Page 113 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

106 In search of a ‘good mix’
adorned and managed bodies are produced. In addition, as with ‘race’ and
gender, class is embedded in processes of subjection and in subjectivities.
Class is one of the ways in which subjects come into being, one of the mo-
dalities through which subjectivities are constructed:

Class is not just about the way you talk, or dress, or furnish your home;
it is not just about the job you do or how much money you make doing
it; nor is it merely about whether or not you went to university, nor
which university you went to. Class is something beneath your clothes,
under your skin, in your psyche, at the very core of your being.
(Kuhn 1995: 98)

Beverley Skeggs highlights the intersections between class and gender,
noting ‘the category “woman” is always produced through processes which
include class, and classifying produced very real effects which are lived on
a daily basis’ (Skeggs 1997: 2). In particular, she traces the way feminin-
ity is always classed, representing middle-class respectability, and how this
involves ambivalent identifications or dis-identifications in femininity for
working-class women.
Valerie Walkerdine and Helen Lucey highlight the ways in which mother-
hood and mothering are classed concepts and practices. They argue that
working-class motherhood has been judged negatively against the model
of the middle-class ‘sensitive mother’ (Walkerdine and Lucey 1989). But
motherhood is also raced, with black mothers often cast by public and state
agencies into a model of deviance (see Phoenix 1991). Thus, at the core
of practices of motherhood lie the intersections of ‘race’, class and gender.
The experience of and practices involved in mothering are inescapably and
irreducibly gendered. It is a ‘women’s’ activity and requires individuals to
reorientate their identities, their sense of being as women and their relation-
ship to other women, particularly perhaps their own mothers:

Motherhood is not only about having children. It is about having a
mother; that is, about being mothered too [. . .] the position of the
mother is mediated by desire and longing, and much more complicated
than a biological event or than a role which can be learned.
(Woodward 1997: 243–4)

Motherhood is also classed and raced. In addition, as the material in this
chapter makes clear, much of the work of mothering involves negotiating,
repeating and reciting gendered, classed and raced norms. The everyday
practices of mothers are the performative re-inscriptions of norms. They
are, at least in part, the product of classed, gendered and raced imaginings of
how children are and should be positioned, as well as what mothering and
parenting should be.
The women were interviewed at a particular moment in their lives when