’s health, rape crisis centres, sexual diversity initiatives, and so on. The series began with an introduction to a theoretical framework useful in organizing this kind of work and then, each morning, qigong and self-defence practice. By the final day of the conference, women were able to do the qigong set from beginning to end as a group and to confidently execute a number of key self-defence moves. More importantly, the participants discussed how this kind of work could be set up in their own communities as a viable political project linked to building a social movement focused on antiviolence and decriminalization of homosexuality within a decolonizing, anti-imperialist, anticapitalist, and antiracist framework. For example, building self-defence collectives in order to work through the politics by which patriarchal colonialism shapes and regulates sexualities can build capacity that is both personally and politically transformative.

My hope in writing this chapter is that similar collectives will be created in other urban contexts globally. David Harvey (2012, 5) writes that “to claim the right to the city” means “to claim some kind of shaping power over the processes of urbanization, over the ways in which our cities are made and re-made and to do so in a fundamental and radical way.” A civil self-defence collective can be more than a four-day women’s workshop on de-escalation techniques and defending against strikes. The models generated by early innovators beginning in the 1970s can be re-examined in the contemporary context of slum expansion, the ongoing production of fractious bodies, and our collective process of reclaiming urban spaces from global financialized imaginaries in order to build transnationally networked communities informed by resurgent Indigeneity and economies.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the following martial arts teachers who have inspired me and guided me: Shifu Andy James and Shifu Donna Oliver, from the Tai Chi and Meditation Centre in Toronto; Bill Hind, Sensei, the most senior practitioner of goju ryu in Canada; Fran Turner, Sensei, my aikido teacher, who also taught me the lovingkindness meditation when I accompanied her to the Elizabeth Fry Society to do outreach work; the many students of all my teachers who have helped me along my learning path; Wendi Dragonfire, Sensei; Nadia Telsey and Annie Ellman. The memory of my friendship with Roxana Ng was a particular inspiration for me as I was writing this chapter. I dedicate the piece to her memory.

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1  For an in-depth discussion of mindfulness as embodied practice, see Yuk-Lin Renita Wong’s chapter in this volume.