Whiteness and its discontents: Notes on politics, gender, sex and food in the year of Hanson¹

This essay was written in October 1998 and deliberately has not been updated since then.

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to begin to unpack whiteness in the context of the current ‘race debate’, to suggest some of the historical dimensions of this racial formation in Australia, and to point to the fissures that both underlie and structure the seemingly unified category of whiteness. Drawing on media commentary, popular culture and theoretical discussions of whiteness that have appeared in US and European contexts, whiteness is discussed here as a series of investments and interests also unevenly inflected by factors such as class, ethnicity and gender. ‘The ideology of ‘white interests,’ in John Gabriel's words, ‘has been built around and harnessed to ideas of economic security, prosperity, ontological security, and a sense of local and and/or national belonging.’ The range of responses to Hansonism reveals how competing white identities conflict as well as collude with one another, forging alliances and oppositions in order to maintain and reshape historically constituted ‘white interests’. In the process, whiteness is both productively materialised as well as consolidated. In the final section of the essay, I identify some of the means by which strategic mobilisations of ‘difference’ also function to both challenge and reaffirm whiteness.

Notes

This essay was written in October 1998 and deliberately has not been updated since then.