‘Sometimes there’s racism towards the French here’: xenophobic microaggressions in pre-2016 London as articulations of symbolic violence

Abstract

This article discusses xenophobic microaggressions experienced by members of the French community in London prior to the EU-Membership Referendum in 2016. Acting at the interface of agency and passivity, implicitness and complicity, they go unseen in the social space despite their omnipresence. Through a close reading of empirical data collected as part of an ethnographic study, the article posits that these microaggressions are articulations of historically embedded anti-French ‘symbolic violence’. The three main areas addressed are humour, intersectionality and the reproductive nature of the phenomenon.