Algerian boxer Imane Khalif is determined not to be deterred by a global controversy over her gender as she beat Thailand’s Janjam Suwannapheng to win gold at the Paris Olympics on Wednesday.
Khalifa became the talk of the town when her Italian opponent Angela Carini quit the match just 46 seconds after the match began. Carini immediately broke down in tears and said she had been punched in the nose with a force she had never seen before in her life.
When news broke that the International Boxing Association, which is not recognised by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), had disqualified Khalif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-Ting from last year’s World Championships for failing an unspecified gender test, allegations began to surface that they were both men.
I won’t speculate on Carini’s motives, including whether she was intentionally portraying herself as the victim and Khalif as the male usurper. Carini claims she was simply upset about losing and wasn’t trying to make a political point, and she later apologized to Khalif. Nonetheless, the damage was already done.
My book White Tears/Brown Scars looks at the historical and contemporary position of European (i.e. white) women as the pinnacle of both femininity and victimhood, and examines the power of what we commonly refer to as “white women’s tears,” but which I prefer to call strategic white womanhood.
In this dynamic, which occurs on both a personal and national level, white women’s emotional suffering is used to punish people of color who are in conflict with them. I argue that it is not so much the tears or the person shedding them that is important, but rather the protective desire these tears generate in the audience.
In this case, the request sparked public outrage, with public figures such as author J.K. Rowling, former U.S. President Donald Trump and Italy’s right-wing Prime Minister Giordano Meloni joining forces to condemn it.
Each of these men came with their own ideological burdens to impose on the body of the caliph. JK RowlingRowling, known for her objections to trans women, summarised it as the “smiling” pleasure of a “man” beating up a woman and “crushing” her dreams. It seems Rowling did not understand that under the guise of protecting women, she was actually attacking a woman.
Meloni stopped short of claiming Khalif was a man in disguise, but he viewed it as “not an uneven contest.” stating that “Athletes who have male genetic characteristics should not participate in women’s competitions. Not because we want to discriminate against anyone, but because we want to protect the rights of female athletes to compete on equal terms.”
However, this statement ignores that the history of women’s sports, from tennis to weightlifting, shot put and, yes, boxing, is filled with athletes who did not conform to the stereotypical, European standards of femininity, including, ironically, European athletes.
While we previously accepted that some women are indeed bigger, stronger or faster than others, it now seems that many of us expect female athletes to behave exactly like each other and seek to punish those who don’t conform. Despite the growing awareness of non-binary genders, it seems we are becoming less tolerant of any deviation from the stereotypical norm.
Even more worryingly, it appears that the issue of fairness in women’s sports is being used to return to an era of race science in which the word “woman” was synonymous with “white.”
In 2016, South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya (who would be banned from women’s competition three years later) won gold at the Rio Olympics, followed by Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi and Margaret Wambui of Kenya. All three were accused of not being real women, leaving some of their European competitors in tears and prompting fifth-place Joanna Jozwik of Poland to declare, “I am happy that I am first European and second white” (Canadian Melissa Bishop finished fourth).
Fast forward to 2024, and this clear allusion to race science was repeated by Bulgarian boxer Svetlana Staneva, who, after losing to Lin Yu-Ting, brought her fingers together in an X sign and tapped them, seemingly to indicate that she has XX chromosomes and to show that, unlike her Taiwanese opponent, she is a “real” woman.
Would this have become as hotly debated a topic as it is now if Carini had withdrawn from the match without an emotional display? Would it have been treated like any other match in which one opponent was too good for the other? It’s impossible to say, but it’s worth noting how suddenly Iman Khalifa’s body became a topic of debate.
As many others have already pointed out, Khalif has been boxing in women’s competitions for several years, including at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, but has not faced these allegations. She has released photos of herself as a young girl, spoken about the challenges of boxing as a woman in her Algerian culture, and has been defended by the IOC and Algerian officials.
The point of all this is to argue that it’s not just about “fairness.”
After Carini’s withdrawal, Khalif’s next match was against Hungary’s Anna Luka Hamori, who posted and deleted a photo before the match, which I think is the most important in the whole matter, as it reveals the whole story. In this AI-generated image From the information Hamori gleaned from Instagram, Khalif is not only depicted as a man dominating a beautiful, vulnerable white woman, but he is also completely stripped of humanity and portrayed as a supernatural, mythical beast.
This is a pervasive form of Orientalism, reminiscent of centuries-old depictions of “the East,” in which non-white women have variously been depicted either as pitiable, submissive victims in desperate need of saving by white men, or else as masculine, animalistic creatures unworthy of protection, in contrast to the superior European women.
These portrayals reflect the way the West sees itself. Women’s bodies are the ground on which the West fights its ideological battles. White women are depicted as pure, innocent, and in need of defending at all costs because they are the epitome of Western civilization. On the other hand, black and brown women have long been depicted as devoid of innocence and unworthy of protection because they too are the embodiment of their “inferior” cultures.
That Hamori, who looks about the same height and stature as Khalif, shared a photo in which her avatar resembles herself almost as much as Khalif’s resembles her is instructive. This is no longer about a literal fight between an Arab boxer and a European boxer, but rather another iteration of the old white cultural mythology that brown and black men pose a unique threat to white women, and by extension, to the West.
Despite its centuries-old and continuing dominance, the West has tended to image itself as a kind of deprived nation, a lonely island of morality, purity, and civilization, constantly threatened by barbaric oriental hordes.
Every so-called “culture war” in the West is linked to race because the West is built on self-defined notions of racial and cultural superiority that it uses blatantly to justify global military and economic domination. In the past, European ideas of “race” fueled settler colonialism. Today, US-led neo-imperialism uses cultural inferiority to justify military intervention, as can be seen in Israel’s repeated assertions that it represents the front line of Western civilization in the Middle East.
That all this is happening against the backdrop of the Gaza massacre, which is on the verge of turning into a full-blown regional war is no small matter. This is how the Western imagination seeks to re-present itself as a victim, always under an existential threat.
While Western powers are united in determination to raze Gaza to the ground, while thousands of civilians are being killed, and while exhausted, traumatized Palestinian men are digging out the surviving members of their families and communities from the rubble with their bare hands, a large part of the West has chosen this moment to portray itself as a beautiful young woman who is inappropriately attacked by a monstrous Arab man.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
