Questions of Consumption: What Ordinary Gardeners Do With Garden ‘Lifestyle’ Media - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 166

femininity - suggests that gardening is seen as both an extension and compartment
of femininity. The exchange went on:
Stephanie : I think its mainly women that's noticing 'cos they're the ones that have time
to do it an' we've got better ideas anyway. Obviously … we've got better ideas about
co-ordinating.
John : Well that's what women are for, that's why you get dressed up innit and put make-
up on.
Stephanie : Yeah.
John : Yeah, it's like your garden is an extension of you, to me.
For couples who perform traditional modes of gendered gardening, lifestyle garden
media texts may not be sufficiently conventionally gendered. If the decorative
aspects of gardening are a logical extension of how women adorn themselves through
clothes and cosmetics, then the general interest magazine is a more convenient place
to search for ideas.
This topic argues that people live out classed and gendered identities in the
context of their ordinary gardens. In chapter 5, I argue that while the media was an
institutional site where more ordinary people were embraced, representations of the
ordinary were still located by class and gender. This section shows that class was the
most significant variable in determining how people navigate their consumption of
media texts. Bourdieu's (1986) theoretical approach to class was also salient from
the production to the point of the consumption of lifestyle texts because access
to being able to consume the knowledges which inhere within lifestyle ideas was
largely determined by the distribution of (classed) capitals. Age was also significant
to the consumption of lifestyle texts, especially when being older was combined
with being working-class. For respondents over fifty-five there was a sense that they
lacked sufficient future to fundamentally change the garden. And older working-
class people simply lacked the economic capital to consume new lifestyle ideas.
In these cases, people suspended their own subjectivity from the address of garden
lifestyle texts in the acceptance that garden maintenance, with its emphasis on
making the best of the resources they had was 'for the likes of them'. I found only
scant evidence to suggest that gender had a real bearing on modes of garden lifestyle
consumption. 1 It would seem from my data that women's general interest magazines,
through which the construction of femininity was more pervasively given emphasis,
served to feminise aspects of lifestyle, including gardening, perhaps more obviously
for my respondents than garden lifestyle texts. Subjective locations had a bearing on
how ordinary people consumed media lifestyle texts.
1 This may well have more to do with the types of questions I asked during my
interviews than with whether gender mattered to my respondents' consumption of lifestyle
texts. I never directly asked whether gender affected their consumption. See appendix one.