White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, And Gender in Everyday Life

This revealing book explores the processes of racialization, class and gender, and examines how these processes play out in the everyday lives of white women living in London with young children. Bridget Byrne analyzes the flexibility of racialised discourse in everyday life, whilst simultaneously arguing for a radical deconstruction of the notions of race these discourses create. Byrne focuses on the experience of white mothers and their children, as a key site in the reproduction of class, race and gender subjectivities. Examining what they say about themselves and how, as mothers, they have made friends and new social networks and chosen schools for their children, the book asks what this can tell us about whiteness in everyday life. Byrne offers a compelling account of both the experience of motherhood and ideas of white identity. Byrne's research is unique in its approach of exploring whiteness in the context of practices of mothering. She adopts a broad perspective, and her approach provides a suggestive framework for analyzing the racialization of everyday life. The book's multi-layered analysis shifts expertly from intimate acts to those which engage with local and national discourses in more public spaces. Reconsidering white identities through white experiences of race, White Lives will appeal across many disciplines, to students studying sociology, anthropology, race and ethnicity, and cultural studies.Byrne, Bridget is the author of 'White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, And Gender in Everyday Life', published 2006 under ISBN 9780415347129 and ISBN 0415347122.