Domestic belongings: Intimate security and the racial politics of scale

This article aims to explore the phenomenon of White ressentiment in recent Australian politics by tracing the affective mobilization of ‘home’ in the political backlash against multiculturalism through government and media discourse. Beginning with the rise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation, the first section draws on Lauren Berlant’s work in order to recast Hansonism as an intimate public that utilized ‘home’ as a means of fostering affective identification with White belonging in a multicultural context. The following section explores how Hansonism centred the national imaginary upon a White domesticity, which functioned to create a correspondence between the White family home and the Australian nation. In doing so, Hansonism refashioned migrant (particularly Asian) homes as being unheimlich to the nation. The third section traces how this ‘homely nation’ continued to affect race politics under John Howard’s national security agenda. The conclusion reflects on two arguments that emerge through the article, which give the article its subtitle. The first concerns what I term ‘intimate security’ by which I signal the ways in which domains of security and intimacy converge. I argue that the stability, comfort and intimacy associated with the family home and family values become emblematic of the secure nation such that public insecurity is often felt as a nostalgia for a lost home. However, this intimate security is founded upon a White domesticity, such that non-White migrants are rendered unheimlich to the nation. The term ‘racial politics of scale’ is used to render the ways in which scalar imaginaries are used to secure particular configurations of race.