Lion dances are an acrobatic form of ritual performance with roots in ancient China. Traditionally, men have performed lion dances to scare away evil spirits and protect themselves from harm. The members of Gund Kwok, an all-women’s dance group in Boston’s Chinatown, also perform the lion dance to resist nefarious energies and to neutralise unwanted aggression. In their case, however, the negative forces stem from the hypersexualised gaze to which they are subject as Asian American women. I argue that lion dance training creates a resistive, ‘impermeable’ bodily subjectivity. Using ethnographic research, I examine how lion dance training and performance promotes a sense of protection through embodied practice and by challenging and managing the public gaze. In doing so, this study builds on scholarship that investigates the impact of dance training practices on an individual’s sense of bodily identity. While much research has focused on more mainstream dance techniques and the specific ‘bodies’ that those forms create, this article focuses on a group of female artists who are re- envisioning a traditional performance practice, illustrating how a grass roots dance group can serve important purposes outside of formal dance training systems and the academy.