Page 20 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Knowing ‘whiteness’ 13
and in the everyday, while at the same time destabilising the category of
‘race’ itself. It argues that Judith Butler’s combination of Foucauldian and
psychoanalytic approaches to gender has important implications for the
analysis of ‘race’ and particularly for an understanding of the intersections
between ‘race’, class and gender. Thus, ‘race’ is proposed to be performative
– that is, that the concept itself, and its lived nature, is produced through
the reiteration and recitation of racialised and racialising discourses. The
chapter further argues that a range of perceptual practices – especially those
centred around the visual – are particularly important to the construction of
‘race’ and in the repetition of racialised discourses.
In the final introductory chapter, ‘Talk, tea and tape recorders’, the con-
text of the fieldwork is given. This chapter gives a thumbnail sketch of the
areas where the study took place. It also raises questions of power and ac-
countability in interviewing and fieldwork, as well as a further consideration
of the politics of research on whiteness.
Chapter 4, ‘Narrating the self’, explores the production or non-produc-
tion of a narrative of self in four interviews. This chapter will suggest that
the production of a narrative of self is not inevitable and requires a sense of
coherence and difference, both of which may be produced through racial-
ised discourses.
Questions around racialised performativity are taken up in Chapter 5,
‘Seeing, talking, living “race”’. In discussions with mothers about children’s
attitudes to ‘race’, the question of perceptual practices is discussed as well
as the extent to which ‘race’ is a subject that white women prefer to ignore
or avoid. This chapter also examines aspects of the white imaginary, with a
particular focus on gendered responses to blackness, which mix both fear
and desire. It also explores the ways in which London is experienced as a
racialised place and produces racialised subjects.
Chapter 6, ‘In search of a good ‘mix’. ‘Race’, class and gender and prac-
tices of mothering’, moves from the realm of the imaginary back towards
questions of practice. This chapter examines the practices of mothering of
a group of middle-class women based in one area of London. The chapter
focuses on two aspects of mothering –social activities of mothers and chil-
dren, and choices around schooling and education. It explores the processes
of inclusion and exclusion which are both classed and raced.
Collective identities are explored in Chapter 7, ‘How English am I?’. This
chapter examines the different ways in which interviewees positioned them-
selves in relation to a concept of Englishness that is both classed and raced.
This chapter will explore not only how constructions of Englishness are re-
lated to constructions of the self, but also how, for some of these women, a
key metaphor for explaining their relationship to national identity was that
of the domestic.
Several themes run through this book and are taken up in different ways
in the various chapters. They concern not only the way in which lives are
lived, but also the ways in which selves are narrated and imagined. In order