Page 53 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

46 Narrating the self
in her life story. Her account also suggested the social availability of certain
accounts of classed and raced transformation (see Lawler 2002).
Sally grew up, as she said in the extract quoted at the beginning of the
chapter, in a small village. She described her family as one that had prob-
lems, particularly in communication, many of which she associated with a
working-class background:

I would say though that the kind of set-up I come from, I wouldn’t ...for
me personally, I wouldn’t just say oh that’s quite a dysfunctional fam-
ily. I would say, that’s got lots of working-class stuff running through
it, personally. Do you know what I mean, about things like education,
not necessarily . . . especially at that time maybe, not necessarily being a
priority and seeing how one thing might lead on to another.
(Interview 22)

The problems with the family were focused particularly around Sally’s
father: ‘my dad was just terribly restricted by this awful difficulty he had
in just relating’. There is a suggestion in the account that at least some of
these problems with her father were related to gender and sexuality. Her
father was represented as at times domineering: ‘he was really controlling,
and he was the sort of person, you’d be watching something on TV and he
would come and turn the TV over’, but also as a protective figure, willing
to drive long distances to pick her up, for instance, when she needed him
to. In contrast to the domineering father, Sally’s mother was presented as
largely passive and lacking agency. Sally described how her mother failed to
intervene in the worsening dynamic between the father and children in an
effort to protect her relationship with her father. Rather than describing her
mother as a role model, or as someone who played an active role in shaping
her behaviour, Sally suggested that she and her sisters developed in opposi-
tion to her mother: 4

I think we’re quite a force to be reckoned with, me and my sisters. We’re
all sort of strong-minded, quite loud and assertive, and my mum just
isn’t like that. You know, like now, she wouldn’t dare do lots of things if
one of my sisters was coming round.
(Interview 22)

The main protagonists in the earlier part of the narrative were Sally and
her sisters. They were sometimes described (as above) as if they formed one
unit. Again, the sisters acted as one when they decided to leave home:
So, then things went really wrong, and one day there was an argument
about something [. . .] and we put our viewpoint and we ended up get-
ting into an argument with my dad, and he said, ‘well, if you don’t like