Page 25 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

18 Troubling ‘race’
However, is ‘race’ also a norm through which bodies, and subjects,
are rendered culturally intelligible? How are subjects constructed not just
through the reiteration of gendered norms but also racialised ones? How
are gendered norms racialised? How are the psychic processes of subjection
racialised? Can one talk of the regulatory apparatus of whiteness (or, as Hall
calls it ‘compulsive Eurocentrism’; Hall 1996: 16) as well as that of hetero-
sexuality? Butler discusses the ways in which a fetus and baby are ‘girled’.
But, just as one cannot enter social processes as an intelligible individual
without being a girl or a boy, one cannot be a person without having a, simi-
larly embodied, racial identity. Indeed, one is a white/black/Asian/mixed-race
girl or boy, and the gendering is racialised as the racing is gendered. The fact
that there are numerous possible descriptions of race – rather than the neat
duality of male/female – does not mean that it is somehow less obligatory or
coerced. If one’s race is not obvious, it will be searched out, and different
definitions will be applied across different cultural and temporal contexts, as
illustrated by Linda Martin Alcoff:

When mythic bloodlines which are thought to determine identity fail
to match the visible markers used by identity discourses to signify race,
one often encounters these odd responses by acquaintances announcing
with arrogant certainty “But you don’t look like . . .” or then retreating
to a measured acknowledgement “Now that you mention it, I can sort
of see . . .” to feel one’s face studied with great seriousness, not for its
(hoped for) character lines, or its distinctiveness, but for its telltale racial
trace, can be a particularly unsettling experience.
(Martin Alcoff 1999: 31)

For Butler, regulatory schemas function as ‘historically revisable criteria
or intelligibility which produce and vanquish bodies that matter’ (Butler
1993a: 14). They achieve their power through citation: ‘the norm of sex
takes hold to the extent to which it is “cited” as such a norm, but it also
derives its power through the citations that it compels’ (Butler 1993a: 134).
This repeated, compulsive citation of the norm is what Butler terms perfor-
mativity. The terminology here is awkward. By performativity, Butler does
not refer to a voluntaristic, self-conscious acting, but practices that serve to
enact and reinforce sets of regulatory norms. She defines performativity
4
as ‘not the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but
rather, as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that
it regulates and constrains’ (Butler 1993a: 2). Through performativity, sub-
jects repeatedly re-enact the discourses through which they are constructed.
Minnie Bruce Pratt, a white woman writing in 1984 about her struggle
to challenge her own racism and anti-semitism, gives an account of some
different experiences of being interpellated as a white woman. This account
is interesting because of the way in which it can be read to suggest ways in
which whiteness is performative. Pratt is compelled to act in certain ways
that are constructed as racialised and thereby serve to emphasise and rein-