Page 184 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Notes 177
mean that the term race is not frequently used, either explicitly or implicitly, in
a biologically essentialist manner.
2 Vikki Bell (1999a) makes this argument strongly in considering Judith Butler
and anti-semitism, but there is a risk here that race and ethnicity are being used
as interchangeable/identical terms. The argument Bell makes for ethnic identity
may hold less strongly for ‘race’, which generally fails to escape biological es-
sentialist articulations. It is less easy to change or reject a racial identity than a
religious affiliation and less easy to be intelligible without a racial identity.
3In Excitable Speech (1997b), Butler examines legal and political responses to
hate speech, including race hate. In this work, she explores the performativity of
racialised speech, rather than of ‘race’ itself.
4 This aspect of Butler’s work has often been misunderstood, particularly in re-
sponse to Gender Trouble (1990), which prompted studies embracing the idea of
‘stylised’ performance and, in particular, the subversive potential of drag. Sara
Ahmed, in noting the later re-emphasis of Butler’s work on performativity, and
considering the case of racialised ‘passing’ (where those normally positioned
as non-white are able to ‘pass’ for white), questions discourses that tend ‘to
position “passing” as a radical and transgressive practice that serves to desta-
bilise and traverse the system of knowledge and vision upon which subjectivity
and identity precariously rests’ (Ahmed 1999: 88). She goes on to argue that ‘I
do think that there is a failure to theorise, not the potential for any system to
become destabilised, but the means by which relations of power are secured,
paradoxically, through this very process of destabilisation’ (Ahmed 1999: 89).
5 For a discussion of borderlands, see Anzaldua (1987).
6 This accounts for the phenomenon of racial ‘passing’ (see Derricote 1997; Twine
1997; Ahmed 1999).
7 Gilman also traces how, with the development of aesthetic surgery, attempts
were made to modify these ‘different’ looks.
8 See for example Vron Ware’s discussion of literary representations of the ‘fool-
hardy’ colonial woman whose muddled thinking on race often results in tragedy
or even death (Ware 1992: 232).
9 For reviews of the literature within ‘race studies’, see Solomos and Back (1994);
Bulmer and Solomos (1998); Bonnett (1999); Back and Solomos (2000).

3 Talk, tea and tape recorders
1 Initially, I was open to talking to ‘parents’, i.e. both mothers and fathers. But it
quickly became clear that fathers as primary carers (which was who I wanted to
speak to) were hard to come by. It is likely that accounts of men and fatherhood
would have produced different results.
2 Census information is used here only as a very rough guide, in that there are
many problems with the way the information is elicited, particularly in the case
of racial identity. See Ifekwunigwe (1997) for a discussion of the 1991 census’s
failure to accommodate mixed-race identities.
3 An additional ten interviews were carried out with women in the pilot stage of
the research who either were not white or did not live in the two areas. These in-
terviews proved useful and have been drawn on in the study (and this chapter).
4 One o’clock clubs are run by local authorities and provide a room with toys,
books and art equipment and also an open space with toys and equipment where
parents can come with their children to play. The clubs are free and drop in (i.e.
do not require regular attendance) and parents must stay with their children.
5 Class position is notoriously difficult to capture, particularly if class is under-
stood to reach beyond economic position (Bourdieu 1994). Classifications of