Locating women in public: A self reflective note

 I couldn’t argue with the bias or gap that lay in the essay that follows, but it is a part of my understanding of the “I and self”, based on the experiences encountered by me because, no matter how deep I want to look in order to analyze a certain phenomena of security, there will always be a perspective that would push me to unlearn my own. In a world that is so embedded in hierarchies and inherent biases, I would not be completely wrong to say, to self-reflect and question the status quo is an act that stems from a certain privilege, a privilege that is so intertwined with the identity of the observer, that it often goes unnoticed. As Ken Booth articulates, “There are many variables which in practice affect the evolution of I/me, including gender, race, national group, upbringing and so on.” (Booth, 1994) Therefore, it is inevitable for different individuals to experience a similar phenomenon- an event in academia or issue of security, differently - in terms of emotions, actions and the questions that arrive and the effects that follow. Thus it would be safe to say my thoughts stem from a post positivist understanding of the world; but that again in my opinion is because of something I identify and view the world as, a woman. “We see things not as they are, but as we are.” (Anais Nin, n.a) 

My understanding of the self had its first indentation of self-reflection in the 7th grade, when I was the only female that volunteered in a batch of 30 girls to run a race. It was baffling to me, not because I was the only girl who volunteered, but because there were more than five times the number of boys who did. It did not end here. Every annual sports day that followed, there was somehow a disproportionate ratio between boys and girls, volunteering for athletic events. And this thought surfaced before every football match I was forced to play even though I was not specialized in it just because girls were running short of players. 

This is when I stumbled upon the larger question that looms over our social order even today- ‘where are the women?’ (Enloe, 2000). Or was it a mere coincidence that I had seen innumerable instances of this gendered disproportion? Drawing in insights from the feminist security studies, with the current dominant understanding of gender performantly in areas of sports, the logical framework of gender that embeds societal and state understanding of masculinity and femininity – “we are bound to therefore envisage a rather different politics of the global” (Shepherd, 2009), one that questions  the assumed gendered roles echoed by the patriarchal ideology, feeding into stereotypical notion of how men are dominant in the public realm and women, more visible in the private should behave, and is no mere coincidence. 

To break out of this purview I would thus be analyzing two areas conventionally in the “public realm” - sports, and nationalist movements, how they view the  female body and how this ultimately ties in with the question posed by feminist security studies.   

Locating Women in the “public”

Sports

Over the years sports and sporting institutions have reflected a certain sense of hegemonic masculinity that has trickled down to genders across the spectrum - the stereotype of  men and women having different physical capabilities and considering women to be a seemingly ‘inferior’ and weaker category so much so that often females are forced to imitate “masculine” practices and in the process blur their feminine identity to blend into the idea of an athlete.  For many, there has been a lot of comfort found in the idea of women not being able to participate in “physically challenging” activities. Language such as, “I am not like them” ( Levi 2003) and “ you play really well for a girl” are a few examples among many lines often used to "other" traditional notions of femininity. 

Sex Verification in sports 

 One of the many ways through which this hegemonic masculinity translates into policy in sports is the gender verification process The practice of sex testing or Gender Verification that defines women’s sports today is primarily backed by the logic of Sports governing bodies like the International Olympics Committee (IOC) and the International Association of Athletics Federations,(IAAF), for preventing male competitors masquerading as women, in events designated exclusively for women. What sounds like a practice to ensure gender equality is more complicated than that and has implications beyond just the private realm so much so that it is devised in a way that would be discriminatory and exclusionary towards a lot female sports persons who do not fit a certain “stereotype”, especially intersex athletes. The entire process of gender verification also promotes a type of understanding of masculinity that today defines the sporting industry and in turn makes it difficult for gendered bodies beyond the heteronormative male to participate. 

Beginning at the Rome Olympic Games in 1960, the IAAF began establishing rules of eligibility for women athletes. Ever since the beginning , the sex testing process was one that was extremely humiliating and taxing for women. Initially, physical examination was used as a method for the gender verification process. This was so problematic that it was immediately resented as it violated a range internationally accepted fundamental rights including to privacy, dignity, health, non-discrimination, freedom from ill-treatment, and employment rights etc. Sex chromatin testing was then introduced at the Mexico City Olympic Games in 1968. The principle was that a chromosome pairing of XX  would be a female and an XY pairing will create a male. However, the chromosomes we’re born with are part of sex, which also takes into account genetic, physical, and hormonal information. It is different from gender, which is the way someone identifies in the world as a woman, a man, or nonbinary, or something else. However, an even greater bias is that there exist phenotypic females with male sex chromatin patterns beyond the typical categories of XX females and XY males; people who have differences of sexual development (DSD) ie intersex individuals. These individuals have no athletic advantage, and thus, should not be excluded from sporting competition.

Moreover, the current criteria for female competitors has been checking the level of testosterone: a hormone produced by both men and women is again highly problematic.  The claim that there is a significant connection between high testosterone and athletic performance  is more complicated than that. Testosterone is not the only factor that is important for an individual's athletic performance, and can be related to lean body mass and building of muscle. There are other physiological factors: that could be heart size, factors like nutrition, coaching, and equipment all play into an athlete’s performance. So it’s unclear how testosterone can be singled out as the defining factor. Thus, time and again, the sporting bodies that have targeted women perceived to be “too masculine” have become targets of suspicion, and resulted in their careers ending prematurely. They are discriminated against on the basis of their sex, their sex characteristics, and their gender expression. 

Inherent racism in the process and its relation to International Politics 

Another loophole in the gender testing policy that often goes unnoticed is the policy only forces athletes identified as suspicious to be tested. That means deciding who is to be tested can depend on an athlete’s appearance and most times the athletes under scrutiny are non-white athletes from the global South, like Indian athlete Dutee Chand and and South African athlete Cater Semenya. They are usually selected for testing because they don’t fit a particular stereotype of what a female looks like. This is the duality women have to endure when it comes to the arena of sports. When it comes to training, it is essential for females and other gendered bodies to behave like men and project strength like men. However, when there is a level of masculinity projected by females that is uneasy or uncomfortable with governing bodies, they are subject to scrutiny. Athletes from the African and South Asian countries, who are generally underrepresented in a lot of sporting events, thus become a part of a system where their sport can become an institutionalized source of perpetuating racism. Prominent athletes who were victims of this process were Caster Semenya and Dutee Chand among many.

Tokyo Olympics 2020 (Source: Reddiff.com)

Women and Nationalism

Even as one analyzes how women have had a complex and uneasy relationship with states as institutions in the public realm vis a vis nationalism, where, even though at the face of it, women participating in nationalist movements, did allow for them to break out of their private sphere and acquire a new identity of fighting for a national cause in the public domain, as one deconstructed this, it is found, women were more often used by male leaders to symbolize and portray aspects of struggle, violation, or subjugation under a colonial power, than actually welcomed for their ideas and intellectual contributions. (Enloe, 1989)

Thus the narrative of nationalism often told as one that is devoid of gender or gendered perspectives, is reflective of a mainstream securitization of threats that does not look beyond the state. Whether it be in history textbooks or the irrelevance of gendered experience right in War zones,  in case of Libya, Afghanistan, Syria etc. From colonial history to nationalist movements and data coming out of War zones even today, somewhere, society is still lacking in self reflective view and is stuck between a Realist perspective of security and that of mainstream Securitization. As, Lene Hansen, a prominent feminist security studies scholar, articulates, often times when security is seen as a speech act it is the consequence of someone from a position of power labelling the insecurity as a threat, and it is only then, the threat gets securitized. Thus, in the process  the everyday insecurities and threats that loom over women in both the private and public realm get silenced. Even the disproportionate data that is often produced by the security agents, are a reflection of the mainstream securitization of threats. (Hansen, 2000)

“if we take seriously the lives of women – their understandings of security – as well as on-the-ground workings of masculinity and femininity, we will be able to produce more meaningful and more reliable analyses of ‘security’ – personal, national and global” (Enloe, 2007)

Thus, “Security studies is ultimately what we make it” (Booth, 1994)  and by highlighting the referent object as the embedded individual, there is a clear surface of gendered insecurity faced by women which often social institutions, the mainstream security actors fail to notice. Just as Ken Booth reflected on from his initial realist perspective on security by saying that “The individual/bottom up/victim perspective began to change what I thought about the state, state types, social power, other security problems than the military inventories of the superpowers, the state as the exclusive security referent, and states as a source of threat rather than as a source of security. The sovereign state came to be seen as an important part of the problem of insecurity, not the solution.” (Booth, 1994) Over the years I too have had found a refuge in the feminist perspective of securitization, because it not only used individual experiences as the starting point of understanding security but also advocated for states to have a purview beyond what it considers the “public” and pushed it to recognize so many silenced acts of unequal treatment meted out by women as a threat to security,(which is often considered in the ambit of high politics) and makes “the personal, political and the international as a seamless web realm.” (Booth, 1994)

Bibliography

1. Booth, Ken. Security and Self: Reflections of a Fallen Realist. Routledge, 1997. 

2. Enloe, C. H. (1989). In Bananas, Beaches & bases: Making feminist sense of international politics. essay, University of California Press. 

3. Hansen, Lene. ‘The Little Mermaid’s Silent Security Dilemma and the Absence of Gender in the Copenhagen School’. 2000. Millennium 29 (2): 285–30

4. Levi, Sasson Onra. "Feminism and Military Gender Practices: Israeli Women Soldiers in “Masculine” Roles*." (2003): sasson Levy- IDF ( refer pg 447-455).pdf
5. Shepherd, Laura J. “Gender, Violence and Global Politics: Contemporary Debates in Feminist Security Studies.” Political Studies Review 7, no. 2 (2009): 208–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-9299.2009.00180.x.

6. Padawer, Ruth. “The Humiliating Practice of Sex-Testing Female Athletes.” The New York Times. The New York Times, June 28, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/magazine/the-humiliating-practice-of-sex-testing-female-athletes.html.