Discourse in right-wing and centre-right French opinion journalism often frames groups labelled as “Muslim immigrants” through narratives of cultural crisis and symbolic threat, despite the imprecision of this category. Rather than treating terms such as “multiculturalism” or “political correctness” as descriptive policy concepts, this study analyses them as discursive signifiers mobilized to structure political meaning and legitimize exclusion. Based on a corpus of 100 French opinion texts, the article examines how these signifiers reorganize self–other relations by portraying the national subject as constrained, silenced, or victimized, while Muslim-identified groups are depicted as conditionally accepted yet persistently suspect. Drawing on discourse-theoretical insights informed by Lacanian concepts of trauma and lack, the analysis suggests that within this corpus contemporary media narratives rework classical Orientalist hierarchies through a discursive shift toward self-victimization and affect-driven framing. This post-Orientalist configuration reproduces othering indirectly by translating socio-political anxieties into moralized narratives of loss, repression, and threatened national identity.
Song et al. (Tue,) studied this question.