Page 112 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

In search of a ‘good mix’ 105
think people of different backgrounds and different “races” have just sort of
drifted. I mean, if they were ever together in the first place, I don’t know.
There’s no chance really for people getting together’.
Deborah produced a narrative around social differences that not only had
a time dynamic – suggesting that things were different once – but also sug-
gested some of the ways in which differences are constructed and marked.
Differences are classed and conditioned by material resources. They involve
how people look and behave on the street, how they move through the
streets, where they go and what they do. They also influence who interacts
with whom, and how people interact with each other. This chapter explores
one specific intersection of ‘race’, class and gender by looking at what some
of the women I interviewed said about being mothers. The previous chapter
discussed how perceptual practices, ways of seeing and being seen, as well
as the imaginary are formed within discursive frameworks. This chapter will
broaden the scope of analysis to a range of other practices. It will look at the
social lives of the interviewees and their children; how they characterised
their roles as mothers; what they looked for when choosing a school for
their children; how they organised their children’s after-school activities. I
argue that the activities involved in being mothers and bringing up children
can be understood as performative of ‘race’, class and gender. That is, that
practices of mothering are implicated in repeating and re-inscribing classed
and raced discourses. The women, as mothers, are also engaged in gendered
– and gendering – work.
Class, as a discursive construction, maps onto material inequalities and
forms of social exclusion and exploitation. Like ‘race’ and gender, it is also
embodied:

Bodies are the physical sites where the relations of class, gender, race
and sexuality and age come together and are embodied and practised.
A respectable body is white, desexualised, hetero-feminine and usually
middle-class. Class is always coded through bodily dispositions – the
body is the most ubiquitous signifier of class.
(Skeggs 1997: 83)

Class and ‘race’ cannot always be easily disentangled from each other.
Historically, the working classes, perceived as ‘other’ by the normative mid-
dle classes, have been ascribed racialised characteristics (see Cohen 1988).
Sander L. Gilman traces how, in representation, working-class and black
women were ascribed similar positions in relation to deviant sexualities (Gil-
man 1985). ‘Race’ and class are not only inter-related, but can be subject to
a similar analysis. Perceptual practices of seeing (and hearing) difference are
as important in constructing class as they are with ‘race’. Class is inscribed in
bodies, functioning at the level of the visible, both because classed bodies are
different shapes and sizes (see Lawler 1999: 83) and through the functioning
of classed ‘dispositions’ (Bourdieu 1994) or tastes. Through class, differently