Mila Ghorayeb, Author at The McGill Daily

The Subaltern Spoke, but You Called Them Liars

Mila Ghorayeb — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 10:03:48 +0000

All people – including Global Southerners, including the colonized, including the enslaved – have an innate interest in being free. Therefore, all people – including Global Southerners, including the colonized, including the enslaved – will oppose conditions that limit their freedom.

These sentences probably seem trivial to most readers. Of course people desire freedom, and of course that desire is not contingent on their status as a racialized, colonized, or enslaved person.

But these sentences have not always been trivial. In fact, much of the subjugation faced by those in the Global South and by the enslaved has relied on a history of justifications in colonial political thought – some of which I have outlined in my previous piece, “Critique of Imperial Reason.” And this stream of thought relied on the notion that racialized people, particularly those in the Global South, were not naturally constituted for freedom. Instead, they were thought to be naturally constituted for subordination, and were further thought to lack the rational capacities to be free.

Because of this, most of what we knew about this set of people – which I will, like other theorists before me, refer to as the “subaltern” – did not come from their own accounts of their experiences. Instead, they came from elites that were intent on documenting the subaltern as hostile and uncivilized.

In recent history, postcolonial scholars have sought to make a claim we might now consider to be very basic: the subaltern are rational agents that desire to control their own circumstances and live freely – just like anybody else. Scholars like Gayatri Spivak and Ranajit Guha have devoted time to highlighting how mainstream scholarship has perpetuated the notion that the subaltern are irrational and unable to speak for themselves. Spivak’s famous piece, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” points out how the subaltern have been conceived of in reductionist, simplistic terms, as have their motives. As a result, they are viewed as a homogenous, primitive unit that need Global Northerners to speak on their behalf.

Guha, like Spivak, writes of this reductionism through discussing the documentation of peasant insurgency in colonial India. He argues that some scholars falsely documented the actions of Indians to be motivated solely through sectarian hatred between Hindus and Muslims, and presents counterevidence of class solidarity between the two groups against wealthy elites. On the other hand, Guha also points out that left-wing scholars were also reductive, misattributing peasant insurgency solely to class disparities without any attention to ethnic and religious complexities. Either way, Guha rightfully argues, scholars have erred by attempting to simplify the motives of Indian peasants.

Spivak’s famous piece, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” points out how the subaltern have been conceived of in reductionist, simplistic terms, as have their motives. As a result, they are viewed as a homogenous, primitive unit that need Global Northerners to speak on their behalf.

While Spivak’s and Guha’s contributions have lead us to rethink our perspectives on the Global South, I argued in my previous piece that racist conceptualizations of the subaltern are able to evolve and adapt to current conditions. That is, they attempt to modify themselves to subvert new critiques, while continuing to rest on the same underlying claims.

This is something I notice all too frequently with the discourse on Palestine. Any perusal of The McGill Daily’s Facebook page, for instance, will reveal people commenting on any article about the Israeli occupation in ways that deride Palestinians for daring to express their grievances, laugh-reacting to the article, and claiming that the accusations made are baseless attempts to single Israel out as a state. And that’s just the surface. In The New York Times, popular columnist Bret Stephens recently chided activists for supposedly only caring about Palestinians when they could blame Israel. Such a critique implies that Palestinian activism is not really about achieving freer conditions, but about demonizing Israel. This is reductionism that baselessly ascribes bad motives to a cause propelled by vulnerable people in unsustainable conditions.

People often forget that the concerns about the Israeli government’s policies regarding Palestinians do, in fact, arise from Palestinians, which makes it incoherent to complain about a “singling out.” For instance, the Israeli government has over 60 discriminatory laws against Arab minorities. Who should Palestinians complain to? If Israel claims to be democratic, the logical recourse would be to voice a grievance against the Israeli government – and not against every single other government that has violated international law. When Palestinians are forced to demolish their own homes, is it not natural to protest their conditions and express their pain on the global stage? When children are shot in the face for handing out sandwiches to demonstrators, and when people are shot for protesting – who do they express these grievances to? Is it wrong to ask the world for solidarity when you are mourning the deaths of your family at the hands of the state? Some seem to think so, though their justifications are hardly convincing.

The dismissal of Palestinian grievances comes in a few forms. One form claims that they seek to destroy the world’s only Jewish state. In other words, the claim is that Palestinians that voice their grievances against Israel are motivated by anti-Semitism: a vile, age-old hatred that has subjugated one of the world’s most marginalized groups.

Yet, it is to the benefit of white supremacists to treat [Palstinian grievances] as another form of savage, sectarian hatred by groups they believe to be beneath them.

I have no doubt that some people invoke anti-Semitic language – either intentionally or unintentionally – to speak about Israel. White supremacy is real, and the fact that it is systemic means that the popular language used to speak about oppressed groups often has a bigoted history. But this means that everyone internalizes anti-Semitism; not just Palestinians. That is, anti-Semitism is not an exceptional feature of Palestinian and Arab communities, but a global system of oppression. To treat it as an exceptionally Arab feature is to treat it as an irrational hatred by violent people rather than an unjust way the world has organized itself for over 2,000 years. Yet, it is to the benefit of white supremacists to treat it as another form of savage, sectarian hatred by groups they believe to be beneath them.

To recognize that criticisms of Israel can be anti-Semitic is very different from claiming that Palestinians are upset with Israel because it’s a Jewish state. Palestinians would be not be resigned to their conditions regardless of what kind of state was policing them and occupying them militarily. For instance, Palestinians revolted against the Ottomans for autonomy under Zahir al-’Umar, who fought for religious toleration for all minorities.

The claim that Palestinians protest Israel because it’s Jewish is susceptible to Guha’s and Spivak’s anti-reductionism critique. This is because it frames the issue as a religious-sectarian conflict and buys into the trope that the subaltern fight based on age old tribal hatreds, and not because they wish to be free.

But no other group of people would tolerate such subjugation. The history of political protest shows, time and time again, that no other group would tolerate living under discriminatory laws, home demolitions, and statelessness – regardless of who is in charge of facilitating it. To claim otherwise is to reproduce the notion that the subaltern are i) motivated by irrational hatred rather than a desire for freedom, or ii) lying when they claim their circumstances are unfree. Either way, we reproduce the same pernicious discourses that have damaged Global Southerners in recent colonial history.

The history of political protest shows, time and time again, that no other group would tolerate living under discriminatory laws, home demolitions, and statelessness

The next form of dismissal is invoking Hamas – an Islamist group that was historically bolstered by the US and Israel to counter secular nationalism. Critics will attribute all acts of Palestinian protest to Hamas, despite the fact that support for Islamism has significantly decreased in almost all Arab states, including Hamas in Palestine. The invocation of Hamas rests on another trope that silences the subaltern. Namely, it falls back on the notion that fundamentalist irrationality drives Palestinian protests. But Palestinians’ struggle for freedom and liberation existed far before the establishment of Hamas. As Middle East politics scholars Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel have recently written, it is often elites and officials, such as those of Hamas, that weaponize ethnic and religious identities for their own benefit. They manufacture a conception of conflict that is purely sectarian and de-emphasize other crucial political grievances, such as those that would arise from socioeconomic conditions. Further, lumping Palestinians in with Hamas rests on another racist trope identified by postcolonial scholars: reductionism. That is, it treats the issue as a conflict between a civilized, democratic group of people, and a savage, fundamentalist, and uncooperative group of Islamists.

Even if people have different visions as to how the state ought to look like, the issue at hand here is the reaction to Palestinian grievances. You can very easily oppose Hamas, as do many secular Palestinians, while taking the grievances Palestinians express seriously. The only way to counter historically racist ways of discussing the subaltern is to centre their experiences and their voices, rather than letting others speak for them. The only way to discuss this issue in good faith is to stop assuming Palestinians are lying about their own experiences. For it is not that the subaltern don’t speak: it is simply that you choose not to value their testimonies.

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Critique of Imperial Reason

Mila Ghorayeb — Tue, 29 Jan 2019 22:37:45 +0000

Last November, news broke out about the death of an American missionary, John Chau, who had gone on a mission to convert the North Sentinelese to Christianity. The North Sentinelese are an uncontacted people who have protected status from the Indian government. They are “hostile” to outsiders, likely due to other attempts at “contacting” them – such as British attempts at colonizing the Andaman Islands, which resulted in the kidnapping of Native people and multiple deaths due to the spread of diseases. As such, travelling to their islands is illegal, and attempts from the North Sentinelese to keep out foreigners by any means are permitted by the Indian government.

Naturally, the news of Chau’s death sparked a great deal of commentary – some of which posed a question that may be all too familiar to colonized people: “shouldn’t we show them the goods of Western society? Isn’t it a crime not to?” or “shouldn’t we civilize the Sentinelese?”

As we see, the intellectual history of colonialism still haunts our political thought today.

While these comments certainly received their fair share of pushback, I found that the discourses produced by Chau’s death have given us the opportunity to understand colonial mentalities. Colonialism has a long intellectual history. While much of it, in practice, was exercised through pure coercion and material power, plenty of rationalizations and normative justifications for colonialism took place and evolved in different stages. As we see, the intellectual history of colonialism still haunts our political thought today.

In Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law, Antony Anghie effectively divides colonial thought into stages of intellectual rationalizations that have evolved in each era of colonialism. Colonial thought, Anghie argues, relies on something called “the dynamic of difference,” which postulates that there are two cultures: one that is universal and civilized, and the other that is rogue, hostile, and uncivilized. Advocates of colonialism thus try to “bridge” this gap by assimilating the latter into the former. As a result, the “civilized” are owed sovereignty rights, while the “uncivilized” are malleable. The form that this takes has been altered over time, but its basis in colonial thought has remained rather stable.

The first rationalization of colonialism was an appeal to natural law. “Natural law” gained popularity in Western political thought through philosophers such as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Its rationale is that there are universally binding principles about how we ought to act that are discoverable to anyone that possesses the use of reason. During the colonization of the Americas, European values were projected as the universal, natural law. It was thus Western “benevolent” thinkers that “posited” that Indigenous peoples were capable of reason (how nice of them!). However, since Indigenous peoples did not use their reason to adhere to natural law (e.g., by resisting European impositions of property and trade), subjugation of Indigenous peoples was justified under the guise of enforcing natural law.

The second rationalization of colonialism was legal positivism, which claimed that law – international law in this case – was for civilized peoples. Hence, in order to have the privileges of sovereignty, states needed to have what European powers deemed “civilized social institutions.” Because practices of non-European states were considered “uncivilized,” they weren’t afforded the same rights to sovereignty as European states were. Therefore, European powers were justified in interfering with the governance of what they deemed “uncivilized” states.

It is clear, for instance, that Sentinelese sovereignty — and the explicit wish to be left alone after a history of abuse – was not respected by Chau, and isn’t respected by bloggers and experts alike.

The third rationalization was pragmatism, which divided the colonizer and the colonized into the “developed” and “undeveloped” world. Pragmatism was exemplified in institutions like the Mandate System in the Middle East, which sought to promote ‘good governance’ and economic prosperity. This was also for the sake of Western economic prosperity. For instance, in the Mandate era, the United States requested an “open door policy” to Middle Eastern oil deposits.

In modern times, we see imperialism and violations of sovereignty in the Global South manifest through the idea of “good governance.” This can be seen with the notion of “spreading democracy” in Iraq or Libya. These interventions are often expressed in the language of human rights to make them more palatable. Nonetheless, they operate on the mentality that uncooperative, non-Western states should not be afforded the same kind of sovereignty as Western states and their allies. We know that there is no real concern about good governance; otherwise, Western allies that commit human rights violations — such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia — would not have their sovereignty respected, either.

The case of North Sentinel shows us that these three rationalizations have not made a clean break from each other, but are instead a chimeric spectre haunting today’s popular discourse. While Chau’s venture mimics the “natural law” rationalization, reactions to North Sentinel and Chau’s death have shown us a noteworthy blend of colonialism’s three dominant rationalizations.

It is clear, for instance, that Sentinelese sovereignty — and the explicit wish to be left alone after a history of abuse – was not respected by Chau, and isn’t respected by bloggers and experts alike. While the Sentinelese case is unique, the responses to it are not. The urge to try and expose the Sentinelese to our ways of living despite very clear signals of rejection and the laws of the Indian government continues the pattern of disregard for sovereignty in non-Western states.

The newer language of “good governance” is implicit in the above arguments. Because the North Sentinelese do not partake in our globalized economy, they are of no use to the global political body with respect to resources and trade. Thus, integration into the global economy would give other states access to North Sentinelese resources.

“Development” language often implies that economies must “modernize” like Western ones. In order to avoid unwelcome invaders and condescending calls to be civilized, “developing” nations are urged to follow the same historical trajectory as developed ones. The “development” rationale continues today with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which intervene in developing states to create compliance with Western financial interests.

Frameworks like that of Anghie’s help us understand and see our history in action, as colonial rhetoric is repeated and perpetuated further. The arguments that we see resurfacing are not new, but rather, (often poorly) evolved and borrowed from a dark and shameful past.

The “development” rationale continues today with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which intervene in developing states to create compliance with Western financial interests.

John Chau’s writings did not indicate that he had conscious illwill toward the Sentinelese, but it did contain elements of infantilization that are all too familiar. He referred to the island as “Satan’s last stronghold” that could be saved by benevolent Christians like himself. If the belief is that Christianity is a self-evident truth, then the North Sentinelese would, hypothetically, be left to contemplate it on their own, as natural laws are supposedly discoverable to anyone that can use reason. But it does not seem that the North Sentinelese are being treated as rational agents at all, despite the fact that they are behaving as such. This is likely because rationality is being conceived of as “openness” to modernization and conversion to Western ways of life. But given the colonial violence the North Sentinelese have experienced, resistance to foreign contact and interventions seems like rational self-preservation. That is, they are acting on the knowledge and experiences that they have to keep themselves safe from colonialism, violence, and exposure to disease.

The problem is that treating the North Sentinelese as rational agents puts colonial apologists in another bind: namely, that they should then be permitted to set the terms of their own practices within their legally protected parameters. This means that their “development” is up to them, and not those that wish to “civilize” them or show them the light.

To quote C.L.R. James, a scholar of the Haitian Revolution: “Bonaparte was not going to be convinced by Toussaint’s justice and fairness and capacity to govern. Where imperialists do not find disorder they create it deliberately.” The rationales presented by Anghie have transformed and evolved precisely because they need to keep up with those that continually point out their inner contradictions.

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“You Pushed Me To”

Mila Ghorayeb — Mon, 22 Oct 2018 10:00:50 +0000

In places such as the US, Europe, and more recently, Ontario and Quebec, far-right politicians and movements are accumulating support at historic rates. In response to this far-right “backlash” around the world, many fall back on a similar justification. They will say that they don’t agree with these far-right politics, but that it’s the left’s fault because they were too aggressive. For example, the popular phrase “this is why Trump won” refers to the ways in which leftist activism has accelerated and grown louder over the years. The logic here is that many people who were radicalized towards far-right politics would not be so “far gone” if the left had simply been nicer, more gradualist, and less exclusive.

The response from leftists can take various forms. One way is to simply deny that the left is responsible for such a thing. For instance, in the case of Trump, one might argue that pre-existing racial animus is what moved people rightward when a popular figure came forward embodying this racist rhetoric in a loud and public manner. Another response has been that data simply does not support this idea, because no more voters came out to support Trump than previous Republican candidate, Mitt Romney. Some might simply argue that it’s absurd to make such an accusation when no one can ultimately be responsible for making someone support far-right viewpoints and that they must have gotten there on their own.

The logic here is that many people who were radicalized towards far right politics would not be so “far gone” if the left had simply been nicer, more gradualist, and less exclusive.

Personally, I do not doubt that people can be pushed in all sorts of directions by the actions of their opponents. It’s reasonable to believe that the recent rise of far right politics is partly due to the predominantly leftist politics that preceded it. But accepting that one side can “push” another does not give us enough information to morally evaluate, excuse, or tolerate either side’s actions.

Plenty of leftist writers and theorists acknowledge that people on any side of the political spectrum can be “pushed” toward more radical behaviour if their opponents put enough pressure on them. For instance, Eric Hobsbawm observes that when oppressive conditions reach a certain point, oppressed groups would revolt to keep the powerful “in line.” Revolting served as a threat where the powerful had to ensure that the oppressed had the bare minimum essentials to survive. In these cases, the actions of the powerful engendered radical responses.

Another example is blowback. Leftists often argue that other political actors can be “pushed” into radicalization. For example, Western interventionists are largely responsible for the growth of Salafism — an extremely conservative branch of political Islam — in the Middle East. The interventionists’ brutal actions, such as the maintenance of torture camps in Iraq, contributed to the radicalization and rise of groups like ISIL. It is completely possible for one political entity to cause the radicalization of others and there is no need to shy away from that assumption.

However, these observations do not lead to a judgement or a justification. We can acknowledge the role Western interventionists have played in the spread of Salafism and still claim that violent Salafism is morally wrong. Simultaneously, we can also acknowledge that the interventionists have behaved immorally.

We need to look deeper to make moral evaluations. Clearly, a marcher in the white supremacist Charlottesville rallies, yelling anti-Semitic slurs, is not morally equivalent to a peasant revolting against their masters because they were starving. We should therefore consider how both the pushers and the pushed are historically and socially situated in order to form a judgement about them.

So, a right-wing person may have decided to march at the Charlottesville rally because they were pushed by leftist politics further rightward. Perhaps they did get upset by people calling them “racist” or “anti-Semitic” all the time. But the fact that they got upset about it, or radicalized over it, does not somehow absolve them of that accusation. Marching in the Charlottesville rallies could still be motivated by anti-Semitism rather than solely by leftists being “mean.”

Furthermore, the marcher is engaging in a kind of hatred that has been institutionalized for centuries, and that is responsible for the systematic and social domination of an oppressed group. It is easy to conclude a few things from these observations. First, that the marcher is motivated by anti-Semitism and racism. Second, that while the left calling him out on his bigotry may have pushed him further to the right, this does not morally absolve the marcher from engaging in racist and anti- Semitic practices.

The left can do a few things with this information. One is to re-think the politics of shame it uses, including call-out culture — a self-reflection that is already being done by activists and anti-oppressive publications. But it does not mean that leftists should walk on eggshells with every potential far-right radical, either — clearly, that would be exhausting and unproductive. The main idea is to be mindful that the left can and has engaged in alienating actions as well.

But it does not mean that leftists should walk on eggshells with every potential far-right radical, either — clearly, that would be exhausting and unproductive.

Yet the left is by no means the only group in trouble for these kinds of discourses. At the end of the day, the “you pushed me” discourse does not benefit the right. If the right wishes to use the “you pushed me” discourse as often as they do, they should also acknowledge how right wing politics have “pushed” and marginalized large groups of people over the course of history, e.g., the working class, racialized people, non-men, etc. The emergence of protests that the right often complains about is evidence of this. The history of left wing protests shows us that change often begins when marginalized people come together to express their frustrations at abuses of power that they have tolerated for too long. The targets of these protests are often martyred and defended by the right, such as the police, the government, and Supreme Court justices. In this scenario, being “pushed” to act is not justifiable to them.

Ultimately, the “you pushed me” justification has some truth to it — the right is not wrong about that. But what they should understand is that people other than them can be pushed as well. With that acknowledged, the right should be more worried about the ways in which they weaponize the “you pushed me” discourse. Descriptively, we can all use this justification, but once we engage in serious moral thought, the right is in trouble.

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Banning the veil is an exercise in futility

Mila Ghorayeb — Mon, 06 Nov 2017 17:00:54 +0000

“ I didn’t recognize you for sh*t!” my friend called back at my greeting as I biked past her the other day. My everyday commute has me covering my face while biking in this sunny, yet freezing, city: helmet, sunglasses, and a scarf covering my neck and face. I am certainly not identifiable.

Many can probably relate to this in public spaces. We all hide our faces – particularly in the winter – and that does not make a significant difference in everyday political society. No one is really concerned with not seeing peoples’ noses and mouths on the bus. Yet the niqab captures peoples’ attention–and not because people genuinely believe that seeing someone’s nose, mouth, and hair will make us safer. Rather, the fact is that the veil is racialized and symbolically represents a class of people which a majority of Quebec (and Western society) is afraid of and intolerant towards. There is no epidemic of niqabi women posing systematic danger to the everyday Quebec resident in public spaces.

Even lawmakers are not pretending this is about security this time around. While supporters of Bill 62 may exhibit some rage about security-despite the fact that most niqabi women believe that they have a responsibility to remove their veils when they need to be identified-the bill is supposedly addressing religious neutrality. I say “supposedly” because while it is deemed secular, ministers scrambling to justify it will hop from the religious neutrality foot to the security one if it serves as a more convenient defense.
If we assume, for the sake of argument, that Quebec (whose legislators deliberate under a crucifix) is concerned with secularism, fine. I’ve been non-religious for long enough that I can personally deliberate on what best fosters a religiously neutral society. I fail to see how a niqab ban in public institutions is actually going to promote religious neutrality. First, Quebec is positioning this problem as though niqabi women are a prominent demographic–when there is an estimated 50-100 women in total who wear the niqab. I find it hard to believe that 100 women (at most) are standing in the way of a strongly secular Quebec.

Second, the bill does not stop women from wearing the niqab generally; only when enforced in use of public services. This perhaps discourages but does not eradicate the practice of wearing a niqab–it only excludes women from wearing it in various places. It thus inconveniences niqabi women, but doesn’t really do much for the province.

Third, the bill does not target any other expressions of religion, Islamic or otherwise. Even if we assume that the target is just Islam, this bill does not target all expressions of Islam; it does not ban all forms of veiling (e.g. the hijab), or any other accessories with Islamic symbolism. If this is at any point brought up, advocates of Bill 62 will simply hop back onto the “security” foot again–until security’s consistency is attacked, at which point they’ll then hop back to ‘religious neutrality’. Repeat the cycle ad nauseum.

When these arguments get tiresome, the final argument that the West loves to jump onto is that issue of non-consensual veiling. People will argue that laws like Bill 62 are necessary because ‘many’ women who wear the niqab do so under coercion. Personally, I take this concern very seriously. I do not doubt that some women are forced to veil.

But let’s get into the pragmatics again. What exactly is this bill going to do for women that are forced to veil? Will the abusive man in her life suddenly acquiesce when Quebec will not allow her to ride the bus anymore? Somehow, the man in question is abusive enough to force a woman to cover most of her face and body, and to continually divorce this woman of her will. Yet he will crumble when he realizes that she can’t go to public school or ride the bus in niqab, and so end his abuse forever.

It seems ridiculous, but this is a common narrative. The trope of the “coerced niqabi” is often contrasted with the “empowered western woman”, who paradoxically finds empowerment by publicly appealing to the male gaze. We thus define agency through that lense; a white woman’s agency is the archetype of agency itself. Arab and Muslim niqabi women who do not emulate white standards cannot be seen as agents. Instead, they are docile objects that can be saved by the power of the mighty Quebec legislature.

In sum, Bill 62 is pointless and geared at a made up problem. The three common arguments for banning veils in this case–security, religious neutrality, and protection of women–are inconsistent and sloppy. It’s clear that the motives behind this bill are dishonestly racist at worst, pointless at best. Security, religious neutrality, and the protection of women are all genuine concerns, but Quebec is taking the wrong approach if it purports to tackle them.

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Lifting gender norms off our shoulders

Mila Ghorayeb — Mon, 25 Jan 2016 11:01:57 +0000

For me, like for any feminist critical of gender roles, getting into lifting was an experience both personal and somewhat political. It felt empowering to me as a woman to drop excessive cardio in favour of strength. I had grown to resent the ‘cardio culture’ that seemed almost imposed on women: a woman should be restricting her calories, running every day to decrease the space that she occupies, and working to become petite and delicate like a woman should be. I started eating more, getting stronger, and encouraging other women to do the same, thinking: “Why don’t all girls reject this fear of lifting being manly and making them bulky, and just jump in?” But it’s not that simple, since this fear is an effect of compulsory gender norms.

Any girl who lifts can show you whom they follow on Instagram, where the hashtags #fitgirls or #girlswholift will produce endless posts featuring fit women, sometimes half-naked and hypersexualized, captioned, “Ladies, put those two-pound dumbbells down and start real lifting! Don’t be afraid, you won’t get bulky!” The hashtag #squats exhibits even more sexualized booty pictures that turn lifting into just another aesthetic imposition on women, rather than a means of empowerment and physical well-being.

I don’t doubt that most of these women mean well – I have certainly felt the urge myself to spread the barbell gospel and inform all my female friends about how powerlifting changed my life. However, while I recognize that lifting weights does have an aesthetic component, I have a few criticisms of the mentality displayed through those hashtags, and of the way we approach the relationship between women and sports in general.

Encouraging women to lift should not be about encouraging them to be sexualized in a different way; it needs to be approached as an act of athletics, and not simply aesthetics.

While women might indeed be afraid to lift for fear of becoming bulky, this is an individual instance of a much deeper social problem, namely, the problem of the imposition of femininity on women. A feminine woman is petite, takes up little space, and is passive rather than assertive and dominant. To become smaller, women are expected to exercise through cardio and restrict their eating, in the hope of fitting a narrow image of a ‘beautiful’ body. Meanwhile, men are to eat as much as they can, unleash their strength and dominance, and become bigger and stronger.

There are women who feel confident enough to deviate from gender roles; some people overcome the pressure of gender roles more easily than others. However, when a woman is socialized to behave in a particular way and internalizes these patterns of behaviour as something she must conform to, it is very difficult to one day step off the treadmill and into the male-dominated weights section. The treadmill makes her feel less insecure about the body fat she believes to be excessive, while the weights section can be intimidating and may seem too unfeminine, regardless of what other ‘fit girls’ try to tell her.

Although the rising popularity of lifting among women can help trump these internalized behaviours and dispositions, it can also reinforce them. Looking at these hypersexualized women doing photoshoots in the squat rack half-naked, a woman may wish to replicate their newly fashionable curves and defined, toned bodies. Yet, she might well remain intimidated, partially because women lifting is only recently socially acceptable, but also because, as it grows in popularity, weightlifting is creating another unattainable beauty standard for women. Now, it’s okay if women lift, but they still can’t really be bulky. Larger glutes from squats and deadlifts aren’t the same thing as the bulk that repulses men and scares women. ‘Girls who lift’ are fine when they are ‘booty-builders’ and bikini-clad fitness models with moderately small frames, but they become “gross” if they are heavier, singlet-wearing powerlifters who grunt, slap their thick thighs, and hype themselves into dominating a difficult weight. In other words, it’s okay for a woman to lift if compulsory femininity firmly keeps its grasp on her, finding a way to objectify and sexualize the woman rather than allowing her to be an active subject, to act upon something, to unleash her strength, and to claim her dominance and space. Encouraging women to lift should not be about encouraging them to be sexualized in a different way; it needs to be approached as an act of athletics, and not simply aesthetics.

Women and their athletic choices, whatever they may be, should be respected and free from unwarranted and counterproductive scrutiny.

I’m not saying that lifting will or should necessarily make a woman bulky. Different training styles, diets, and genetics produce different results, and women’s bodies should not be thought of as something put into a given athletic process for one narrow, specific result. I am, however, challenging the notion that getting bulky is somehow a bad thing, and propose to retire the saying, “don’t be afraid to lift, you won’t get bulky!” It just feeds into gender conformity. So what if a woman is bulky?

Sport allows women to act upon something rather than be acted upon, and can be liberating for them, but this is not the case if they are enticed into it through the same structures that oppress them and if they are pressured once again to fit into an unattainable mould. Women’s bodies are diverse, and should not be subjected to a narrow spectrum where bulkiness is shamed or forbidden – and neither should they be shamed for behaving in accordance with the roles imposed on them. Instead, women and their athletic choices, whatever they may be, should be respected and free from unwarranted and counterproductive scrutiny.

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