Page 185 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

178 Notes
‘middle’ or ‘working’ class in this research are intended as broad brush desig-
nations based on a combination of economic position, educational and social
background and cultural outlook.
6 See Domínguez (1986), Cohen (1988), Allen (1994), Ignatiev (1995), Haney
López (1996), Squires (1997) and Bonnett (1998).
7 See Tizard and Phoenix (1993), Ahmed (1997), Ifekwunigwe (1997) and Twine
(1997).
8 All names have been changed to provide anonymity.
9 In quotations from interviews, pauses or gaps in speech are donated by ‘. . .’ and,
where speech has been omitted, this is in square brackets: ‘[. . .]’.
10 While several white interviewees said that it was interesting to be offered the
opportunity to think about things that there wasn’t usually time or motivation
for, this contrasted with Claudia, a ‘mixed-race’ respondent who said ‘the ques-
tions were fine. It just made me think about things I just think about all the time
anyway’ (Interview 6).
11 See Appendix 2 for general areas for discussion.
12 Chapter 4 examines the question of the production of narrative in detail.
13 This will be illustrated more fully in Chapter 6, ‘In search of a “good mix”’.
14 See Acker et al. (1991) for a discussion of some of the problems of including
research subjects in analysis.
15 This concept will be discussed further in Chapter 5.

4 Narrating the self
1 See Byrne (2003) for further discussion of narrative.
2 This phrase is from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak quoted in Butler (1993a: 122).
3 See S. Hall (1992) and Weedon (1997) for a fuller account of the challenges to
the Enlightenment subject.
4 This contrasts with other interviewees who cited their mothers as an important
influence on them. See for example the following extract from Teresa: ‘I have
a very strong mother who was a wonderful mother and there was a very strong
sense of security through our childhood, and I guess I would want to replicate
that’ (Interview 18). Even for those who were more ambiguous about their par-
ents, they often did provide a benchmark for comparison, for instance their
styles of mothering – see for example Madeleine later in this chapter.
5 See also Chamberlain (1997).
6 See Chapter 6 for a further discussion of the significance of music as a signifier
of class.
7 Chanfrault-Duchet also suggests that a narrative may not be produced because
of the ‘attitude of both members of the interaction’. In my own research, there
were cases where it was clear that the interviewee did not want to tell her life
story, perhaps particularly to me.
8 Part of the reason for the difference between the interview with Rosemary and
that with, for example, Sally or Madeleine must surely lie in the ways in which
they responded to me as an interviewer. It is likely that Sally related to me more
or less as a peer, someone who at least had similar interests and whom she felt
had a broadly similar social position, in terms of gender, class, race and perhaps
even economic status. She said that she enjoyed the interview, and it was clearly
a style of encounter – where you explore aspects of your life with an empathetic
listener – with which she was familiar. Rosemary must have been conscious of
the class difference between us. Here before her was a middle-class woman (who
had been introduced to her by a middle-class parent at her daughter’s school),
who was in further education and wanted to ask her personal questions. It may