An Unnerving Otherness: English Nationalism and Rusedski’s Smile

In view of scholarly work that has explored the socio-psycho significance of national performativity, the body and the “other,” this article critically analyses newspaper representations of the Canadian-born British tennis player Greg Rusedski. Drawing on Lacanian interpretations of the body, it illustrates how Rusedski’s media framing centered on a particular feature of his body – his “smile.” In doing so, we detail how Rusedski’s “post-imperial” Otherness – conceived as a form of “extimacy” (extimité) – complicated any clear delineation between “us” and “them,” positing instead a dialectical understanding of the splits, voids and contradictions that underscore the national “us.”