Racial embodiment and the affectivity of racism in young people’s film

This article uses a bodily and affective perspective to explore racial minority young people’s experiences of racism, as enacted (on film) through disgust and enjoyment. Applying Žižek’s ideology critical psychoanalytical perspective and Kristeva’s concept of “abjection”, the article considers race embodied, that is the racial body both partly Real (in the Lacanian sense) and a mean for the projection of ideological meanings and discursive structures, which are sustained by specific fantasies. From this perspective, the film’s affective racism is “symptomatic” of the discrepancies between, on the one hand, Danish social democratic welfare state ideology and a dominating race discourse of “equality-as-sameness”, on the other, the Real of racial embodiment, which makes the encounter with the Other traumatic and obscene. The analysis exposes the bodily and affective underside of race relations (which lead attempts to discursively undo racism to fail) and instead seeks to undermine the fantasies that sustain racial power relations.