Class, Taste and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 129

275). People, they argue, have more complicated and contradictory consumer
practices than is implied by habitus, in which Bourdieu conceives of consumption
as a coherent set of classifiable practices. The authors quote Wynne and O'Connor's
(1995) study of middle-class consumption in Manchester, where respondents'
indulged in quite disconnected forms of consumption. They reason that part of the
problem can be found in Bourdieu's research methods, where he concentrates on the
inter-connections between variables in his use of correspondence analysis, to produce
an emphasis on differences, thereby tending to miss important social processes which
have little variation (for a more detailed explanation - see 1996, 285). Ultimately,
in a bid to limit difference, Bourdieu falls to 'occupational identifiers' since they
become, 'the sole surrogates which can stand in for this process of identity formation'
(1996, 288). Longhurst and Savage suggest the need for a more complex conception
of habitus which allows more room for agency, in which the internal tensions within
habituses might be explored. Drawing on work in media studies, they call for the
kind of work that I hope to have produced here: more ethnographically centred work
which focuses on consumption practices in context, 'everyday life' and the social
networks within which people live. What this study seems to underline, and this was
especially pertinent in relation to the working-class people of the study where the
inter-connections of community become key nodes around which some gardening
practices were performed, is that habituses are not just about striking divisions
between people. Indeed, through shared practices and tacit community agreements
habituses are also about making similar kinds of classed identity. For contemporary
ordinary gardening is undoubtedly a classed entity.
Chapter 7 uses ethnographic data to explore whether gardening practices are
gendered as well as classed. Drawing on Butler's (1990) notion that gender is a
masquerade, and as a means to examine how the men and women of this study
inhabit gendered modes of being, I turn to investigate what tasks men and women
perform in the garden. Using a case study of floristry and flower arranging, I ask
whether there is a (classed) gendered gardening aesthetic.