The Queer Femme Fight Club Channeling Rage Through Wrestling

If you’ve had a lot of anger recently and nowhere to put it, Femme Feral could be the wrestling club for you.

A group of queer femmes in the UK are mad about Brexit and started a fight club.

But Patey-Ferguson and Smith didn’t want to give in to hopelessness. Instead, they decided to wrestle each other in their shared art studio in east London.

“It was a way of channeling and being able to get that anger out and put it somewhere in a productive way,” explained Patey-Ferguson. “I think we wanted to find a way of sharing this anger and take up loads of space. It is a reaction to that [idea] as a girl you need to be nice, personal, peaceful, [to] sit down and be quiet.”

Rather than try to actually fix problems, they were going to tussle.  Why do anything productive when you can winge and waste time?

It may sound like an unorthodox way of working out stress, but it clearly worked. They felt exhilarated, if not slightly bruised. Several months on, Femme Feral has expanded into what Patey-Ferguson calls a “queer femme fighting force.” Anybody who identifies as a woman can join; a total lack of wrestling experience is not only encouraged but embraced.

Unorthodox?  Yes.  An effective fighting force?  No.

As audience members entered the space, the wrestlers began moaning and crawling on the crash mats that had been carefully laid in the center of the venue. Over a live soundtrack of heavy mic static and crashing cymbals, it quickly crescendoed into a scream: “Fuck Theresa May! Fuck Theresa May!” And then, as two wrestlers squared up to each other on the mat: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

These all female remakes suck.  The female Ghostbusters was awful.  The female Fight Club is even worse.  Tyler Durden’s “you’re not your fucking khakis” speech was way better.

 “Most of the spaces we perform in our queer spaces so often people haven’t been able to really allow themselves to feel the anger and rage that they do feel. So often they are thankful to us for the space that we can feel that together… You don’t feel like you are locked in your room staring at the internet alone. There is a kind of empowerment in that, because if we express that together, there is a possibility of change.”

Wrestling in a basement is not any more effective at changing things than sitting alone on the Internet. 

This is mockably ridiculous.  If you want to break a sweat because it feels good, great.   I love a good workout to reduce stress.  But I’m not kidding myself that getting under the squat rack is going to change the world. 

Scenes that never happened:

“Prime minister, we need to reconsider our economic policy.”
“Why?”
“A bunch of lesbians are wrestling.”
“Let me see.”

“That’s disappointing.  If they had wrestled in Jell-O, I might have done it.”