Author: Former Student

Deliberation Guide for Addressing Hegemonic Masculinity in Davidson Greek Life and Eating Houses

Posted on by Former Student

Title

A Deliberation Guide for Addressing Hegemonic Masculinity in Davidson Greek Life and Eating Houses

Central Question

How does Davidson Greek Life and Eating Houses embody and perpetuate hegemonic masculinity and unequal gender relationships? And how can Davidson Greek Life and Eating Houses begin to address and dismantle hegemonic masculinity within its institutions?

Intended Audience:

Davidson Greek Life organizations including all the college’s fraternities and sororities as well as Eating House members. I will abbreviate this group using the abbreviation (DGL&EH).

Organizations that fall under DGL&EH include:

  • Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.
  • Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.
  • Lambda Pi Chi Sorority, Inc.
  • Connor Eating House
  • Rusk Eating House
  • Turner Eating House
  • Warner Hall Eating House
  • Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.
  • Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc.
  • Kappa Sigma Fraternity
  • Lambda Theta Phi Latin Fraternity, Inc.
  • Phi Delta Theta Fraternity
  • Phi Gamma Delta Fraternity
  • Sigma Alpha Epsilon Fraternity
  • Sigma Phi Epsilon Fraternity

General Format:

DGL&EH represents a considerable number of students at the college so this deliberation would need to take place in a large space. However, as someone who has gone through large group orientations, such as Davidson’s first year orientation, I can speak to how students disengage very quickly in these contexts. For that reason, I propose this deliberation to take place over a series of events that would take place over the course of a week. I propose that the DGL&EH themselves host these events and oversee running them. That way, the DGL&EH members will not feel like they are being talked at (which leads to disengagement), but rather will be responsible for talking with their fellow DGL&EH members about these important issues. That means that every DGL&EH organization will be responsible for putting forth three members who will form part of three Leadership Teams (1, 2 & 3) that will oversee that the sessions go as planned.

Specific Format:

The deliberation will be broken up into separate sessions. Each session will be no more than 2 hours so that they minimize interfering with people’s schedules. The first will be devoted to defining hegemonic masculinity so that everyone can be on a level playing field when it comes to discussing how it manifests in DGL&EH in the second sessions. This will involve DGL&EH members intermixing and splitting into groups of 20 members to review materials that define hegemonic masculinity and how it operates. Each group will then be responsible for creating their own definition of hegemonic masculinity and writing it on a shared document that will be used by all those participating in the deliberation. This first session will take place in the Lily Gallery and the first floor of Union which means there will be two simultaneous sessions so that there is adequate space. Members of the Deliberation Leadership Team 1 will be in charge of splitting up into two groups and leading the sessions at the two locations.

The secondary sessions will entail DGL&EH organizations each giving a 10-minute presentation on how their institution embodies and perpetuates hegemonic masculinity. Every member of each organization may not end up being able to speak during the 10-minute presentation but will be required to be present, nonetheless. Leadership of each DGL&EH organization will be in charge of ensuring full attendance. These presentations will be hosted in the Duke Performance Hall so that every non-presenting DGL&EH member can attend each presentation. Attendance will again be overseen by the leadership of each DGL&EH organization. Additionally, I propose putting together a review panel of faculty and students interested in offering follow-up questions and feedback for each of these presentations. Deliberation Leadership Team 2 will be in charge of ensuring that the presentations run smoothly and stay within their time limits.

The final session will entail each DGL&EH organization preparing a report on hegemonic masculinity. These reports will entail an organizational definition of hegemonic masculinity and an organizational response to the results of an anonymous form on instances and experiences of hegemonic masculinity (which every Davidson student would be able to contribute to). The report will also include an internal reflection of how the organization has embodied and perpetuated hegemonic masculinity as well as a section devoted to steps towards addressing and dismantling hegemonic masculinity within the respective organization. Leadership Team 3 will be in charge of compiling these reports and building a rudimentary website on which the reports will be posted for everyone to see.

Background & Shared Language:

What is hegemonic masculinity?

According to the Oxford Dictionary of Sociology, hegemonic masculinity involves “the configuration of gender practice that embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy– which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women.” The definition also contends that “there are also subordinated or marginalized masculinities” with the existence of hegemonic masculinity. Thus, hegemonic masculinity not only subordinates women but also marginalized masculinities, gender identities and sexualities. That being said, there is no fixed image of a hegemonic masculinity, rather hegemonic masculinity is a relational concept that can change based on who is involved in the creation of an unequal gender relationship, which is the true basis for hegemonic masculinity. The term was coined by Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell in her 1987 book Gender and Power. Connell reformulated her concept with sociologist James W. Messerschmidt in 2005 to emphasize the relational nature of hegemonic masculinity and that “that this relationship is a pattern of hegemony—not a pattern of simple domination—that legitimates unequal gender relations.”

Why is it important?

Since hegemonic masculinity legitimizes unequal gender relationships, I contend that is a particularly important concept to address and dismantle. I also think that because of its relational nature, any work towards addressing hegemonic masculinity will require an examination of entire institutions and systems that perpetuate unequal gender relationships rather than individuals who might embody “dominant” forms of masculinity.

Why do sororities and eating houses have to participate?

According to sociologist James W. Messerschmidt, “all participants constituting an unequal gender relationship are collective orchestrators of hegemonic masculinity.” For this reason, sororities and eating houses, which are comprised primarily of women, should participate in this deliberation, as hegemonic masculinity not only impacts their membership but can also be “orchestrated” by their members through their participation in unequal gender relationships. One area where this could be explored would be cases where eating houses host joint events with fraternities.

Conversation Agreements:

While every member of DGL&EH organizations are required to attend each of these sessions, it should be acceptable for members to opt out of conversations that have the potential to bring up traumatic topics.

Members should demonstrate respect towards one another, and members of the leadership teams should collectively define what this looks like to maintain the collective nature of this deliberation.

These will be fairly public events, but members should agree towards keeping personal stories in the conversations they were shared in only.

Questions for Consideration:

  • How did hegemonic masculinity manifest itself at Davidson College before it began to accept women in the 1970s?
  • What are people’s current conceptions of hegemonic masculinity and where do they come from?
  • What is the difference between hegemonic masculinity and dominant masculinity?
  • Why is it, or why is it not, important to emphasize hegemonic masculinity in discussions around unequal gender relationships?
  • Is it possible to dismantle hegemonic masculinity?
  • Is hegemonic masculinity too narrow of a concept when considering unequal gender relationships?
  • Does everyone have the same understanding/conception of gender?

Reflections and Follow Ups:

After each session, participants should be encouraged to reflect on these questions. Perhaps there can be an award system for the most thoughtful responses:

What have you learned about hegemonic masculinity?

What are some manifestations of hegemonic masculinity in your Greek Life or Eating House organization?

What steps can be taken to address hegemonic masculinity at Davidson College, but specifically in its Greek Life and Eating House organizations?

Token for Caleb Luna’s Lecture: “Filth Are My Politics: Toward an Anti-Racist Fat Queer Politic.”

Posted on by Former Student

A few weeks ago, I attended the Sally G. McMillen Lecture that featured artist, public scholar and theorist of the body Caleb Luna and their talk: “Filth Are My Politics: Toward an Anti-Racist Fat Queer Politic.” I was immediately struck by the way Luna (virtually) initially made the mood of the talk very welcoming and low-key, something most guest lecturers do not ever do. The fact that they were presenting virtually because they were very busy finishing their dissertation also allowed me to relate to Luna in the sense that we were both students who were busy with work. In terms of the content of the talk, Luna offered a fascinating history of fatness and fat phobia as they relate to race, which is an analysis I was completely new to. In their (paraphrased) words, fat phobia has little to do with health and more so with white supremacy’s goal of crafting a legitimate sex, race and class. To expand on this point, Luna spoke about the legacy of Saartje Baartman, in terms of how her body was commodified and put on display for the financial benefit and entertainment of white Europeans, and how it contributed to the creation of racialized genders and a conflation of fatness with conceptions of “racial Others.” Additionally, Luna spoke about art in the Baroque Period (17th & 18th centuries) and how it enshrined fat women, which some read as an acceptance of fatness back then. However, Luna problematizes this reading of the art and contends that the reason this depiction of fatness was acceptable was because the women were white. In the development of the “science” behind today’s normative conceptions of fatness, Luna claims there was also an underlining thread of anti-Blackness. After all, the European colonialists in Africa were exploiting and exporting the bodies and skeletons of Black Africans for “scientific” purposes during the 19th and 20th centuries. Some of these skeletons are still kept and featured at well-known European museums. This intersectional analysis provided by Luna illuminated a history I was almost completely unaware of prior to the talk. While I knew the story of Saartje Baartman, I did not know about how her story plays into the racialized history of fat phobia.

Throughout the talk Luna recommended the scholarship of numerous authors to explore this topic further such as:

“The Invention of Women:” A Review for Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s Revolutionary Book

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In 2011, Beyoncé asked, “Who run the world?” and answered, “Girls.” Almost a decade later, many of the protest signs at the Women’s March on Washington featured this same declaration. Worthy as it may be, Nigerian sociologist Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s first book, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, which provides a deconstructive analysis and history of womanhood and gender—and their absence— in Yorùbán society, presents a strong case against the idea that “girls” are, and have been, a global and universal social category. As evidenced by the title, The Invention of Women, Oyěwùmí lays out how “the fundamental category “woman,” which she claims is “foundational in Western gender discourses,” “simply did not exist in Yorùbáland prior to its sustained contact with the West.” (Oyěwùmí x) Moreover, Oyěwùmí presents evidence for how the Western constructions of gender, as well as sex, were brought to Yorùbáland and implemented in such a way that they became salient social institutions that eventually led to the “patriarchalization” (86) of Yorùbán history and society and as a result, the subordination of what is now the category of women.

Before I begin to review and summarize the work of Oyěwùmí in The Invention of Women, I want to foreground her definition of gender as it forms the basis of her analysis. Oyěwùmí considers gender to be “an institution that establishes patterns of expectations for individuals based on their body-type, orders the social processes of everyday life, and is built into major social organizations of society, such as the economy, ideology, the family, and politics” (39).

The work of Oyěwùmí in her 1997 monograph takes the boundary pushing scholarship of sociologist Judith Lorber and others at the time who were focused on the construction of gender, and complicates it by noting that gender was not only socially constructed, but that it was socially constructed in the West and is therefore not applicable transnationally or transculturally. To set the stage for her argument, Oyěwùmí speaks to the characteristics of Western thought that allowed for the construction of gender. She contends that the somatocentricity (ix) of Western thought, in which biological determinism is the basis for the organization of society, coupled with the West’s “privileging of the visual,” (3) made the physical human body “the foundation of social thought and identity” (x) and thus subject to the creation of gender. Oyěwùmí makes it clear that in contrast to the West, Yorùbán society, prior to Western contact, did not privilege the visual sense or the body in its construction of sociocultural meaning.

Oyěwùmí then goes on to explain the ways in which Yorùbán society was organized absent of gender and sex. One key tenet of Yorùbán society that Oyěwùmí explains is the “centrality of the family compound,” rather than gender, “in defining the status of residents” (44). People who married into a household, or “ilé,” were known as “aya,” while those in the household were known as “ọkọ.” The “aya” was considered an outsider while the “ọkọ” was considered an insider and their relationship was ranked such that the “ọkọ” was “the privileged senior” (44). Overall, the hierarchy of Yorùbán society was based on age—with older people having the most status— and thus “social positions of people shifted constantly in relation to those with whom they were interacting” (xiii).

In the latter half of the monograph, Oyěwùmí speaks to the process in which gender was brought to Yorùbán society through missionaries and the imposition of the British “patriarchal colonial state” (123). Because “access to power was gender-based” in Britain, the British arrival in Yorùbáland led to the creation of “women as an identifiable category, defined by their anatomy and subordinated to men in all situations” (123). Oyěwùmí claims that one the most impactful aspects of colonialism that led to this subordination was the colonial educational system as it excluded those under the new category of women. This in turn led to the creation of a stark gender divide in terms of power, wealth, and status, which Oyěwùmí claims is an impact that is still felt in “the contemporary period” (128).

In the final pages of her book, Oyěwùmí widens her focus and criticizes the way in which “womanhood has been pathologized, at a global level” (177). As a result, Western feminists have assumed that the experience and subordination of women is universal without recognizing that this represents a “globalization of what was once a local Western preoccupation” (177). However, because colonialism imprinted gender and the category of women on Yorùbán society, Oyěwùmí speaks to the challenge of “present[ing] alternative ways of looking at anatomic sex-distinctions without pathologizing the female” (178).

I believe the greatest strength of Oyěwùmí’s The Invention of Women lies in the fact that it paints a holistic picture of Yorùbán society and culture before gender was introduced, as well as after colonial contact. As a result, I was able to understand the way in which specific cultural institutions were changed and perverted in the formation of male hegemony in Yorùbán society as a result of colonialism. Oyěwùmí also relies on primary sources, such as Yorùbán elders, to make her argument without preemptively imposing foreign cultural concepts, such as gender, on her research, which she claims is often the case with Western and Western-educated researchers. In her words, “Researchers always find gender when they look for it” (31).

A challenge I would levy on the work on Oyěwùmí in her monograph is the lack of elaboration on her very brief mention of homosexuality. In a discussion around sexual relations in precolonial Yorùbán society, Oyěwùmí contends that “homosexuality does not seem to have been an option” (63) without any further elaboration. Feminist, academic and human rights activist Sylvia Tamale, in her essay, “Confronting the Politics of Nonconforming Sexualities in Africa,” reveals that in many African cultures, there are examples of nonconforming sexuality while noting that “the context and experiences of such relationships did not mirror homosexual relations as understood in the West, nor were they necessarily consistent with what we may today describe as a gay or queer identity” (Tamale 35). Thus, without assuming the presence of homosexuality and nonconforming sexuality in precolonial Yorùbán culture, I wonder whether or not it is even possible to state that these sexualities were absent given Oyěwùmí’s evidence of the absence of gendered identities. In other words, how would nonconforming sexuality be conceived without the construction of gender? Additionally, Oyěwùmí claims that “issues of sexuality were not really issues of morality” (Oyěwùmí 64) until the arrival of Christianity and Islam. Thus, what is nonconforming sexuality when there is no conception of moral, normative and conforming sexuality? Nevertheless, I think Oyěwùmí’s work would be strengthened with a deeper interrogation of homo/nonconforming sexuality in precolonial Yorùbán culture in addition to a discussion on the impact colonialism had on notions of homo/nonconforming sexuality.

All in all, Oyěwùmí’s The Invention of Women is a fairly accessible and relatively short monograph that is not only vital to understanding how gender is constructed, but also vital in that it problematizes the supposed universality of the construction of gender. This book is suited for anyone interested in the intersection of gender and colonialism, for Oyěwùmí reveals how the colonial project in Nigeria was inseparable from the imposition of gendered identities and a gendered hierarchy. Finally, if there’s anything to take away from this review it is this. Next time you hear/say/think “Fuck the patriarchy!” think about the contributions of Oyěwùmí, and how they might inform your answer to this question raised by philosopher and art historian Nkiru Nzegwu: Is patriarchy a “valid transcultural category of analysis?” (21).

The Feminist “Love-Politics” of Labelle in “Morning Much Better”

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Labelle, formed in 1971, was all-female rock trio comprised of Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash. Known for their “godless gospel music” fit for the “space age,” Labelle was revolutionary and boundary breaking in a plethora of ways, whether it be their sex-positive lyrics, futuristic costumes or the fact that they were the first Black rock group to perform at the New York Metropolitan Opera and the first Black vocal group to be featured on the cover of Vogue magazine. I contend that Labelle was uniquely “womanist,” in all the senses of activist and author (and also anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist) Alice Walker’s term, as they were a Black feminist group that loved music and dance and promoted sexual and non-sexual love through their intimacy-laden lyrics and “sexual self-expression” focused performances.

In this short essay, I will analyze their 1971 track “Morning Much Better” from their first album Labelle and lay out why I think it is a feminist song. “Morning Much Better” begins with this demand addressed to a sexual partner: “But if you want to keep me happy / Better hear what I’m saying to you.” To me, this sets the song off on a particular feminist note, as it emphasizes the agency of the person making the demand, which in the case of Labelle, is three Black women. This is especially significant given the fact that Labelle was a departure from the girl group model of the sixties and seventies exemplified by The Supremes, who, also as Black women, were subject to a degree of respectability politics that made them look practically identical and sing about sentiments such as “waiting for love,” in the case of their song “You Can’t Hurry Love.” The difference in tone and agency of The Supremes’ song and “Morning Much Better” underlines both the boundary pushing nature of Labelle as well as their song’s feminist message, which rejected the notion of passively waiting for love and/or a sexual partner.

While the song has one mention of “Daddy,” it is otherwise pronoun-less and thus could apply to anyone of any gender identity, which is another unique feature of many Labelle songs that cultural anthropologist Maureen Mahon contends, “surely contributed to the group’s appeal among gay men and lesbians.” Thus, “Morning Much Better” is also part of Labelle’s legacy of promoting a more intersectional feminist message that included people of all gender identities and sexualities.

The central narrative in “Morning Much Better” is a desire to have sex in the morning. One line in the chorus goes: “But I usually like it much better in the morning, yeah.” This overall sentiment of the song renders it as one that is, in signature Labelle fashion, sex-positive, which is a feminist ideal exemplified by many feminists including poet and activist Pat Parker. It also renders the song as one that promotes communication and dialogue in sexual relationships, which I contend is a feminist principle in that it is the foundation of healthy relationships of mutual respect in which both sexual partners have the ability to express their desires as well as what makes them feel good.

In advocating for sexual partners vocalizing their own personal desires and preferences, “Morning Much Better” exemplifies what writer, feminist and civil rights activist Audre Lorde envisioned as radical self-care, which she writes, “is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” While self-care today has veered far from this conception as it has come to adopt the kind of “competitive atomistic” and “liberal individualism” that author and feminist bell hooks claims “undermines the potential radicalism of feminist struggle,” Labelle in “Morning Much Better” is advocating for a radical self-care based on consensual and fulfilling sex, healthy relationships and a good night’s sleep! As the song goes: “But I don’t know, baby, just what it is, but that’s mmmm, when I feel good / Oh, with seven (I assume hours) behind me / Oh, you better come find me, yeah.”

All in all, “Morning Much Better” is a “sonically intimate” and vibrant feminist, and arguably womanist, boundary breaking song that incapsulates a Black feminist tradition of “love-politics,” in the sense that it advocates not only for relationships of love and intimacy that personally feel good, but also a relationship of love with oneself through its promotion of radical self-care. According to a member of the Atlanta Feminist Lesbian Alliance, Labelle’s impact was indeed felt. In their words, Labelle represented “very together women who love people and each other. And they have a heavy feminist message.”

Listen to “Morning Much Better” here.

From Palestine to Ukraine: The Roles of Race, Whiteness and Gender in Negotiating Resistance

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War and social media have coexisted for the last two decades or so, however, the role social media is playing in the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine stands out from other ongoing conflicts, whether it be the current bombardment and mass starvation of Yemen, the ongoing civil war in Syria, or the practically invisible suppression of West Papuans in their prolonged struggle for independence. I contend that the distinction lies in the way the Western world is responding to the crisis in Ukraine. As a very active American consumer of social media, primarily on Instagram and Twitter, I have noticed an outpouring of support for Ukraine from my American peers previously averse to posting on matters of politics and current events as well as from American and European individuals and institutions with prominent social media followings, including corporations, celebrities and government officials (see images below). These individuals and institutions are what I am referring to when I say “the Western world.” Even my own college of Davidson in North Carolina is currently flying the Ukrainian flag beneath the American one in the center of campus.

I am pointing out this distinction that is the Western world’s response to the war in Ukraine because I think it can teach us an important lesson on a) the political construction of whiteness, b) how race and gender influence how the West perceives and responds to human suffering around the world, c) who is entitled to resistance to violent aggression in the eyes of the West, and d) who is given unequivocal support from the West in their respective fights against imperialist aggression.

I will perform my analysis using a TikTok I encountered on Twitter depicted below. First of all, for a TikTok to make it onto Twitter, especially the politics-focused Twitter spaces I am a part of, it needs to be one that is very prominent and being widely discussed and shared. In the case of this TikTok, it had over 750,000 likes, 16,000 comments and 15,000 shares and 14.2 million views alone at the time that I encountered it. The TikTok itself centered a horizontal video of a young girl confronting a taller and armed male soldier. The video follows the girl as she yells at the solider who responds by walking away and laughing. The environment in the background resembles a desert with a sandy road and hardly any trees. For a moment at the end, the video cuts to an old woman who is crying being interviewed by RT, a Russian media outlet. Above the video, there is text that reads: “LITTLE GIRL TRY TO STOP” followed by two broken heart emojis and a sad face emoji, which is then followed by: “PRAY FOR UKRAINE” [Ukrainian flag emoji] [broken heart emoji]. The caption for the TikTok read: “#ukraine #army #fyp #fyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy #RUSIA #emotional.” The TikTok was posted by @staystrongukrainee, which had 127,400 followers on the app, and now appears to have been removed (most likely for spreading misinformation).

As evidenced by the strange caption and the questionable editing of the video, this TikTok exhibits many standard “red flags” of misinformation. In fact, the TikTok is an example of misinformation as the video it references as depicting Ukraine is really a ten-year-old video depicting a Palestinian girl named Ahed Tamimi confronting an Israeli soldier in the Palestinian territory known as the West Bank. It is precisely the fake nature of this TikTok that interests me the most, as I believe its ability to exist as a piece of misinformation to illicit support, solidarity and sympathy for Ukraine in the current conflict reveals a lot about the political construction of whiteness, as well as the role of race and gender in shaping Western discourse around the Ukrainian conflict specifically, but also war and resistance in general.

First and foremost, I want to speak on this video’s ability to be used as a tool for misinformation and how that is related to whiteness. Ahed Tamimi, who has blonde hair and a fare skin tone, is white passing.

Before I delve into this, I want to touch on the history of this term. “Passing” was first used in runaway slave notices from 19th century America, which Andrea Guzman claims “brings us back to the tension between being white and being free. Are they really the same thing?” This history is significant as it reveals that the concept of “passing” for white is a political construction with implications of power and freedom. It also reveals the fact that whiteness has historically been a threshold demarcated by upper-class, property-owning white people. The runaway slaves could not decide themselves whether they were or were not white passing, but rather their whiteness was contingent on the whims of white people as revealed by the fact that poor white people were sometimes cast as “mulatto” by other whites and sold into slavery.

This is all related to the case for Ahed Tamimi in this example of misinformation as it was her white appearance that allowed this video of her to be repurposed for the Ukrainian conflict, which is situated in a country where the majority of the population has fare skin and, in some regards, is considered white. In fact, some journalists are noting how the skewed coverage of the Ukrainian conflict compared to others around the world (Syria, Yemen, Somalia and West Papua as some examples) is due to its nature as a nation of white people. Another source astutely classified the skewed nature of the coverage as “blatant racism.”

But while Tamimi’s white passing appearance has allowed an account like @staystrongukrainee to co-opt and frame her resistance against the Israeli soldier to be an assumed example of resistance from a Ukrainian girl against a Russian soldier, Tamimi’s identity as a Palestinian, and therefore a non-white, non-Western individual, did not afford her resistance to Israeli aggression the same level of support and sympathy from the Western world that has been afforded to cases of Ukrainian resistance against Russian aggression. Kuan-Yun Wang, in an analysis of American and Canadian media coverage of Tamimi notes that “the media frame Tamimi and the Palestinians as violent initiators.” Wang found that the media also decry her persona as “fake’ and ‘propaganda,'” all of which Wang claims to “achieve the purpose of legitimising the use of state violence on colonised bodies, which ultimately reflects settler-colonial history in North America.” In terms of Tamimi’s reception in Israel, one member of the Israeli government has called her a terrorist, while the current Prime Minister, and Education Minister at the time, Naftali Bennett stated Tamimi deserved to be incarcerated for life following another instance of her slapping a soldier in 2018, which she served time in prison for. I will also speak on popular gendered tropes used against Tamimi in Israel later on.

This is all in stark contrast to the women in Ukraine who have taken up armed resistance against the recent Russian aggression and have been hailed by Western media outlets (examples: France24, Vanity Fair, Slate) and labeled as “brave” and as “heroes,” as seen in the tweets below.

While Tamimi’s relation to whiteness (being non-white but white passing) has impacted the way her resistance is received and, in this case, commodified to illicit certain reactions, her gender has also been used to further delegitimize her resistance, unlike the case of the Ukrainian women. For example, Yasmeen Serhan in an article for The Atlantic noted that “a young girl known for her long, curly hair isn’t the image one might typically come to expect of a national freedom fighter.” While the validity of Tamimi’s status as a “hero” figure is questioned due to her age, appearance and gender, the Ukrainian women being heralded on Twitter and in the media are not subjected to such scrutiny, even when, in another case of misinformation used to illicit support for Ukrainian women fighters, the women are wearing neo-Nazi symbols on their bullet-proof vests. Additionally, I have yet to come across any source that labels the Ukrainian women fighters as “fiery,” which is the sexist term The Mirror used to characterize Tamimi.

The fetishization of Tamimi’s hair is also very prevalent in media and individual accounts of her. The Washington Post described the appearance of her hair as “wild locks swept up in a hair band,” which is yet another example of the emphasis on Tamimi’s supposed feistiness and “wild” nature, which is notably not how men, or the Ukrainian women I’ve referenced, that participate in resistance are ever described. A popular nickname for Tamimi among Israelis and others is “Shirley Temper,” which both fetishizes her hair, in its reference to the hair of Shirley Temple, and weaponizes her gender as something that is associated with rage. The general focus on her hair above everything also points to a form of dehumanization that Tamimi, and not the Ukrainian women, experience.

Other accounts of Tamimi have described her as a “metoo heroic victim” and have classified her resistance as “provocative,” which is yet another sexist term commonly used to objectify and victim-blame women. One Twitter user, who notably has their profile picture set as the Ukrainian flag, objectifies Tamimi in referencing her “usefulness.” They wrote: “Shirley Temper’s arrest was the grand finale of her parents’ grooming. Now that she’s no longer a photogenic little girl, she’s no longer useful.”

Returning to the focus of this analysis, it is clear from these examples that resistance to violent aggression is not created equal according to the West. While Ukrainians are heralded for resisting the violent invasion of Russia, Palestinians like Tamimi who resist the violence of Israeli soldiers (unarmed, in the case of Tamimi) are put under intense scrutiny, delegitimized, objectified and ridiculed. Additionally, it is clear race and gender play key roles in how resistance to violence is negotiated and classified by the West. As evidenced by the TikTok I’ve been referencing, the political construction of whiteness, and its ability to be weaponized at the whims of those looking to achieve certain goals, also plays a key role. Tamimi’s white passing appearance was weaponized to create misinformation to illicit Western sympathy for Ukraine, while her identity as a non-white Palestinian girl (at the time of the 2012 video) complicated and invalidated her actual act of resistance in the eyes of the West.  

Tamimi’s relationship to whiteness can be understood using the words of Bree Newsome Bass, an artist and organizer based in North Carolina, who writes that “The ongoing conflict in Eurasia again shows that whiteness is not an ethnicity but a fluid power construct, a product of colonialism, where inclusion/exclusion fluctuates largely according to the whims of the ruling white elite. Where is the dividing line between Europe & Asia? Between East & West? Between European & non-European? Between white & nonwhite? Anti-Black racism remains the only constant that holds this fragile construct together. There must be clarity on who is unequivocally excluded.”

Bass’ inclusion of anti-Black racism is also relevant to the Ukrainian conflict, as African international students, migrants and residents of Ukraine have experienced immense racism, as well as acts of violence, in their attempts to escape the fighting.  

This case of misinformation from TikTok I have dissected is important in that it reveals the impact of whiteness as a “power construct,” to use Bass’ terminology, that factors into the negotiation of whether or not certain people are entitled to resistance, whether or not it is acceptable that certain people suffer, and whether or not certain people are given unequivocal support from the West, even in the extreme cases of displaying connections to Nazism, like some fighters in the Ukrainian army.

As the Ukrainian conflict continues to this day, alongside numerous other conflicts and cases of Western imperialism around the world that have been purposefully swept under the rug and overlooked, it is important that we do not perpetuate narratives or spread media that supports the racist Western double standard regarding resistance that is rooted in whiteness and its weaponization. All peoples are entitled to resistance against oppressive forces, and we must recognize that.