Page 78 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Narrating the self 71
accounts reveal the importance of others in the construction of a sense of
self, the influence of contrasting or alternative discourses and perspectives in
forming your subjectivity.
In contrast to Madeleine, Deborah did not have a story of her developing
self because she constructed her experience as so normative that there was
not really a story to tell. Her sense of self was built on suppressing notions
of change or difference within her own life. Deborah presented herself as a
subject with agency and subjectivity, but was not willing to explore ruptures
or contradictions within this. Therefore, the narrative form had little to offer
her as a genre for communicating her subjectivity. Finally, Rosemary lacked
the sense of agency required to see any interest in telling a story of her self.
Her subjectivity was framed by doing, not telling. Therefore, she was not
interested in looking to the past or exploring her sense of self.
These different accounts and their different use or non-use of the narra-
tive form have illustrated some of the complexities involved in understand-
ing and analysing subjectivities and the self. While the renditions of self can
only ever be partial, I would argue that the analysis has shown how even
the personal and individual processes of understanding the self are formed
within racialised, classed and gendered discourses. The next chapter turns
more directly to examination of racialised discourses by exploring the ques-
tion of how race was talked about by the interviewees.