Page 34 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Troubling ‘race’ 27
the accounts of a set of women who were positioned and identified relatively
unproblematically as ‘white’. The interviews will be examined in various
ways in order to examine some of the practices, discourses and processes
of subjection that combine to produce white, female subjects. Although I
asked the women about their perceptions and experiences, the analysis of
this requires different readings of their accounts. In the following chapters, I
will look at how the women negotiated questions of seeing and talking about
‘race’ in their everyday lives and particularly in their practices as mothers.
I will also explore some of the different ways in which ‘race’ and racial
tropes, such as the threatening young black man and the racialisation of
location, were imagined. I will examine how some of the women produced
or failed to produce a narrative of the self and how these accounts were
racialised, gendered and classed. The mothering practices of the interview-
ees are explored in a further chapter and, finally, the question of collective,
national identity is examined. The next chapter explains the approach I took
in finding and talking to the women I interviewed. It also gives a sense of the
context in which the study took place and how the process of analysis was
undertaken.