Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Thomas : Lena has always grown chives, mint and parsley.
Lisa T : So you live on your own? Do you do all your gardening on your own?
Doris : Yes, the lot.
Lisa T : Absolutely everything?
Doris : Mmm mumm.
Using Butler's (1990) notion that there is no authentic gendered self beneath
the performance of identity, this section turns to how contemporary gardening is
done by the men and women of this study. For Butler gender is a 'corporeal style', a
copy of a copy, an act, a repetition, a set of strategies with cultural survival as their
ultimate aim. The parody of gender Butler describes does not presuppose an original,
since it is the idea of an original that is being parodied. For her gender is a 'regulated
process of repetition', a series of recurrent acts that congeal to look like something
that has been there all along. But if, as Butler argues:
the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and
inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false,
but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity
(Butler 1990, 136).
it must also be possible to 'act' gender in ways which highlight the constructedness
of gendered identities in ways which reveal they have a vested interest in passing
themselves off as 'natural'. In this section, I investigate the circumstances which
contribute to the construction and performance of heterosexual gender identities
in relation to gardening. I ask: do the ordinary people of this study act gender in
conventional ways and if they do, why do they invest in traditional modes of being;
or, do some people live in ways which allow them to flout traditional gendered modes
in ways which disrupt and unfix the foundational construction of gender? Finally, I
examine the relationship between media representations of gendered gardening and
my empirical examples of what and how men and women, somewhere in the North
in the late 1990s, 'did' gardening.
The interviews I conducted with my Yorkshire gardeners took various forms:
I spoke with both men women on their own and with women in pairs, but most of
my sample consisted of interviews with married heterosexual couples. The practice
of interviewing couples can raise specific issues and difficulties for the researcher,
particularly in relation to asking about how a division of labour is established in
relation to the garden. Other academics have faced similar problems: when Kirkham
(1995) interviewed Ray Eames, wife of the internationally renowned husband and
wife modernist design collaboration, she mentions how difficult it was, even though
her husband Charles Eames had died several years before the time of the interview,
'to get beyond generalizations about all the work being a joint effort' (Kirkham 1995,
217); in similar vein Cockburn, in her study of gender and domestic technology,
Machinery of Dominance (1985) claims that the couples she interviewed typically
answered with a set response when asked to talk about how domestic work was
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