Algerian boxer Imane Khelif appears determined not to be intimidated by the global controversy over her gender, beating Thailand’s Janjaem Suwannapheng on Wednesday to advance to the gold medal bout at the Paris Olympics.
Khelif burst into the global spotlight when her Italian opponent Angela Carini retired after just 46 seconds of fighting. Carini immediately burst into tears, recalling a punch to the nose harder than she had ever received in her life.
After it was reported that the International Boxing Association, which is not recognised by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), had disqualified Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting from last year’s world championships for failing an unspecified gender test, accusations that they were both men were launched.
I won’t speculate on Carini’s intentions in whether she was deliberately portraying herself as a victim and Khelif as a male usurper. Carini claims she was simply upset about her defeat and didn’t want to send a political message, and she later apologized to Khelif. Either way, the damage was already done.
My book White Tears/Brown Scars examines the historical and contemporary positioning of European (i.e. white) women as the pinnacle of femininity and victimhood, and interrogates the power of what we commonly call “white women’s tears,” but which I prefer to call strategic white femininity.
In this dynamic, which plays out at both the individual and national levels, the emotional distress of white women is used as leverage to punish people of color who find themselves in conflict with them. I argue that it is not so much the tears or even the person shedding them that are most important, but the need for protection that those tears evoke in the spectators.
In this case, the emergency has sparked a wave of public outrage, including from public figures such as author JK Rowling, former US President Donald Trump and far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who have joined together to condemn the decision.
Each of these figures came with their own ideological baggage to impose on Khelif’s body. JK Rowling, known for her opposition to transgender women, summed it up as the “sneering” pleasure of a “man” hitting a woman and “shattering” her dreams. Rowling seems to have forgotten that under the guise of protecting women, she was actually attacking a woman.
Meloni stopped short of claiming that Khelif was a man in disguise, but denounced what she saw as “a competition that is not unequal,” saying that “athletes who have male genetic characteristics should not participate in women’s competitions. Not because we want to discriminate against anyone, but to protect the right of female athletes to compete on an equal footing.”
This assertion, however, ignores that the history of women’s sports, from tennis to weightlifting to shot put and, yes, boxing, is littered with athletes who do not conform to stereotypical European norms of femininity, including, ironically, European athletes.
Where we once accepted that some women were indeed bigger, stronger, or faster than others, it now seems that many of us expect female athletes to be standard images of each other and seek to punish those who don’t conform. Despite the growing awareness of non-binary gender, it seems that we are becoming less and less tolerant of any deviation from the stereotypical norm.
More worryingly, it also appears that the issue of fairness in women’s sport is being used to propel a return to the era of racial science in which “woman” was synonymous with “white.”
In 2016, South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya (who would be banned from women’s competitions three years later) won gold at the Rio Olympics, followed by Burundi’s Francine Niyonsaba and Kenya’s Margaret Wambui. All three had been accused of not being real women, prompting some of their European competitors to cry and Poland’s Joanna Jozwik, who came fifth, to declare: “I’m happy to be the first European, the second white” (Canadian Melissa Bishop had finished fourth).
In 2024, this apparent nod to racial science was echoed by Bulgarian boxer Svetlana Staneva, who, after her loss to Lin Yu-ting, made an X shape with her fingers and tapped them together, apparently to indicate that she had XX chromosomes and imply that, unlike her Taiwanese opponent, she is a “real” woman.
Would the topic have been as emotionally charged if Carini had withdrawn from the match without showing any emotion? Would it have been interpreted like any other match in which one opponent was simply too strong for the other that day? It is impossible to say, but it is worth noting how Imane Khelif’s body has suddenly become a topic of debate.
As many others have already pointed out, Khelif boxed in women’s competitions for many years, including at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, without these accusations being made. She has posted photos of herself as a young girl, spoken out about the challenges of boxing as a woman in her Algerian culture, and been defended by the IOC and Algerian officials.
All this to show that it is not just a question of “fairness”.
After Carini’s withdrawal, Khelif confronted Hungarian Anna Luca Hamori, who in the process posted and deleted an image that I think is one of the most significant of the whole affair, because it lays bare the subtext. In this AI-generated image, which Hamori picked up on Instagram, Khelif was not simply depicted as a man dominating a delicate and vulnerable white woman, but was denied all humanity and drawn as a supernatural and mythical beast.
This is Orientalism on a grand scale, recalling centuries of representations of “the Orient,” in which non-white women have been portrayed either as miserable, submissive victims in desperate need of rescue by white men, or as masculine, animalistic creatures unworthy of protection, in contrast to superior European women.
These representations embody the West’s view of itself. Women’s bodies are the terrain on which the West wages its ideological battles. White women are depicted as pure, innocent, and to be defended at all costs because they symbolize Western civilization itself. Black and brown women, on the other hand, have long been portrayed as devoid of innocence and unworthy of protection because they too are avatars of their own “inferior” cultures.
The fact that Hamori, who appears to be the same height and build as Khelif, shared an image in which his avatar looks almost as little like his as Khelif’s does is telling. This is no longer a literal fight between an Arab boxer and a European boxer, but a new iteration of the outdated white cultural mythology that holds that brown and black men pose a unique danger to white women and, by extension, the West.
Despite its centuries-old and continuing dominance, the West continues to project an image of itself as a kind of outsider, a lonely island of morality, purity and civilization under constant threat from the barbarian hordes of the East.
In the West, any “culture war” is inextricably linked to race, because the West is built on self-defined notions of racial and cultural superiority that it explicitly relies on to justify its global military and economic dominance. In the past, European ideas about “race” fueled settler colonialism. Today, US-led neo-imperialism uses cultural inferiority to justify military intervention, as evidenced by Israel’s insistence that it represents the frontline of Western civilization in the Middle East.
The fact that all this is happening in the context of the Gaza genocide, which is about to escalate into a full-scale regional war, is not insignificant. This is how the Western imagination seeks to redefine itself as an eternal victim whose existence is threatened.
Even as Western powers unite in unwavering determination to reduce Gaza to rubble and dust, as tens of thousands of civilians are killed and as weary and traumatized Palestinians dig with their bare hands for what remains of their families and communities from the rubble, a significant portion of the West has chosen this moment to shine as a beautiful young girl unjustly assaulted by a demonic Arab.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
