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Bodies That Matter: Performing White Possession on the Beach
Abstract
In this article I examine how white possession functions ontologically and performatively within Australian beach culture through the white male body as lifesaver, surfer, and soldier. I draw on Butler’s idea of performativity in that a culturally determined and historically contingent act that is internally discontinuous is only real to the extent that it is repeated. Raced and gendered norms of subjectivity are iterated in different ways through performative repetition in specific historical and cultural contexts. National, racial, and sexual subjects are in this sense both doings and things done.