Page 23 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

16 Troubling ‘race’
impact on human experience. The enduring power of race as a way of divid-
ing people means that it continues to have effects: ‘although we might say
there is no such thing as race as the intrinsic property of bodies, this does not
mean that race does not exist, as an effect of the very way in which we think,
know and inhabit the world’ (Ahmed 2002: 47). Drawing on the work of
Judith Butler on the construction of sex and gender categories and identities
and gender performativity, this chapter examines the possibility of using the
concept of performativity to move away from essentialist notions of identity.
It argues that ‘race’ needs to be understood as an embodied performative.
That is, that the repeated citation of racialised discourses and, importantly,
the repetition of racialised perceptual practices produces bodies and subjects
that are raced. What is critical here is that these practices produce the idea
of differences, rather than being an effect of them. ‘Race’ is in the eye of the
beholder. Thus, this chapter will discuss the shifting nature of perceptual
practices that produce racialised seeing, as well as the ways in which subjects
are positioned as visible or invisible within racialised schema.

Deconstructing, de-essentialising and troubling ‘race’
Judith Butler is concerned with the ways in which the body (and therefore
the experience of the body) are discursively constructed. Butler grants
neither sex nor gender a material ‘reality’ (which is not to say that there
is no material body, only that it is not experienced prior to or outside of
discourse). The construction of gender (and hence the establishment of the
norms of sexual difference) is achieved through the continual reiteration and
‘performance’ of particular discourses:

gender proves to be performative – that is, constituting the identity it
is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a
doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed . . . . There is
no gender identity behind the expressions of gender . . . gender is per-
formatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ which are said to be its
results.
(Butler 1990: 24–5)

What is the impact of racialising this formulation? Can we do so without
reserving primacy for sexual difference? Butler points out that assuming
the primacy of sexual difference is what marks psychoanalytic feminism as
white ‘for the assumption here is not only that sexual difference is more
fundamental, but that there is a relationship called “sexual difference” that
is itself unmarked by race’ (Butler 1993a: 181). There may well be problems
in trying to translate too closely Butler’s formulations on gender to race. 2
Nonetheless, it is important to trace how ‘white’, ‘black’ or ‘brown’ bodies
and identities are produced and how they are produced as gendered. If we
were to consider racialising Butler’s position, it would become: ‘there is no