Dangerous Muslim Wombs and the Fear of Replacement: Experiences from Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand

Abstract

The ‘white replacement’ (sometimes called ‘white genocide’) conspiracy theory has become a key element of contemporary far-right racist ideology. The white supremacist terrorist who committed mass murder at two Christchurch mosques in March 2019 brought his Islamophobia with him from Australia to New Zealand. His online ‘manifesto’, posted just prior to the massacre, was entitled The Great Replacement, and began with the sentence, ‘It’s the birth rates’ repeated three times. Both Australia and New Zealand are former British white-settler colonies where whiteness remains hegemonic. Both have small Muslim minorities, but have a history of everyday Islamophobia since 9/11, including violence directed against Muslims and their places of worship. Much of this violence has been directed against Muslim women, often more ‘visible’ because of the hijab, itself targeted in Islamophobic ideology as a supposed manifestation of Muslim misogyny and backwardness. Islamophobic vilification has also been explicitly directed at Muslim women, whose dangerous fecundity is portrayed (with wild misrepresentation of demographic reality) as threatening to overwhelm the predominant white, Western national culture. The racist far right calls ritually for drastic counter-measures, with ‘ethnic cleansing’ ranging from violent racist metaphors to actual terrorist murders. In the current global circulation of Islamophobic propaganda, the local articulation of the ‘replacement’ myth in Australia integrates elements of anti-Muslim racism from Eastern Europe and white-supremacist ideology from North America (from Charlottesville 2017 to the Capitol siege in 2021), always in complex intersection with gender relations.