ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author argues that the participants' long-term interaction with Lebanese Muslim holiday-makers from Western Sydney during peak season produced a perception of Lebanese Muslim body techniques as inferior, outsider and, for some, unwanted. Incompatible embodiment and everyday rituals, body techniques and modes of using public space were the primary source of tension. For some of the participants, sensuous experiences of difference and encounters with 'incivility' were racialized as essential to Lebanese–Muslimness and, in some circumstances, translated into Islamophobic practices. The participants' everyday talk about Lebanese Muslims revealed the latter's racialized habitus, and how 'flipping' between the fields of class, gender, religion and ethnicity converted their 'embodied capacities' into negative capital. Using Hage's White Nation theoretical framework in multicultural Australia, the author explores why it is that the number of 'Lebanese Muslim' bodies, the type of bodies and embodied practices surface as clear points of difference and, in some cases, friction.
