Description
This paper will critically investigate the way whiteness is created and circulated in stories about security. Taking The Bodyguard, the latest ‘terrorism drama’ as a case study, I argue that whiteness is articulated through and central to security discourse and practice. In this story we see how whiteness is articulated against racialised others, but also through the post-racial space. This paper will examine the discursive processes by which whiteness comes to be an unmarked racial category and the power secured and wielded through this so-called ‘invisibility’ by considering the way whiteness functions in the narratives of The Bodyguard. Or, as put succinctly by Dyer 2003 it aims to 'make whiteness strange'. This recentering of whiteness is not done in order to direct even more scholarly attention to the practices of straight white men, but to undermine the unchallenged hegemony of whiteness in order to better understand the violences, exclusions and absences that it creates.
