Don’t throw sand over my eyes. On the burkini ban and European cruelty
Immigration has always been a feminist issue.
Next week it will be the one year anniversary of the moment that the world wept at the images of the body of tiny Aylan Al-Kurdi laying lifeless on a beach. His image, the symbol of a crisis that had reached such proportions that it could no longer be ignored. The world reacted in horror at the sight of the child’s helpless body. There was a public acknowledgement across all of European mainstream media that something needed to be done. “The refugee crisis” they called it. European governments also agreed that “something needed to be done”. The institutions within the EU agreed… “something needed to be done”.
However, these same European institutions didn’t have a name for “the refugee crisis” that was systematically washing out dead bodies on European beaches in 2000.
Or back in 2012 when I wrote about those who die to keep us safe, the bodies washing up in Spanish, Italian and Greek beaches practically every day.
None of those instances, even when they were occurring daily, were deemed important enough to be called a crisis. Each of those nameless, dead bodies were merely “the price that Europe is willing to pay for its economic stability”.
I kept a death toll calendar for a while. Eventually I had to stop posting it when it was met with indifference and barely a commentary on the systematic death of refugees, undocumented immigrants, the displaced. I could no longer deal with the daily contemplation of the growing figures. Mostly nameless. All of them without a personal history attached to them. None of them with a burial site to honor them. I often heard that these were not “feminist issues”.
The dead facing the double erasure: washed up on a beach as a lump of discarded material and removed from the feminist discourse because “these are not gender issues”. These, I was told, belong to the wider, non gender specific politics. These, the dead bodies, are part of “something else”.
The problem with the “this is not a feminist issue” discourses is that they tend to be oblivious to how death has a way of creeping into our bodies in manners that exceed the punctual, specific physicality of “this dead body” to become “all of our migrant bodies”.
Submission to whiteness
There is a niche category of porn commonly referred to as CMNF (Clothed male, naked female). This type of porn, which is often associated with fetish subcultures, features images of women in various states of undress while in the presence of fully clothed men. The various sites that feature this type of porn (warning, link NSFW) usually make a point in that the thrill for both the dressed and undressed person resides in the power imbalance and the ensuing embarrassment for the stripped woman. In many cases, CMNF porn is part of wider consensual fantasies involving BDSM and other power related play scenarios.
Back then when I was writing about the dead bodies on European beaches I failed to make one connection that has become painfully clear today: the beach as the site where European white, heteronormative patriarchy inhabits our bodies both in life and in death. The site where the cis gender female body is meant to be seen under the conditions approved by the male gaze. It is no coincidence that one of the selling points of European beaches is that women are “free to sunbathe topless”. Free to sunbathe, that is, if you wear the patriarchy approved attire as this French Muslim woman learned yesterday. Because, to inhabit a European beach as a visible immigrant woman you have to be either an anonymous dead body or forcefully stripped by four policemen. The sadistic, necrophiliac non consensual nature of European white supremacy revealed once and for all.
This, the forceful stripping of a Muslim woman by four fully clothed men embodies the pedagogy of cruelty I referred to here. The non white body as a site of discipline and forceful compliance. The burkini, a piece of beachwear that the white European patriarchy has deemed inappropriate because, in a paradoxical moment of unintentional irony, “it forces Muslim women to be submissive to men” (nobody said that patriarchal bullshit has to be ideologically consistent, right?). In the name of “liberating” Muslim women from their supposed “submission”, four men force the beachgoer to strip, submitting to their authority as agents of the State. Mandatory, non consensual CMNF scenarios in a breath taking moment of sexual assault by the State. It is not a coincidence that many of these porn tropes also draw inspiration from the submission of veiled women. The State, ultimately, as the executing arm of the white patriarchy that demands complete compliance and availability of our bodies.
The forceful stripping of a woman is the ultimate symbol of white supremacist rape culture. A culture that subsists on necrophiliac fantasies of self defense and militarization against a “horde” of dead children’s bodies washing up on its shores for decades. A culture that will violently demand compliance and submission from non white people to maintain its power. The only way a non white body can inhabit these beaches is either dead or stripped of its agency. The white, cruel European patriarchy wants us dead or undignified, preferably as part of a non consensual porn scenario. And contrary to what I heard before, this is and has always been a feminist issue.
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