Tactical Bodies

Meg De Young and Gabrielle Hall-Lomax present their collaborative project, Tactical Bodies, in an exhibition at Hillvale Gallery in Melbourne, Australia

Tactical Bodies is a research-based project exploring how gendered expectations shape the ways women use their bodies. It began with shared reflections on how perceived threat influenced their movement through public spaces—affecting how they held themselves and navigated their surroundings. This awareness became a starting point for examining how these responses are conditioned and whether the body can unlearn them through self-defence practice

Using performative photography, the artists investigate how the body learns to respond to danger through repetition, rehearsal, and embodied experience. Drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of gender as repeated performance, Tactical Bodies considers how women are socialised into habits of caution and constraint— gestures that come to define femininity. The project questions how these ingrained patterns might be disrupted.

While women’s self-defence can effectively prevent violence and build confidence, it also faces criticism for being unrealistic or placing responsibility on those most at risk. Informed by manuals, training, and feminist scholarship—including Emilia Aaltonen’s critique of ‘feminine vulnerability’ and her conception of self-defence as corporeal resistance—Meg and Gabrielle stage re-enactments to explore how the body might be retrained under threat. Their rehearsals deliberately reject fixed forms, embracing contradiction. The resulting images feel simultaneously empowering, absurd, humorous, and unsettling—mirroring the tensions inherent in self-defence.

By positioning self-defence as both a conceptual framework and a practical method, Tactical Bodies challenges narratives that cast women primarily as victims. It reimagines the constraints placed upon women’s bodies—and the possibility of resisting them through deliberate, physical action.

Tactical Bodies runs 18 May to 15 June 2025 at Hillvale Gallery in Melbourne, Australia. Find out more about the exhibition on Hillvale's website.