Drawing on interviews with white middle-class mothers, this article examines the ways in which mothering involves practices and identities which are classed, raced and gendered. In particular, it focuses on the construction and articulation of middle-classness with whiteness. The article examines the women’s descriptions of how they constructed social networks as mothers, chose schools for their children and planned their after-school activities. It argues that these activities involved in being mothers and bringing up children can be understood as performative of race, class and gender.That is, practices of mothering are implicated in repeating and re-inscribing classed and raced discourses
Citizenship tests are designed to ensure that new citizens have the knowledge required for successful ‘integration’. This article explores what those who have taken the test thought about its content. It argues that new citizens had high levels of awareness of debates about immigration and anti-immigration sentiment. Considering new citizens’ views of the test, the article shows how many of them are aware of the role of the test in reassuring existing citizens of their fitness to be citizens. However, some new citizens contest this positioning in ‘acts of citizenship’ where they assert claims to citizenship which are not necessarily those constructed by the state and implied in the tests. The article will argue that the tests and the nature of the knowledge required to pass them serve to retain new citizens in a position of less-than-equal citizenship which is at risk of being discursively (if less often legally) revoked.
This paper explores the contested and racialised nature of Englishness as a national identity. Based on qualitative interviews of white mothers in London, the paper examines the different ways in which the interviewees positioned themselves in relation to concepts of Englishness. National identity involves ways of being, a sense of place and belonging. It is produced through forms of myth-making and narrative production which depend on particular constructions of time and space. This paper examines how nation-ness is imagined and lived by the interviewees. It asks how constructions of Englishness related to constructions of the self and how imaginings of belonging involved imagining of otherness. It also describes how, for some of the interviewees, the domestic, particularly in notions of cleanliness and dirt, as well as food and consumption, was a key metaphor for explaining their relationship to national identity.
Drawing on accounts from interviews with white women, this article explores the production of narratives of the self. It suggests that the story produced of the self is not inevitable and may revolve around notions of sameness and difference that, in turn, depend on the positionality of individuals in terms of normative discourses of `race', class and gender. Sally can be seen to be reciting the process of subjection in the way she creates herself as the subject of a narrative, using tropes of difference and sameness to explain who she is and who she is not. However, for the others, the norms and conventions of lifestory do not conform with their experiences of subjection. This is because, in the case of Madeleine, she does not experience an easily retold sense of herself, while Deborah appears to want to present herself as so inevitable and conforming to dominant norms that there is no story to tell.
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