Beyond the Figure of the Problem Gambler: Locating Race and Sovereignty Struggles in Everyday Cultural Spaces of Gambling

As gambling has become a ubiquitous feature of many neoliberal capitalist societies, the problem gambler has become a familiar cultural figure, invoked in regulation, popular culture and everyday life. This article brings critical research on governmentality together with cultural studies and critical Indigenous scholarship on whiteness, race and sovereignty to understand the racial biopolitics of gambling beyond the individual subject of problem gambling. I argue that, for settler-colonial states, gambling plays a role in maintaining tropes of cultural representation and securing legal and political power within an overarching system of white racial entitlement. An investigation of cultural spaces and products of gambling in Australia, together with close readings of Indigenous creative works, ties the figure of the problem gambler to broader processes of what Goldberg calls ‘racial neoliberalism’. I show how this figure becomes a metonym for dysfunctional consumption, is harnessed to racially targeted welfare reforms, and used to undermine the rights of Indigenous people, both as gamblers and as sovereign political and legal subjects