Rita Bullwinkel: "Turning your body into a weapon is a form of liberation."

BarcelonaRita Bullwinkel has never boxed, but she was a water polo player. Like the protagonists of Lightning stroke (The Second Periphery/Sixth Floor), who face off high in the ring at a seedy Reno gym, traveled miles to compete with other girls who trained 20 or 30 hours a week. "As I moved away from my time as a young athlete, I asked myself: Why did I do it? What really motivated me? And even now, after writing the entire book and speaking to so many journalists, I don't think I have an easy answer," explains the American writer, who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. "One of the conclusions I've come to is that these girls want to be seen. Outside the ring, no one sees them the way they see themselves. When you practice a sport like boxing, you have to look very closely at your opponent, observe their body, recognize that they have power over you, that they can get hurt. In every area of their lives, they feel that someone is looking at them like that, as people with potential, with strength," adds Bullwinkel.

The physical is very present throughout the novel. It's not very common in film or literary fiction. "The experience of living inside a young female body can be very claustrophobic. Society constantly reminds you, insistently and frequently, how limiting the body can be. And this generates a need to breathe, to find relief. Turning your body into a weapon may seem like an unexpected choice, but it's almost a form of liberation. Sport. At least this way, her body can be a tool, not an object," the author reflects.

The desire to be "good"

The writer doesn't eroticize the bodies of the opponents who travel to Nevada to compete. "They are real bodies, tired, sweaty, with wounds, and a life. Popular culture tends to portray female bodies as objects of desire or as victims. I wanted to write about active, determined bodies that make decisions and provoke consequences. When I wrote the fight scenes, I did it almost as if it were violence, not will," she explains. This book is just two days of tournament time. Specifically, the hours in which the eight protagonists fight, but within a space where the fighters don't speak, memories and projections of the future flow. The writer travels to the future and past of her boxers. She doesn't limit herself to the fight, nor is who wins very important, but rather what the boxers think in the ring.

It's striking how the writer speaks of the desire to please. Many of the girls in the book want to be liked, even if they don't know exactly who. And yet, they find themselves in a space—the ring—where it's difficult to please anyone. "In society, especially for women, pleasing is almost second nature. It's something we learn very early on: to smile, to be polite, to avoid conflict. It's a form of survival, but when you step into a ring, you can't smile or apologize. For many women, it can be extremely liberating," says Bullwinkel. "As a teenager, I remember wanting everyone to like me. I wanted the coaches to think I was disciplined, the other girls to see me as a good teammate, my parents to see that I was a hard worker. That constant desire to be good "It was exhausting," she adds.

In the ring, however, there is no room for courtesy. We live in a culture that associates violence with masculinity, and self-control with femininity. Boxing allows the author to break away from all these clichés. "Women have been raised to repress shame. But anger can be a source of knowledge. If you know how to listen to it, it can tell you what's wrong around you. In the book, many of the girls don't have a language to express themselves emotionally; their body is their only voice. And boxing is, paradoxically, its way of speaking," she says. When a woman walks alone at night, she is told that she shouldn't, or that she should carry a spray can or keys in her hand. But these young boxers have been taught that their bodies can protect them. "This completely changes the relationship."

The Unimportance of Coaches

Tired of the fact that in sports fiction, especially that which talks about women, the coach or the father who makes the athlete's success possible always appears as Million Dollar Baby either I want to be like David Beckham, in his novel, he takes away all the limelight from them. "In my experience as a young athlete, coaches weren't very important. They were administrators, people you had to tolerate. They often made money while we didn't get paid anything. I didn't want to turn them into the bad guys, but I didn't want them to be the protagonists either. They're just not important," he explains, recalling that I want to be like David Beckham It has a "horrible" plot: "A coach discovers a girl (played by Keira Knightley) and tells her she'd be good at soccer. She hesitates, he coaches her, and thanks to him, she becomes good. And then, they even end up dating," she details.

The resistance she talks about in the book is also practiced in real life. The author works at McSweeney's magazine, which lost funding from the National Endowment for the Arts because they used terms like diversity, equity, and inclusion. "Words that were once innocent or social justice are now restricted. It's a phenomenon that affects everyone who works with words, but there are many of us who resist this control. There is neither silence nor a passive response," she assures.