Page 50 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Narrating the self 43
been of significance at the time. Her vagueness about these events seemed
to demonstrate that they were of little importance to the Sally of the time of
the interview. She was separating herself from the child who took (or did not
take) the exams. In the narrative, Sally presented an ambiguous relationship
between her present self and her past selves. On the one hand, Sally often
distanced herself from the events and the person who experienced them. For
example, she continually speculated on what this character did or felt (for
instance, seeing a man with pornographic magazines ‘probably did scare us’)
but without claiming ownership of the memories. Yet, at the same time, Sally
was constructing a narrative for her younger self that tried to make sense of
where she was at the time of the interview, for instance by demonstrating her
difference from her family from a young age.
This negotiation between the self of the present and the self/selves of the
past is an inherent part of telling one’s life story. To be asked about one’s life
is, to some extent, to be asked to give an account of one’s self. It is also to
produce an account that is explicitly or implicitly a story, an act of creation.
In telling the story of her self, the narrator claims the position of the subject
for her fictionalised self and accounts for her subjectivity. This book is con-
cerned with how white subjectivities are produced through the working of
racialised, gendered, sexed and classed norms. By asking interviewees to give
an account of their lives, I was opening up an avenue to examine processes
of subjection. Producing a narrative of one’s life, representing one’s self,
involves to a certain extent repeating processes of subjection. One must con-
struct oneself as the subject of the story and, in doing so, claim intelligibility
and agency. The fiction of the whole coherent self is created, but it can also
be undermined in the telling. This chapter will ask to what extent providing
a narrative of the self involves individuals positioning themselves as raced,
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classed and gendered subjects. In particular, it will examine the extent to
which whiteness is produced in the accounts.
Donald E. Polkinghorne describes ‘self-narratives’ as the ways ‘individuals
construct private and personal stories linking diverse events of their lives into
unified and understandable wholes. These are stories about the self. They are
the basis of personal identity and self-understanding and they provide an-
swers to the question “Who am I?”’ (Polkinghorne 1991: 135). Approaching
these accounts as narratives suggests acknowledgement of the constructed,
flexible and fictionalised nature of the process of accounting for the self.
However, this still leaves the question of what is involved in constructing a
‘unified and understandable whole’ out of the diverse events of a life. Is this
inevitable or, indeed, always possible to achieve? What is behind the posing
and answering of the question ‘Who am I’? How does an individual come
to occupy the site of the subject implied by such a question? What ‘enabling
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violations’ does this involve? What is claimed and enabled by taking up this
position as a speaking subject, and what is repressed? Paul Ricoeur stresses
the importance of an ‘examined’ or ‘recounted’ life: