Gender and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 148

either from the death or divorce of a spouse, they performed all the gardening
activities - including those normatively assigned to men. For example, one female
respondent told me that while she had lived with her ex-husband she had tacitly
agreed to 'leave him to do things'. When he left however, she made the conscious
decision to continue the 'masculine' tasks he had done for herself, using her own
skills and aptitudes for structural and technological DIY. Similarly, widowed
grandmother Doris simply did all her own gardening, including heavy digging
and pavement slab laying, without the help of any of her male relatives. In these
ways, one can see that female gardeners can 'make like men', they are, given the
social conditions, able to develop a masculine 'feel for the game'. These gardeners
were not out to gender-pass, but they were able to make the conscious choice to
leave behind traditional gardening practices. Old forms of subjective recognition
were discarded and new practices were taken up. As such, Bourdieu's conception
of institutionally sanctioned performativity, with its insistence on the rule-bound
unconscious normativity of habitus, simply cannot account for these instances of
performative subversion. Moreover, the female gardeners who 'made like men' did
so bodily, they took on heavy gardening labour, hence challenging Bourdieu's view
of habitus as a literally embodied concept. In order to understand these instances,
one needs Butler's insights on the possibilities offered by discursive agency. The
men and women who broke gendered gardening conventions used their bodies as
tools through which to re-enact gender. These men and women were not content
to simply fit into pre-destined roles; rather, they re-constructed their identities with
a degree of consciousness. From Butler's vantage point, this is a consequence of
the flexibility which she argues can be accommodated within the theory of habitus,
which she argues Bourdieu leaves out of his account:
What Bourdieu fails to understand, however, is how what is bodily in speech resists and
confounds the very norms by which it is regulated. Moreover he offers an account of
the performativity of political discourse that neglects the tacit performativity of bodily
“speech”, the performativity of the habitus (Butler 1997, 142).
Moreover, for Butler, 'speaking the unspeakable' can destabilise social institutions
and offer performatives an unpredictably radical future (Butler 1997, 142). For
the men and women who gardened in unpredictable ways did manage to unhinge
traditional modes of gender; as Butler argues, these gardeners seized their own
authority and in doing so they carried out transgressive gender acts in the ordinary
spaces of their everyday lives.
Indeed the wider implications of Butler's argument directs the discussion back
to the institutional backdrop of gardening as a leisure activity: the media. According
to Butler, 'insurrectionary acts' can shake the foundations upon which the power
of institutions are based. My data would suggest that some people are gardening
in ways which transgress gender norms. This would go some way towards offering
an explanation of why conceptions of gender in the gardening media underwent
change in the 1990s. While traditional images of gendered gardening still pervade
television and magazines, lifestyle experts, as I argue in chapter 5, were represented
in ways which were challenging staunchly traditional ideas about how men and