Page 59 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

52 Narrating the self
The figure of Joy played a key role in Sally’s story of herself. By entering
into Sally’s life, she had enabled her to be something that she was not previ-
ously. Sally attributed herself only very limited agency in this story. Her teen-
age desire for a man to rescue her appears to be merely replaced by the figure
of Joy. The significance of Joy’s racial positioning was ambiguous in Sally’s
account. On the one hand, as we have seen above, the fact that Joy ‘wasn’t
white’ was part of the reason why Sally began to question the assumptions
that she was brought up with. At other points, Sally herself denied that Joy’s
racial positioning meant anything to her:

The thing that struck me that was really different about her was mainly
her pace of life, and her self-confidence and the way that she did things.
I can’t ever remember being aware of the whole colour thing with that
particular family. I mean, they’re very, very London, quite Cockney sort
of... you know, it’s much more to do with London, it sort of feels like
now than it did to be a total cultural difference. And it could have been
that I was aware of the colour thing, of course it could, but no, it wasn’t
like that.
(Interview 22)

Sally presented the differences that excited her in Joy as being nothing
to do with ‘race’. Yet at the same time, she mentioned characteristics such
as energy (‘pace of life’) and spirit (self-confidence) that are often attributed
to (and desired in) the racial other (hooks 1992; Dyer 1997). Part of the
difference that Joy offered to Sally was not just racialised but also classed.
Through her influence, she decided to go back to studying. Through Joy
she met a group of people who were involved in alternative squatter and
anarchist culture in London and who had very different class positions
from Sally’s own and the friends she had had before. Sally contrasted her
working-class background and its ‘narrowness’ with that of her middle-class
friends. She constructed a discourse of ‘coming home’, naturalising the shifts
she has undergone in her life along the line of having been a square peg in
a round hole:

It’s like a real coming home feeling, that all of that narrowness just
doesn’t make sense. And actually to be very open to learning new things
all the time and having different experience, I suppose, and not being
shut off to things that are really important. So, after a while, yeah, it was
a real . . . it felt really like the right place for me to be.
(Interview 22)
These different performances of class or a different position felt for Sally
as though she had achieved naturalness or found her inner core. For Butler,
the nature of the performative is that it produces feelings of naturalness: ‘I
argued that gender is performative, by which I meant that no gender is “ex-