Description
The murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in Woolwich by extremists in 2013 sent shockwaves across Britain, prompting an emotional outpouring unseen since the death of Princess Diana. Over a decade later, and despite numerous terrorist attacks having taken place in the intervening period, Rigby’s death continues to inspire significant public attention each year. Why did Rigby’s murder trigger such an outpouring, and why does it remain politically significant in Britain today? Whereas existing analyses have emphasised the event’s significance as an example of an increasingly unpredictable and fearsome form of terrorism, I argue that the murder’s most significant effect was to generate racialised anxiety around Britishness. Building on recent work in ontological security studies on vicarious identity, icons, and victimhood, I argue that Rigby’s identity as a white, male soldier led to his subsequent social construction by right-wing activists as a martyr object for the experience and expression of more general feelings of ‘vicarious victimhood’ that were initially situated around the juxtaposed figures of the securitized ‘Muslim Other’ and the venerated British soldier. While contested from the beginning, the appropriation of Rigby’s memory has continued since, with his alleged non-memorialisation frequently being juxtaposed with the memorialisation of a range of non-white subjects. Such grievances have prompted annual displays of racialised national defiance designed to reclaim (virtual) spaces. Thus, whereas existing scholarship on icons focuses on identification with living, agentic figures, I argue that dead martyrs vicariously reinforce collective victimhood identities in powerful ways by providing ‘deathly proof’ of victimhood and relatively silent icons that are less able to undermine the ontological security of the collective. Beyond developing our understanding of the case and vicarious identity in (inter)national politics, the paper provides key insights into the evolution of ethnonationalist dynamics that are increasingly at the forefront of British politics.
