Page 19 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

12 Knowing ‘whiteness’
tion. This book is concerned with formations of whiteness that remain more
firmly at the centre of public discourses of class, gender and ‘race’. In these
constructions, whiteness tends not to be an explicit, proclaimed identity
as is sometimes expressed within certain working-class discourses. Rather,
whiteness functions as a silent or unmarked norm, which serves to exclude
and marginalise others, and yet is critical to the construction of the white
metropolitan subject as normative.
This research attempts to address the intersections of ‘race’, class and
gender in normative constructions of whiteness. It examines the accounts
of women, both working and middle class, who would not identify them-
selves as racists, and who are also not engaged in what Back identifies as
the ‘liminal space’ of some youth cultures (Back 1996: 244). Through these
accounts, it is possible to examine a different range of racialised, classed and
gendered practices from those of young people which were also taking place
in different locations. As will be explained in more detail in Chapter 3, this
research involves interviews with a selection of women who are located in
particular places (in two areas of London) at a particular moment of their
lives. All the women interviewed were mothers of young children. The fact
that they were occupied with bringing up their children meant that they
were engaged in a specific range of activities, located in spaces that include
both domestic and public locales.
Through their experience as mothers and through their children, the in-
terviewees also have a specific range of concerns, which involve negotiating
classed, raced and gendered discourses. Therefore, these women offer very
different experiences and configurations of whiteness than those most often
researched. They offer the possibility of exploring how racialisation plays
a part not only in the construction of self, but also in practices of mother-
ing. The women’s accounts also suggest the need for a range of approaches
to analyse racialised identities and experience. Rather than focusing on the
production of discourse in interactional settings, this research has involved
in-depth interviews on an individual basis, in which interviewees were asked
to reflect on their sense of self, on their past as well as their present activities.
These more reflective interviews proved to be a rich source of material on
how ‘race’, class and gender figure in the practices and imaginaries of both
middle- and working-class white women living in London.

Summary of the book
The next chapter, ‘Troubling “race”’, is concerned with questions of iden-
tification, taking identities to be discursive constructions, never complete
and always in production. Examination of processes of identification require
an understanding of both how subject positions are constructed (including
through racialised, classed and gendered discourses) and how individuals
come to occupy those subject positions. It is in this context that the chapter
sets out an approach to studying the salience of ‘race’ within identifications