Gender and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 149

women should garden. Charlie Dimmock, whose presence was arguably the most
important in terms of gardening lifestyle since the mid-1990s, could indeed 'make
like a man' in ways which astonished television audiences. It may be that ordinary
insurrectionary acts of gardening were working to set the agenda for more politically
empowered images of how men and women were represented in lifestyle gardening
media.
“The Young Girls' Bouquets They Were Frothy and Frilly”: A Case Study of
Gendered Aesthetics
In the previous chapter, I argued that the aesthetic disposition of the gardens I visited
expressed the habitus of their owners and that social class determined particular
gardening tastes. In the previous section of this chapter, I argued that gardens are
gendered as well as classed through doing . But it was through my respondents'
interests in floristry, showing and flower arranging that I found a means to explore
gendered tastes expressed through horticultural aesthetics. In this section I show how
writers have modified Bourdieu's (1986) economistic metaphors to show that gender
can also be traded as a form of capital (Skeggs 1997). I argue that gendered gardening
aesthetics - located by differential class locations - carry power for their beholders.
In what follows I examine the relationship between working-class masculinity and
floristry and middle-class femininity and flower-arranging as a means to examine
how the men and women of my study invested in both masculinity and femininity as
forms of aesthetic capital.
Bourdieu excludes gender as a form of capital in Distinction (1986). Indeed
feminists have pointed to of the lack of 'fit' between his theory of capitals and the
position of women in contemporary culture. Lovell (2000) for example, argues that
while women appear in Bourdieu's conception of the social field in Distinction
(1986), they feature, 'primarily as social objects, repositories of value and capital',
whose role is to circulate between men in the capital accumulation systems of
families and kinship groups (Lovell 2000, 20). The problem with Bourdieu's schema,
is that women have only a secondary form of status, 'as capital-bearing objects
whose value accrues to the primary groups to which they belong, rather than as
capital-accumulating subjects in social space' (ibid.). Even the advent of industrial
capitalism and women's involvement as workers in the labour market has had little
impact on Bourdieu's dogged insistence that women be counted as objects which
accumulate value as opposed to subjects capable of accruing value in their own
right. One of the means by which some feminists have circumvented the gaps and
silences in Bourdieu's work however, is by modifying his metaphors in order to fully
include femaleness and femininity in the circuits of capital exchange in which they
are located. Skeggs (1997) for example, uses Bourdieu's economistic metaphors for
understanding the lives of white working-class women, but she modifies Bourdieu's
account of capitals by theorising femininity as a form of cultural capital.
Significantly, and presumably because feminist critics have found habitus
a relatively inflexible concept, Skeggs uses Bourdieu's theory of 'capitals' as a
framework for her study. Indeed she errs towards Butler's theory of gendered