Page 52 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Narrating the self 45
of subjecthood. By creating the subject of a narrative, explaining who she
is and who she is not, as well as by accounting for how she came to be,
Sally, in the first case study, recited processes of subjection. However, for the
others, the norms and conventions of narrative did not conform with their
experiences of subjection; either because they did not experience an easily
retold sense of themselves, or because they wished to present themselves as
so inevitable and conforming to dominant norms that there was no story to
tell. Discourses of ‘race’, class and gender are all implicated in these different
renderings of the self.

A story to tell

Sally – transformation of the self
Sally’s narrative of her self was produced in the second interview that I
undertook with her. In the first, she had already spoken about her children
and how she felt about being a mother and living in London. This had also
involved talking to some extent about her childhood and life history. In this
interview, I said that I wanted to go back over her life in a little more detail,
and suggested that she might want to begin chronologically. She stuck to this
approach throughout a long account. This was not always the case in the
interviews I undertook. Some interviewees would specifically say that they
were not going to take a chronological approach or others would begin at a
beginning, but then make links back and forth in time as the story unfolded.
I think the chronological approach appealed to Sally as it enhanced particu-
lar aspects of the story that she was seeking to tell. The main thrust of her
narrative was to establish her difference from her family and to account for
the changes in her life and values. Sally’s account charted, in Raphael Samu-
el’s words, ‘progress from darkness to light. Here the past serves as a kind of
negative benchmark by which later achievement is judged, and the narrative
is one of achievement rather than loss’ (Samuel and Thompson 1990: 9).
Both interviews with Sally were littered with phrases that emphasised trans-
formation: ‘[I] forged my own identity’; ‘[I] grew up in a vacuum’; ‘[studying
sociology] presented me with another side of things . . . [and] was quite a big
change for me, at that stage’; ‘I looked back and thought that it was very nar-
row’; ‘just going out into the big wide world, leaving my little tiny village’; ‘I
had different experiences and I had my eyes opened up in a different way’;
‘I feel like having come from the other side’; ‘I’ve gone beyond it’; ‘I came
from not knowing anything and being very sheltered’; ‘it does feel like I’ve
come from one world into another in a way’. In the account, Sally allocated
both her background and her current situation certain racialised, classed and
gendered features. In this way, through the account, she occupied differ-
ent subject positions governed by different norms and discourses. Class and
‘race’ in particular became tropes that marked or dramatised the ruptures