Algerian boxer Imane Khelif seems decided to not be browbeaten by the worldwide controversy over her gender, defeating Thailand’s Janjaem Suwannapheng on Wednesday to cruise to the gold medal bout on the Paris Olympics.
Khelif exploded into the worldwide highlight when her Italian opponent Angela Carini withdrew simply 46 seconds into their match. Carini promptly burst into tears, citing a punch to the nostril more durable than she had ever skilled in her life.
After it was reported that the Worldwide Boxing Affiliation, which isn’t recognised by the Worldwide Olympic Committee (IOC), had disqualified Khelif together with Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu‑ting from final yr’s world championships for failing an unspecified gender take a look at, the accusations that each of them are male ignited.
I received’t speculate on Carini’s intentions as as to if she was intentionally presenting herself as a sufferer and Khelif as a male usurper. Carini claims she was merely upset at shedding and was not making a political level, and later apologised to Khelif. Regardless, the harm was already executed.
My e book White Tears/Brown Scars seems on the historic and up to date positioning of European (i.e. white) ladies as the head of each femininity and victimhood, and interrogates the facility of what we generally confer with as “white ladies’s tears”, however which I want to name strategic white womanhood.
On this dynamic, which performs out on each a person and a nationwide degree, white ladies’s emotional misery is used as leverage to punish folks of color who occur to be in battle with them. I argue that it isn’t a lot the tears and even the particular person emitting them which can be most vital, however the protecting urge that these tears generate in onlookers.
On this occasion, the urge compelled an outpouring of public outrage, together with from public figures akin to creator JK Rowling, former US President Donald Trump, and Italian far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to unite in condemnation.
Every of those figures got here into it with their very own ideological baggage to impose on Khelif’s physique. JK Rowling, finest identified for objecting to trans ladies, summed it up because the “smirking” pleasure of a “male” beating up a lady and “shattering” her desires. It appears misplaced on Rowling that beneath the guise of defending ladies, she was really attacking a lady.
Meloni didn’t go so far as claiming Khelif was a person in disguise however decried what she noticed as “not an unequal competitors”, stating that “athletes who’ve male genetic traits shouldn’t take part in ladies’s competitions. Not as a result of we wish to discriminate in opposition to anybody, however to guard the rights of feminine athletes to compete on equal phrases.”
This assertion, nonetheless, ignores that the historical past of girls’s sport, from tennis to weightlifting to shot put, and sure to boxing, is peppered with athletes who didn’t conform to stereotypical, European requirements of womanhood, together with, satirically, European athletes.
Whereas we beforehand accepted that some ladies have been certainly greater, stronger or quicker, than others, now it seems that many people anticipate feminine athletes to be cookie-cutter pictures of one another and search to punish those that don’t conform. For all of the rising consciousness of non-binary gender, it appears we’re rising much less tolerant of any deviation from the stereotypical norm.
Extra disturbingly, it additionally seems that the problem of equity in ladies’s sports activities is getting used to propel a return to the period of race science wherein “girl” was synonymous with “white”.
In 2016, South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya (who could be banned from ladies’s competitions three years later), received gold on the Rio Olympics, adopted by Francine Niyonsaba from Burundi and Margaret Wambui from Kenya. All three had confronted allegations of not being actual ladies, prompting tears from a few of their European rivals, and compelling Poland’s Joanna Jozwik, who got here in fifth, to declare, “I’m glad I’m the primary European, the second white” (Canadian Melissa Bishop had completed fourth).
Quick ahead to 2024, and this obvious nod to race science was echoed by Bulgarian boxer Svetlana Staneva, who following her loss to Lin Yu-ting, introduced her fingers into an X signal and tapped them, seemingly to point she has XX chromosomes and indicate that, not like her Taiwanese opponent, she is a “actual” girl.
Would this have develop into the emotionally charged matter it’s now if Carini had merely withdrawn from the match with out the emotional show? Wouldn’t it have been interpreted as every other match wherein one opponent was just too good for the opposite on the day? It’s unattainable to say, however it’s value noting how all of a sudden Imane Khelif’s physique grew to become a subject of debate.
As many others have already identified, Khelif has been boxing in ladies’s competitions for a few years, together with on the 2020 Tokyo Olympics with out these accusations arising. She has produced photos of herself as a younger lady, spoken of the challenges of boxing as a feminine in her Algerian tradition, and has been defended by the IOC and Algerian officers.
All of which is to argue that this isn’t merely about “equity”.
After Carini’s withdrawal, Khelif’s subsequent match was in opposition to Hungarian Anna Luca Hamori, who, within the lead-up, posted and deleted a picture that I consider to be among the many most important in the whole affair due to the way it lays the subtext naked. On this AI-generated picture that Hamori sourced from Instagram, Khelif was not merely represented as a person towering over a dainty, susceptible white girl however was denied humanity altogether and drawn as a supernatural, legendary beast.
That is Orientalism writ giant, recalling centuries of representations of the “East”, wherein non-white ladies have been variously depicted as both wretched, submissive victims desperately in want of saving by white males, or as masculine, animalistic creatures unworthy of safety, to distinction with the superior European ladies.
These representations personify how the West sees itself. Girls’s our bodies are the terrain on which the West wages its ideological battles. White ladies are represented as pure, harmless, and as needing to be defended in any respect prices as a result of they symbolise Western civilisation itself. Black and brown ladies, however, have lengthy been depicted as devoid of innocence and unworthy of safety as a result of they too are avatars for their very own “inferior” cultures.
That Hamori, who seems to be of comparable peak and construct as Khelif, shared a picture wherein her avatar bears virtually as little resemblance to herself as Khelif’s does to hers, is instructive. That is not concerning the literal battle between an Arab boxer and a European one, however is one other iteration of the stale white cultural mythology that brown and Black males characterize a novel hazard to white ladies, and by extension, to the West.
Regardless of its centuries-long and ongoing dominance, the West continues to venture a picture of itself as a form of underdog, a lone island of morality, purity, and civilisation beneath fixed risk from barbaric Oriental hordes.
Each so-called “tradition conflict” within the West is intractably tied to race as a result of the West is constructed on self-defined notions of racial and cultural superiority that it explicitly attracts on to justify world navy and financial domination. Prior to now, European concepts of “race” drove settler-colonialism. In the present day, US-led neo-imperialism makes use of cultural inferiority to justify navy intervention, as seen in Israel’s repeated intonations that it represents the entrance line of Western civilisation within the Center East.
That that is all taking place in opposition to the backdrop of the Gaza genocide, which is on the verge of escalating right into a full-blown regional conflict, shouldn’t be insignificant. That is how the Western imaginary seeks to reframe itself because the perennial sufferer beneath existential risk.
Whilst Western powers unite in an iron-fisted resolve to pummel Gaza into particles and mud, as tens of hundreds of civilians are killed, and as drained, traumatised Palestinian males dig what’s left of their households and communities out of the rubble with their naked arms, a sizeable chunk of the West has chosen this second in time as an instance itself as a good maiden unfairly set upon by a demonic Arab man.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
