Gazing at Semenya

Another then another story about Caster Semenya. First it was a visual impression and suspicion. Then it was blood tests or whatever. Now it is speculation about Semenya’s internal organs and genitalia. Terribly bitter and mean reporting, all of which sucked the joy out of a fabulously exciting performance in Berlin. My remark here, however, is not about how international governing bodies should deal with sexual identity or what counts as sexual identity and so on. That’s another issue and I’m not sure what to say about it, truthfully. Instead, I’m interested in what it means to be someone other than that governing body looking at bodies like Semenya’s.

I’ll be plain about this: it reminds me of the case of Saartjie Baartman, who was exhibited around Europe so that Europeans could gaze with curiosity and astonishment at her “strange” body. It was a traveling spectacle, gruesome. Reading Baartman’s story, we today surely recoil in horror. It is just so terrible. Why, though, does Baartman’s story strike us as terrible? Many reasons, but perhaps the most obvious reason is that those looking at her thought they had the right to gaze at her body. Who were they, really, to think they had such rights? And what does that assumption of a right say about them as people? An ethical question, that is, and it cuts to the core of who and what we are as people.

And isn’t that just what’s happening with the increasingly lurid accounts of Semenya’s body? Mass-media – in images, video, and word – creates traveling spectacles and thus creates spectators in so many new ways and contexts. We consume the spectacle casually on our computers and television. Fascination with Semenya’s genitals is all the story today, and surely will be for the next coming days. The assumption is that we have rights to this gaze, to look inside (prompting notions of biopower, no doubt) and outside her body (recalling Baartman’s case). Why this comfortable assumption? Simply because we are, maybe, sports fans (though so few are actual track and field fans…not unimportant here!). Or because we can.

We don’t have that right. In fact, there is something grotesque in this gaze, invading her body from the inside (chromosome testing, examination of internal structure, etc.) and on the outside (facial features, genitals, etc.). Yet, it goes on without much of a question at all. Reportage, reading, jokes, carefully crafted photographs, and even expressions of solidarity and sympathy. As if we have a right to look and name and make Semenya’s body our own. We don’t.

I include here the cruel jokes, the “outrage” (mostly from folks who don’t follow track and field, much less women’s events), and the shockingly voyeuristic reportage. But I’d also include (with less urgency, I’ll admit, but still…) the sympathetic backlash against all that, including all of those who will take her case on as a cause or an example. Mostly, my criticism is directed at those who find it funny or feign outrage and all of those energies of degradation. Still, it is an enormously invasive gesture and very much the same gaze that would adopt Semenya as an example or cause without her participation. What does Semenya want? How does she understand herself? Has anyone listened? What would it mean if she were to not speak, to not share this thing to which so many – critics and defenders alike – assume a right?

My response to this whole “event” is, in that way, really just a few critical questions. Why do we think we have these rights? And why do we affix our gaze to Semenya’s body with such curiosity and eagerness to speak for her? Or expect (even demand) that she speak in a way we find familiar and politically helpful? Or speak at all? Semenya’s case puts these questions to us in such blunt, even visceral terms precisely because the visibility of the global athlete is suddenly put in contact with the terribly anxious and unpleasant histories of race, nation, and sexuality. At this very moment, all questions return to us and ask us who we are when we demand such speaking with our gaze, in our interests, and in how we begin, often rather unconsciously, speaking-for-another.

Again, who are we to speak for Semenya? Or even to demand that Semenya speak, display, and describe?