Description
This paper draws on a comparatively underexplored concept in Franz Fanon’s work, specifically how the coloniser’s ‘guilt complex’ manifests in bodily ways, to analyse the role of the phallus in current British anti-immigration discourses. The paper argues that this concept is useful to understand both the fear and the popularity of the phallus as a discursively constructed threat to whiteness. After outlining the Fanonian theoretical framework, the paper offers a broader historical contextualisation of the centrality of the phallus as a symbolic threat to whiteness within the (post-)colonial imaginary. The paper then situates the UK Reform Party’s discursive construction of (non-white) male immigrants as posing a sexual danger to (white) British women in this context. The contribution is twofold: first, the paper contributes to postcolonial IR by highlighting the contemporary relevance of this neglected concept in Fanon’s body of work. Second, the paper contributes to poststructural critiques of popular/populist discourses on immigration and border-crossing by situating (post-)colonial racism against idealised/fantasised bodies representing the nation/Self/female and the foreigner/Other/male.
