Shameela Yoosuf AliI was attending an online presentation. My tea sat beside the PC, cooling into that faint bitter smell it gets when I forget it’s there. As I began answering a question, I found myself, despite no external interruption, feeling that I was taking up too much time and space. This unconscious pressure led me to speak more quickly and condense my response.
Why am I shrinking when nobody is asking me to shrink? I kept speaking, but my body had already changed shape, as if my ideas were something I had to shrink to keep. This reaction illustrates a broader and persistent theme in a culture structured by patriarchy, a culture that conditions women, and especially women facing other marginalisations such as racism, ableism, classism, or homophobia, to minimise themselves. Many of us learn, often without thinking, to shrink our presence even when no one explicitly asks us to. The pressure is not distributed equally, women who occupy multiple marginalised identities may feel this expectation more intensely, navigating overlapping systems of scrutiny and exclusion.
Picture someone visiting your home. Before anyone says a word, the woman starts moving around. Soon, she slips into the kitchen and comes back with tea and biscuits. Meanwhile, the men’s spaces stay the same. The chair a man picked at the start of the evening is still his. He keeps talking at the same volume, and his comfort seems to be part of the room itself.
Women’s space, meanwhile, becomes flexible, borrowable, something to be offered up so the gathering can feel smooth. It is not always done with cruelty. It happens through habit, through what we call “good manners,” through the way girls grow up watching women manage everyone’s comfort as if it were their job. Class, culture, and migration status influence who is expected to serve, what counts as “good manners,” and how freely women can claim or offer space. This complexity reminds us that norms of domestic hospitality are never neutral, but instead reflect layered histories of gender, race, and class.
In many family gatherings, men speak as if the room is theirs. Their topics are considered serious, whether they are politics, money, religion, or community affairs. They interrupt each other loudly and repeat themselves, and call it a debate. Their voices take up space without apology and explanation. And also without that internal accounting of time.
Women often speak differently, not because we have less to contribute, but because we actively consider the potential consequences of our words. This self-consciousness leads us to keep our stories brief, even when we are addressing matters of significant emotional or intellectual weight. In conversations, a woman’s attempt to introduce a serious topic is frequently met with humour, which quickly reframes her point as a joke. This dynamic serves to diffuse the gravity of her words and redirect collective attention, effectively rendering her perspective less visible and less valued within the group.
A woman who takes up space can be seen as a threat to the fragile peace women are expected to maintain. Another woman might roll her eyes, laugh along, or whisper later that she is “showing off.” It can look like jealousy, but often it is fear.
This is how shrinking becomes internalised. Power teaches some people that space is theirs by default. Others are taught to request space, justify space, and apologise for space. Importantly, the specifics of who feels entitled to space, and who must justify or apologise for it, are shaped by the intersecting dynamics of gender, race, class, disability, sexuality, and additional markers of identity. Intersectionality foregrounds how these systems of oppression and privilege do not operate in isolation but instead compound and shape each other in complex ways. For instance, a woman of colour or a disabled woman often faces not only gendered expectations to shrink but also racialised or ableist scrutiny that further curtails her ability to occupy space. Over time, these overlapping and mutually reinforcing pressures result in individuals managing this imbalance internally, policing their own presence in accordance with these intersecting social hierarchies. You become your own gatekeeper.
I think space is not only physical but also conversational, emotional, and intellectual. Have you ever thought about who gets to finish a sentence without being interrupted or joked over? Or who has room for disagreementwithout being labelled angry or emotional? Or who can think out loud and still be respected?
Audre Lorde says, “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.” The silence of cutting ourselves short and the silence of swallowing a point because we don’t want to be mocked. And yet there is also that other truth, the one that makes taking up space feel risky. When you stop shrinking, you will be noticed. Let us say that you keep speaking after the joke, some people will treat you as if you have ruined the mood. Women have been trained to maintain the mood, even at the expense of our own dignity.
So I think of Shirley Chisholm here, because her words carry a kind of practical courage: “Shirley Chisholm is often credited with saying, ‘If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.’” It is not begging nor waiting to be chosen. It is saying: I will not hover at the edges of a space that affects my life.
Sara Ahmed puts language to the deeper structure underneath all this, the way space is shaped around certain bodies and voices: “To take up space is to be given an object… The philosopher must have his seat, after all.” A seat is not just a chair. It is recognition made material. It is the world quietly built around some people so they do not have to think about belonging. Others feel belonging as effort, as tension, as carefulness, as a constant need to prove they deserve to stay.
Having explored how ingrained social expectations shape the ways women inhabit space, it is essential to consider how these patterns can be actively challenged and reimagined. In this context, art serves as a substantive act of resistance by making visible the experiences and perspectives that are often overlooked or deliberately silenced. Rather than operating only as ornamentation, art empowers artists and audiences to interrogate, disrupt, and ultimately reconstitute the social norms that enforce marginalisation.
Art gives a thought the time it needs. A poem does not apologise for being long. A story does not rush to become palatable. A painting can hold silence without becoming submission. Art lets you finish the sentence you were trained to cut short. It allows complexity without asking you to smooth it into something “nice.” It refuses the demand to be digestible. And, art becomes an essential site for both the individual and collective reclamation of space, challenging the status quo and modelling possibilities for occupying presence more fully.
This issue of FemAsia features work that embodies the very refusal to shrink which I have discussed, presenting pieces that take up space unapologetically and exemplify the importance of occupying conversational, emotional, and intellectual space without seeking approval. They insist on presence. They insist on weight. They insist that women’s inner lives are not extra or optional.
If you have been shrinking without being asked, you are not imagining it. Many women do it. It is learnt and inherited. It is reinforced in tiny scenes until it becomes automatic. The question is not, how do I become more confident. The question is, where did I learn to move first, and what would it take to stop?
Sometimes the refusal begins very simply. The next time you feel yourself apologising for taking up time, pause and finish the thought. When a woman is joked over, don’t laugh along. The next time your body rises automatically to serve while others remain seated, stay where you are for one breath longer. Notice the weight of yourself in your chair, the grounded feeling of holding your tea cup warm in your hands, the ordinary objects that remind you that you belong, just as you are.
Let your space be tangible, as substantial as a chair firmly placed at the centre of the room.
