Katrina Carrasco on the Importance of Female Physicality in Fiction

Some years ago, I joined a boxing gym so I’d be better able to write my novel’s main character, Alma Rosales. In Rough Trade, Alma loves watching bloodsports. Passing as a man, she gets into plenty of scraps of her own. She has something my boxing coach described while instructing us: a sense during a fight that each punch you take makes you stronger, keener, more riled up.

I first built my boxing skills in drill-based classes, where we punched bags and pads instead of people, preparing to join a sparring class that would match me with an opponent. Walking into my first sparring class after a few weeks of training felt electric—this is it, I thought, the day I’ll experience what I’ve been writing Alma experience!

We gloved up and paired up. We circled. We feinted. Then my sparring partner hit me hard in the face. I was stunned. In the moment, there was nothing to do but make sure my eyeball hadn’t exploded, nudge my mouthguard back into place, and get back to the exercise. But that punch knocked away my tough guy romanticization of the sport. Getting hit in the face sucked. My flare of interest in becoming a fighter like Alma fizzled out. I continued attending drill-based classes because I enjoyed the exercise and wanted to keep learning about the sport. But I decided sparring was not for me.

Part of me was disappointed that I couldn’t share Alma’s mental experience of fighting. But my time at the boxing gym allowed me to share parts of the physical experience of fighting: dodging, jabbing, blinking away sweat. And this gave me a deep access point to her character.

One of the ways I coach writing students to character-build is to start with a physical object. In the context of historical fiction, this might mean starting with an era-appropriate item. For instance, if your setting had oil lamps, begin by describing one of these lamps. Then imagine how your character interacted with it, and how, and when. Build a whole scene for them starting with that physical piece of setting, considering what is revealed about them as a person in this specific slice of their everyday life. Do they like the smell of the lamp oil? Does it cue a memory? Are they excited to light a room for a gathering, or relieved to be alone with a book?

Character building might also start with the body itself. I learned the basics of boxing so I could describe how Alma moved in a fight, or how it felt when she threw a hook: the pull of the muscles in the side, back, and arm; the way the body twists like a corkscrew to build power from the hip for the thrust of the punch; the satisfaction of landing a solid hit. As I wrote more and more of Alma, the emotions on top of the physical—her deeper characterization—responded to the movements of her body, helping me build her specific way of seeing and moving through the world.

Another sport that helped me physically access Alma’s character, as well as the characters of the men on her stevedore crew, is powerlifting. I’ve been lifting for years, an enduring enjoyment that predated my novels and has outlasted my flings with boxing. Of the three main powerlifting movements—squat, deadlift, and bench press—the deadlift best helped me imagine and describe the stevedore’s work of shifting and hauling cargo. Picking heavy things up and putting them down (as some lifters affectionately describe the sport) gave me access to Alma and her men’s physical experiences as they worked loading grain, dunnage, and, of course, their bread and butter: crates of opium.

It also allowed me to imagine and describe the absolute agony of the body after that first day of intense activity following a pause. Sore muscles, cramping, even injury: I’d experienced it all with powerlifting, and these sensations allowed me to imagine my characters from the inside out. The pride Alma takes in her hard-won muscles, too, was a place where I could inhabit her point of view. The line of muscle in a forearm, or the hard rise of a triceps: I see the beauty of these in my own body, and the effort put into carving them, and so was able to make an appreciation of her own form and strength a deeply realized part of Alma’s character.

A third physical activity I used to inform Rough Trade was the very hands-on art of blacksmithing. Bess Spencer, Alma’s former partner in the Pinkerton’s Detective Agency, reveals in an early chapter that she’s fallen on hard times since last she and Alma saw each other. One of the skills Bess has taken up to survive, she says, is smithing—not a woman’s trade, but one she is begrudgingly allowed to practice in the wilder parts of the country when no male smith is present.

To better understand Bess’s skills, her tools, and how she might experience the trade, I took a blacksmithing class at a local studio. I learned about different kinds of metal and how they’d shape; I stood beside the humbling heat of a forge and quickly respected its roaring orange mouth; I hefted up different hammers and heard how they rang out and how the hot metal hissed when dipped into a water barrel.

Accessing this physical aspect of Bess’s character helped me better know her as a study of contrasts: she loves finery and silk dresses, but beneath those expensive clothes she has a strong, trained body capable of hammering metal into submission. This physical awareness further helped me delve into the many things her character must be—how her performances of gender and femininity shift to suit her environment—and the many things of which she’s capable.

Using the physical body to connect with and imagine Rough Trade’s cast was more than just a craft technique. My entry points to creating the book’s female characters—boxing, powerlifting, and blacksmithing—are all traditionally masculine activities. In the context of their historical setting, I wanted Alma, Bess, and Alma’s employer/lover Delphine to break the expected mold of Gilded Age female characters while still grounding them in realism. But I also formed these characters in response to broader, still-prevalent stereotypes about women and their bodies that I want to identify and challenge.

We grow up surrounded by cultural messaging. It comes to us through films, books, television, our parents, our peers. Within the entrenched gender binary and the norms it enforces, there are false polarities relating to all aspects of life, including physicality: men are strong and women are weak; men are big and women are small; men are muscular and women are delicate. People that defy these categorizations are often mocked, overtly and implicitly.

Cultural objects like big studio movies, made to be broadly appealing, often present a boiled-down template of a culture’s fears and anxieties. Accordingly, gender panic plays out in this class of films with tall and/or strong and/or large women (i.e., women with “masculine” physical traits) being portrayed as monstrous and laughable—as are small and/or effeminate men.

I’m a 6-foot-tall powerlifter and former college athlete. Since a growth spurt at 15, I’ve been constantly informed that my body is too big, too intimidating, too much. I rarely found media that contradicted this messaging, books included. Now, like many authors, I write what I wish I could have read as a younger person. In Rough Trade, physically strong women are the norm—they are main characters, they have agency, they desire and are desired. The novel celebrates Alma’s muscles; Delphine’s height and broad shoulders; and Bess’s blacksmith’s strength under her silk gowns. These women may behave badly (that’s the fun part), but they’re not punchlines, caricatures, or warnings.

I wanted Rough Trade to celebrate that these characters enjoy their bodies and what their bodies can do. I wanted it to explore the ways that physical strength can be part of the performance of gender—the masculine, the feminine, and the blurring of the two—and part of any body’s appeal.

It’s taken me a long time to learn to be comfortable in my own body. On some days, that comfort is still a work in progress—after all, our cultural anxieties around gender have been slow to evolve, and we collectively feel as empowered as ever to comment on, police, and categorize women’s appearances. Writing characters like Alma, Bess, and Delphine has been a source of healing for me. I hope that reading about them is a source of healing for others. I’ll always celebrate tall, strong women in my novels—partly as a love letter to myself, and partly as one to readers who want to open a book and look into a mirror, and in that mirror find themselves beautiful.

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Rough Trade by Katrina Carrasco is available from MCD Books, an imprint of Macmillan, Inc.