Page 55 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

48 Narrating the self
In that way there was always something a bit different about me to
my sisters, because my sisters now live a very ...I mean, in a way, I
wouldn’t say they’re kind of . . . they got together . . . the two that are
closest to me have definitely got together with people who are from
middle-class backgrounds, with middle-class aspirations, and they have
very good lifestyles. They travel abroad a lot, they have private educa-
tions for their kids and things. So . . . but at the time, I . . . but within
that they’re very . . . they’ve still, I would say, got very narrow views
about most things, sort of quite homophobic and underlying racist and
quite a lot of sexist kind of stuff that to me seems unbelievable. They’ll
look at their watch and say ‘I must get home to get so-and-so’s tea’,
and yet they’re only 30-year old women. I mean, that to me just seems
amazing that people would think like that at that age, but they just do.
So... but I from a young age, was really quite different, I think, and
then the fact that I then went on to do what I did, but I was always the
sort of ...I think from a young age I was the sort of ...I don’t know,
my sisters wanted to take me out to pubs and things and sit with those
kind of rugby types who, if you’re a woman, you’re supposed to sit on
a bar stool and laugh at their jokes. And I would actually question quite
a lot of what they’d said. But that was probably when I had come back
from Spain more. And I was doing my A levels.
(Interview 22, emphasis mine)

Sally set up various differences between herself and her sisters. She sug-
gested that their whiteness, their middle classness and their gender meant
very different things to them and led to the performance of different norms.
She presented them as having an unquestioning relationship to dominant
norms and acting out racism, sexism and homophobia in their everyday
lives. The account was one of rupture. Sally always felt different, and then
‘went on to do what I did’. She did not explain what this was. The rest of her
narrative suggests various possibilities. It might be because she went on to
further education, or that she got involved with alternative and oppositional
culture in the form of squatting organisations (mentioned but not elaborated
on in her narrative), or her relationship with a ‘non-white’ man and the two
children she had with him, or that she does not have a husband or career
to provide the material resources for the middle-class lifestyle they led. In
various ways, she had established her difference from her sisters. At the same
time, for Sally, there was also the fear that this transformation had not been
fully achieved. For instance, when she described her decision to leave her
college course because she had become pregnant, it was clear that she feared
there was an inevitability in her situation which represented an inability to
‘escape’:

I don’t think that sat very well with me because I was probably only the
first person in my family that had ever done a degree, and it really felt
when I was pregnant I’m sure there was part of me that just felt this is