Degeneracy and replacement: reproducing white settler anxieties in the 21st century

Western European nations and their settler colonies have long held anxieties about corrupting a white able-bodied heterosexual cisgender populous. For hundreds of years, white Europeans and settlers have found new ways to collectively fret about degenerative sexual and reproductive practices that would deplete white racial hygiene. This chapter tracks white settler anxieties around replacement and degeneracy in so-called Australia into the 21st century. Particularly as they manifest across global impositions of coloniality. Implementing a discursive analysis comprised of anti-colonial and Indigenous thought, the chapter examines a history of eugenics in so-called Australia and how settlers systematically control and contain populations they deem degenerate. Then, the chapter considers how white settlers violently enact fears of replacement on Indigenous and non-white people. On the one hand, white settlers intervene in Indigenous lives as part of a regime of settler colonial replacement - to harm and eliminate Indigenous peoples with the goal of replacing us. On the other, white settlers are profoundly anxious about being replaced by other non-white populations. Ultimately, the chapter concludes, degeneracy and replacement are still significant and driving anxieties for white settler behaviours in the 21st century.