Page 60 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Narrating the self 53
pressed” by actions, gestures, or speech, but that the performance of gender
produces retroactively the illusion that there is an inner gender core. That is,
the performance of gender retroactively produces the effect of some true or
abiding feminine essence or disposition, so that one cannot use an expressive
model for thinking about gender’ (Butler 1997a: 144). What is interesting
in Sally’s narrative is that she needed to account for how she achieved this
feeling of her inner core only once she had undergone a transformation. This
sense of rupture led her to articulate her subject position in a narrative that
was framed around tropes of sameness and difference. Through exposure to
difference, of both class and ‘race’, she had found a ‘home’, a place where
she could at least approximate sameness. This enabled her to mark her dif-
ferences from her family, in both who she was and what she did. She was ‘do-
ing’ motherhood differently from her mother and womanhood, whiteness
and middle classness differently from her sisters. One of the means by which
this rupture and transformation was achieved was through the trope of the
transforming encounter with the other. As a result of these encounters, Sally
felt that she now occupied a position where she felt comfortable with herself
and her whiteness (and the ‘non-whiteness’ of her children whose father is
black). Her account ended with a presentation of a subject who had found
completeness and ‘home’:

I have a lot of friends who are from completely different ethnic back-
grounds to me. A lot of black friends who . . . and obviously once you
start being open to people on a much more human level and get to know
people . . . and then obviously my children aren’t white anyway. I think
I came from not knowing anything and being very sheltered to then,
meeting friends and things. So I suppose I feel quite comfortable with
where I am as a white person really.
(Interview 22)

Sally is an example of someone who has a clear narrative of the self. She
set out this narrative chronologically and established its different geographic,
social and political contexts. Her story had a cast of characters whose impor-
tance to herself and her development were made clear. Sally clearly enjoyed
this narrative mode, was an accomplished story-teller and felt comfortable
talking about her life with me. The account is interesting not only because it
demonstrates how the story of a self can be told, but also because of the way
in which the account is gendered, classed and racialised. Part of the story
that Sally wanted to tell was about how she had come to feel ‘comfortable’
with her whiteness and how she had responded to classed positioning and
experiences. She talked less directly about gender. Nonetheless, it is clear
that many of the events she was describing – for instance leaving college to
have a baby and single motherhood – were gendered in significant ways. It
is also interesting how ‘race’ provided a signifier of change in Sally’s narra-
tive. She accounted for her changing subjectivity and altered subject position