Bodies in and out of place: The racialized entanglements of occupying space

Abstract

In the past decades, social scientists have interrogated the racialized machinations of social space. Ahmed (2007), for example, speaks of the ‘Whiteness of space’, wherein White bodies ‘are what lags behind’, sinking into the background and ‘cohering to form the edges of spaces (pg. 156,157)’, but non‐White bodies are fated to be noticed and to be uncomfortably incoherent in space. This research examines the deep entanglements of racialized bodies and space, focusing on two recent ‘disruptions’ of space: the January 6th Capitol attack and the Gaza solidarity encampments. We examined media sources and employed a critical discursive analysis to detail how the occupation of space is categorized and constructed, paying specific attention to how racialized assumptions get discursively (re)produced. We observed that the acts of violence on January 6th, through discursive reproductions of habitus , were imbued with/in White innocence—a habitus not afforded to those involved in the Gaza solidarity encampments. For those participating in the encampments, a habitus of banal terrorism was linguistically and spatially reproduced, whereby the surveillance of the physical space of non‐White and Muslim bodies was routinized. We consider these results within the context of existing critical psychological studies of Whiteness, discourse and race scholarship.