Page 77 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

70 Narrating the self
did not account for her subjectivity through a reflexive narrative. Rather,
she felt and understood her self through her actions and particularly her
mothering. In some sense, her interviews do provide the sense of a narrative.
It is contained in the transformation from (the particularly evocative) ‘street
road worthy’ 4-year-old child ‘trolling’ around the streets to the mother who
is concerned above all to protect her children and keep them away from
‘people outside’.

Conclusion
This chapter has been concerned with how the interviewees did, or did not,
tell the story of their lives. I have argued that the process of producing a
narrative of the self can involve a route into understanding processes of
subjection. Telling a narrative about one’s life involves making oneself the
subject of the story, claiming both intelligibility and agency for oneself. It
often involved taking a particular approach to the self, as experiencing trans-
formation and change. Through examining these accounts of subjection, it
is also possible to analyse how subjects are constructed through raced, gen-
dered and classed discourses.
The first interviewee discussed in this chapter, Sally, demonstrated how
narratives can enact processes of subjection. Sally produced her self as the
subject of a coherent narrative. Gender, ‘race’ and class were clearly impor-
tant in this account. Sally presented herself in processes of being ‘girled’
and/or ‘womaned’. Through this account, we saw her struggling to change
her class position and subjectivity. This transformation was framed within
a story of how she naturally did not fit within that position. Within this
narrative, Sally was not only ‘raced’, but also ‘race’ came to signify her dif-
ference from others. Through her friend, who was not white, and who had
introduced her to new ways of thinking about ‘race’ and herself, Sally said
that her life had been transformed. As a result, she said that she had found
a new way of being.
While Sally’s account provides a dramatic example of how narratives can
illustrate processes of subject construction and subjection, the other three
narratives show in different ways how this is not always the case. Some
selves are not readily reproduced through narrative. The idea of ‘turning
points’ within a life does not always prompt a narrative account of a life.
Madeleine had significant events in her life, but she was not able to use them
to construct a coherent story of the self. This was partially because she oc-
cupied too many (classed, raced and gendered) positions to give a sense of
wholeness and coherence to her self. The event provided points of disruption
to her narrative rather than giving direction and meaning to an unfolding
story. ‘Race’ proved to be one of these disruptions. In the face of challenges
to her whiteness – from a boyfriend – she was forced to look back on her
former selves in a different light and recognise their limited perspectives and
how they were framed by both ‘race’ and class. Both Madeleine’s and Sally’s