Why Talk About Gender in the Chinese Martial Arts? In my years of teaching I have noticed that any discussion of “gender” will usually elicit great interest from a certain percentage of my students, while you can literally watch the... Continue Reading →
Introduction: Masculinity as a Core Value in the Traditional Southern Martial Arts. One of the few facts that everyone seems to “know” about Wing Chun is that the art was created by a female. Whether this is actually true... Continue Reading →
***Here is one of the first substantive posts that I ever wrote on Wing Chun for the blog back in 2012, about three years before my book (with Jon Nielson) came out. Wing Chun mythology is always a hot topic.... Continue Reading →
Introduction Friday morning posts are usually written the day before, and it just so happens that this week’s Thursday falls on Valentine’s Day. That complicates things for reasons that are both understandable and a few which are a little... Continue Reading →
Introduction For someone who doesn’t read classical Chinese, I spend a lot of time in seminars listening to presentations on ancient texts. Cornell regularly invites visiting scholars to discuss their work. While none of these individuals has ever given... Continue Reading →
What at first appears new is often something remembered. The human mind has trouble categorizing and finding meaning in anything that is truly unique or alien. Good storytellers know that originality is not always a virtue. The... Continue Reading →
***We are currently in the final push to prepare and release the second issue of the interdisciplinary journal Martial Arts Studies. This will be a themed issue examining different aspects of the "invention of the martial arts" in a... Continue Reading →
Introduction We all know the story (and those who do not may want to quickly review the most popular version of it here). With the destruction of the Shaolin Temple at the hands of a fearful... Continue Reading →
Introduction: Is the Gendering of Practice Inevitable? In the early 1990s I became a practitioner of a discipline that requires years of careful study and practice to master. It has its major schools, famous instructors... Continue Reading →
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