Page 56 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Narrating the self 49
so kind of predictable and expected, do you know what I mean? And yet
I...I think there was part of me that wanted to kind of make it work
and see how far I could take it.
(Interview 22, emphasis mine)

In the narrative, Sally was presented as struggling to be a different subject,
expressed and established through different actions and ways of being. But
the intervention of events, such as getting pregnant, means that she feels she
was drawn into reperforming certain classed and gendered norms. The crea-
tion of subject positions is not a free or voluntaristic process. It is produced
through accessing available material and discursive resources. Sally’s nar-
rative had established some of the ways in which her subjectivity had been
formed in childhood. She had suggested ways in which her life was affected
by class and gender as well as ‘race’. In her first interview, she described the
way ‘race’ influenced her viewpoint as a child:

But I think I was brought up really looking at things through white eyes.
I think it was quite, in some ways it was quite a racist kind of upbringing.
There was a lot of suspicion, a lot of, in a way, yeah, there was kind of
outright derogatory remarks. And it was very much seen as something
which was totally alien to us. We were really white English, you know in
terms of our food and everything I think.
(Interview 7, emphasis Sally’s)

The fact that she characterised the outlook of her childhood in this way
indicates that she had moved away from this position. This raised the ques-
tion that is set up in the narrative itself of how Sally came to have such an
altered outlook on life. On the one hand, Sally suggested, as already men-
tioned, that she had been different from her sisters for a long time (although
she had difficulty pinpointing exactly when or perhaps how). It is interesting
that, in the following extract, the signifiers of difference are classed (classical
music) and racialised (reggae): 6

I can’t remember when but there was some stage when I knew I prob-
ably felt a bit different to my sisters in a way. I remember sort of I’d
spend a lot of time in my room. I did at some point, maybe around the
age of 16 or so, I did develop an interest in sort of music and reading
and stuff, which I’ve still got now. Classical, pop, reggae, I started to get
into all that. Maybe more so a bit later actually.
(Interview 22)
Yet, at the same time, Sally did not claim sole agency or essentialness
for her difference. One of the things that set Sally apart from her sisters
was a very important friendship with a woman. She described meeting this
friend as a key turning point in her life. It occurred when she was working
abroad: