Catfight: On Yearning, Tension, and the Space Before Touch

Words: Tara Devi

There’s something deeply magnetic about yearning, a charge that exists before anything is spoken, before anything is touched. It lives in glances that linger too long, in the quiet awareness of another body in space, in the almost unbearable pull of possibility. It is not the act itself that defines connection, but the tension leading up to it, the moment where everything could happen, and nothing has yet been decided.

Catfight began in that space.

Like many others, I found myself consumed by Heated Rivalry. It wasn’t just a show; it became a shared language, a cultural pulse moving through queer communities online and off. But what stayed with me wasn’t the secrecy or the spectacle, it was the tension. The quiet, relentless yearning between two people who could not look away from each other. The way desire could exist without resolution and still feel explosive. That feeling felt familiar.

Watching it made me reflect on my own experiences, the connections that shaped me, particularly with women. There is something uniquely layered in female connection: a depth, an emotional intelligence, a vulnerability that exists beneath the surface. It is often unspoken, but intensely felt. For me, these connections carried a kind of knowing, a recognition that exists before anything is defined.

I came to understand my own sexuality through these moments. After years of navigating emotionally unavailable relationships with men, I began to recognise that what I was drawn to, what felt expansive, honest, and alive, existed in my connections with women. The most recent of these connections awakened something undeniable in me: a sense of being fully seen, fully expressed, fully myself. It wasn’t just desire, it was presence, vulnerability, and truth. And at the core of it all was tension.

There is a moment, just before something shifts, that feels almost suspended in time. As Hana Flamm, who wrote an article for the Catfight zine, describes, it’s “that moment right before the kiss – when you’ve caught eyes and you know what comes next.” It’s the breath held in the body, the drop in the stomach, the quiet electricity of knowing without confirmation. That moment can feel endless, as though time stretches to accommodate the weight of possibility.

That is the space Catfight lives in.

Using boxing as its formal framework, Catfight unfolds across four timed rounds. What begins as confrontation gradually transforms into something else, something softer, more intimate, yet no less intense. Breath quickens, bodies tire, skin marks and glistens. Control begins to dissolve. What appears as rivalry slowly reveals itself as connection.

Boxing, in this context, becomes a language.

It allows the body to communicate what words often cannot. There is no dialogue in Catfight, the narrative is carried entirely through movement, proximity, and physical exchange. The push and pull between the two women mirrors the emotional tension of desire: resistance, curiosity, surrender. Each round builds on the last, moving from restraint into something more vulnerable, more exposed.

I was interested in exploring how intimacy between women is often framed, softened, aestheticised, or sensationalised for external consumption. Catfight resists those framings. It does not explain itself, nor does it attempt to make desire digestible. Instead, it invites the viewer to sit within the tension, to feel it without resolution. Because tension, in itself, is a form of connection.

There is something almost addictive about the “in-between”, that space before something becomes real. As Hana reflects, it is “somewhere-on-the-way, rather than here or there… where your adrenaline is ever-rising; this tension swelling.” It is the moment where possibility is still intact, where nothing has been confirmed or denied, where everything exists in potential.

In many ways, this in-between can feel more powerful than the act itself. Once something is realised, it becomes fixed, defined, named, and understood. But in the space before, there is freedom. There is imagination. There is a kind of emotional intensity that cannot be replicated once a line has been crossed.

Catfight holds onto that space deliberately.

Even as the physicality between the two characters intensifies, the piece resists clear resolution. It exists in ambiguity, in glances, in pauses, in the tension between contact and withdrawal. It is less concerned with what happens, and more with what is felt.

As a queer director based in Dublin, my work is rooted in exploring embodied storytelling, narratives that prioritise sensation, presence, and emotional undercurrents over traditional structure. I am drawn to stories that exist in the margins, in the subtle shifts between people, in the quiet moments that often go unnoticed.

Catfight is an extension of that practice.

It also exists beyond the screen. The project expands into a digital zine, a multimedia archive combining still photography, collage, and text. This extension allows the themes of the film to exist in another form, one that can be revisited, reinterpreted, and experienced more intimately. It becomes both documentation and continuation, a way of holding onto the ephemeral nature of desire.

At its core, Catfight is about recognition.

The kind that happens before touch. Before words. Before anything is declared. It is about seeing and being seen, about the quiet understanding that passes between two people when something is felt but not yet spoken. It is about desire that refuses to be polite.

Not in a loud or performative sense, but in its refusal to conform, to be simplified, softened, or explained away. It exists in complexity, in contradiction, in tension. It is both confrontational and tender, both controlled and surrendered. And ultimately, it is about yearning.

Not as absence, but as presence. Not as something lacking, but as something alive, something that moves through the body, that shapes connection, that lingers long after the moment has passed.

Catfight does not seek to resolve that feeling. It simply asks you to sit inside it.

You can read the full article by Hana Flamm on taradevi.ie, and watch the full film on my YouTube channel.