Gender and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 133

throughout life; for him performativity is always freighted down by the solidity of
institutions and the social. On the other hand, Butler's voluntarist position, which
attempts to augment political transformation, envisages agents as relatively free to
erase or re-fashion identity at will, in ways which grant freedom to the individual in
relation to the new self. Left whole, Bourdieu and Butler's positions on performatives
are irreconcilable, in the following section therefore, I draw on both. In the analysis
of the data which follows I identify the potential for intervention by challenging the
discursive construction of gender with a view to enacting social transformation while
recognising the tight social and material constraints which bind men and women to
their gendered roles.
The terms of the debate between Bourdieu and Butler raise questions about the
relationship between institutional sites where modes of gardening were lived out or
represented and the empirical modes of performed gendered gardening discussed
in this chapter. If as Bourdieu insists, performatives are tethered to institutional
authorisation, then one would expect a relationship to exist between the gendered
gardening practices found in both the family and the media and how the men and
women of my study took up modes of gendered subjectivity. On the other hand, if
as Butler argues, performatives can seize their own authority without institutional
tenure, it may be that the influence of institutions such as the family and the media
are negligible. In the following sections therefore, I use the tenets of the debate
between Bourdieu and Butler to ask if my respondents take up the gendered practices
passed down to them through the family and by the media or if they flout convention
by choosing not to perform gender in conventional ways. Can female gardeners
'make like men' despite familial influences, or can men develop a feminine 'feel
for the game' and develop feminine gardening aesthetics? If so, what ordinary
social circumstances produce the choice to do gendered gardening differently?
Or if gender is performed conventionally, why do men and women still invest in
traditional modes of gender? And finally, what impact do empirical modes of being
in the garden have on the media: can the 'insurrectionary acts' Butler describes set a
more politically empowering agenda for how men and women were represented in
the lifestyle media?
“It's Kind of Gone Down in Generations With Us”: A History of Gendered
Gardening
This section explores studies which chart a history of gardening as a gendered activity.
Focusing on cottage gardening, the allotment and on the lawn as a specifically
masculine compartment of the garden, studies suggest that gendered gardening has
an institutional base in the family. Using Bourdieu and work on masculinity which
challenges familial sex-role theory as a means to explore the empirical data, I ask
whether the forms of gardening the men and women of this study performed are
rooted in their familial social learning.
There are several studies which cite the historical formation of gendered
gardening tasks and responsibilities. In The Cottage Garden (1981) for example,
Scott-James argues that in the Victorian family cottage garden, 'some tasks were