1 'Troubling race. Using Judith Butler's work to think about racialised ...

are positioned as white? What is race and racialisation? ‘Race’ as a concept has been
scientifically, politically and philosophically repudiated. Biologically speaking, it is a
meaningless concept. Yet it continues to have a profound impact on people’s lives. In
Britain at least, it effects educational outcomes, job prospects, relations with the police
and justice system, political participation, safety on the street and in homes and personal
relations. How can this paradox be understood and dealt with? How can we acknowledge
and analyse the salience of race in people’s lives without re-endowing the concept itself
with “respectability” and essential meaning? How can I examine the experience of people
as racialised without adhering to concepts produced by racist ideologies?
In order to try to resolve this problem I have turned to the work of Judith Butler to see
what she has to offer the analysis of race and identity. 1 To some extent, what I am
attempting is a ‘translation’ Judith Butler’s work to the analysis of race. Whilst this is
something that I argue Butler would herself advocate, translations are never
straightforward, as this paper will illustrate. Race and gender are not necessarily
comparable concepts and indeed they intersect and are often mutually constitutive. At the
same time as making this theoretical move, I want to keep in the mind’s eye, those lives
in which ‘race’ and racialised identities have had a profound impact. In fact my thesis is
trying to argue for further examination of the processes of racialisation on lives which are
often considered to be untouched or ‘unblemished’ by race - that of people positioned as
white.
I will begin by drawing out the implications of Butler’s work for my research. I will then
go on to trace how some of the questions raised by this theoretical approach emerged in
the interviews I undertook for my fieldwork.
Butler’s book Gender Trouble is concerned with examining how gender categories are
produced by discursive regimes rather than being ontological categories. For Butler, the
categories of man, woman, heterosexual, homosexual are not essential or inherent
characteristics but are the “effects of a specific formulation of power” (pix). Butler is
concerned with the ways in which the body (and therefore the experience of the body) are
discursively constructed. Butler grants neither sex nor gender a material ‘reality’ (which
is not to say that there is no material body, only that it is not experienced prior to or
outside of discourse). The construction of gender (and thereby the establishment of the
norms of sexual difference) is achieved through the continual reiteration and
‘performance’ of particular discourses. Butler writes “gender proves to be performative -
that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a
doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed .... There is
no gender identity behind the expressions of gender ... gender is performatively
constituted by the very ‘expressions’ which are said to be its results” (Butler 1990, p24-
25).
1 I am not alone in asking this. For example in 1996 Stuart Hall pointed to the importance of Butler in
bringing together the discursive and psychic elements of identification and argues that these work needs to
be developed “if the constitution of subjects in and through the normalizing regulatory effects of racial
discourse is to acquire the theoretical development hitherto reserved for gender and sexuality” (Hall 1996).
2