Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

Allison continues to explain how her understanding of gender and her identity evolved over time. Much of that work centered on women’s bodies, including her own. Allison used gazes—including those of men and women—to track her evolving notion of the body.

In the previous section, Allison notes that she and most other women learned to hate women’s bodies early on. In Allison’s case, the violence to which her stepfather subjected her literally broke parts of her five-year-old body when the abuse began—and he apparently broke her arm at some point. When Allison was finally ready to begin healing from her trauma, she knew that she must do that work through her body because that was, in part, where the wounds were.

While Allison’s decision to disrupt the all-male space of the karate class was clearly political, the class allowed her to confront the male gaze head-on. She contended with one young man who “stared at [her] blankly” (61) when she asked about the class, but she “stared right back” (61) and later “glared fiercely” when one of the young men “looked from [her] to Flo” (61). When she and Flo struggled to keep pace as the group ran to class, one of the boys/men “looked back and snickered” (61) at their efforts. These hostile looks reinforced Allison’s sense that hers was an “inept female body in which [she] [was] imprisoned” (63).

Allison had an epiphany about the female body as something to be loved because she recognized in the sensei’s wife the power of “what a woman could do” (63). As she observed what happened between the sensei and his wife—an exchange of gazes between co-equals—she saw the rare instance in which the male gaze was loving. Allison put herself in this chain of gazes when she “watched the sensei watching” his wife. She skipped over the sensei’s gaze altogether when she did her own “[w]atching,” which led her to “fall in love with the body itself” (64).

When Allison ran after class, she experienced and loved what her body was capable of—and part of that was releasing trauma. She describes the reconfiguration of her hands, spine, hips, and “the coccyx that was shattered when [she] was a girl” (64) into a functioning whole that allowed her to run with a more natural stride. The culmination of that run was not responding to the male gazes of her classmates but watching “Flo there among them like a female gazelle” (65) and seeing Flo turn her loving gaze on Allison.

Their exchange of loving gazes eventually changed Allison’s understanding of sex and love. She realized that they could overlap. Allison describes being more assertive during sex with one of her partners because she understood her worth and the worth of her body. When she demanded that her lover make love to her “like a warrior” (66), what she was asking for was lovemaking that was more forceful but not a violation of the other. Instead, it was an act that affirmed “the life [they] make together” (66) and allowed them to be “strong” together, At the end of this section, she describes reaching an understanding of sex as a powerful, healing force when it takes place between passionate equals—women, in her case. This notion of what sex can be counters the sense of alienation and Otherness that Allison felt as a girl. This section is thus a key moment of Allison’s acceptance and celebration of what it means to be a lesbian woman.