Gender and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 145

co-habitation - was a major factor in the take up of traditional garden practices. When
men and women lived together, they made a tacit agreement to perform normative
gendered garden practices: men used tools and technology to produce structure and
women planted to make the garden decorative. For example, men tended to build
trellises, lay lawn turf and mow lawns while the women planted flower beds and
herbs. Taking these examples, the relationship between the media and gardening
viewers would seem to be straightforward: men and women perform the sanctioned
images offered to them by the media.
Bourdieu's position in relation to performativity has particular pertinence
here, indeed it gives further weight to the idea that traditionally gendered media
images are straightforwardly adopted by viewers. For Bourdieu, performatives
are saturated by the structural conventions of institutional social norms. From his
perspective, images of gendered performance in magazines or on lifestyle television
are powerful precisely because they carry the weight of institutional sanction. As a
further consequence, the take up of traditional modes of subjectivity by the media
is in line with Bourdieu's thinking, for contained in his account is the idea that
the unconscious attributes of habitus tend to accept the authority of institutionally
sanctioned performatives. For Bourdieu, people are unable to simply unfetter their
social boundaries since the gendered attributes of habitus and doxa work to resist the
easy slippage in to politically radical performed modes of being. What Bourdieu's
perspective offers, with its emphasis on the powerful social bind of habitus, is a means
to recognise why traditional gendered performances are so powerfully persuasive:
men and women simply find they can easily fit in to the predestined positions that
are marked out for them.
On closer inspection however, my empirical evidence would suggest a more
complex view of why men and women garden in traditional ways. Though
undoubtedly mediated images have a bearing on audiences, I would argue that
the men and women of this study did not simply take up roles assigned to them
because the media ordained them; rather, they recognised that traditional modes of
being offered social rewards. For example, like several of the working-class couples
I interviewed, John and Stephanie gardened in classically traditional ways: John
worked on structuring the garden and Stephanie was left to 'titivate' it. Like many of
the men in this study, John strove to preserve the means through which his wife could
fulfil middle-class conceptions of femininity - by performing decorative tasks and
by steering clear of hard manual labour. To make way for one's wife to 'titivate' is to
offer the space for her to imitate the genteel elegance of middle-class femininity. For
Stephanie, the investment in normative femininity is also about being able to appear
middle-class. In this way, some of the men and women of this study made the choice
to perform traditionally gendered gardening because it offered high social returns.
However, when women live without men, women do decorative work, but
they also take on heavy gardening work themselves and they use tools and garden
technology with confidence. In some cases, they designed new structural plans for
hard landscaping in their gardens and were sufficiently confident to execute some
of the building work themselves. Anne and her daughter Phoebe, an unemployed
textiles graduate, have plans to convert the old wash house at the bottom of their
garden into an art studio: