Projecting Threat: Managing Subjective Investments in Whiteness

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on the ways in which subjective investments in whiteness work to construct Indigenous people as threats to the white Australian nation. In order to better understand such subjective investments, we employ an approach to analysing talk that draws upon both psychoanalysis and discursive psychology. We suggest that this combination may allow for a thoroughly social understanding of the practices of exclusion within Australia. Through an analysis of white participants talk surrounding Indigenous land claims, we demonstrate the "anxieties of whiteness" that structure the hegemonic intelligible subject positions available to white Australians, particularly within the current political climate. Our aim in paying close attention to the ways in which projections of threat are achieved within everyday talk is to make visible the systems of representation that maintain the hegemony of whiteness in Australia.