Histories and Context - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 32

Formations of Class and Gender (1997) is an ethnographic study of white
working-class female consciousness. Set in the north of England, Skeggs conducted
ethnographic research over an eleven year period and studied the lives of over eighty
women. Structured by the terms offered by Bourdieu's concept of capitals, the topic
has a mission to 'provide a space for the articulations of the marginalised' (Skeggs
1997, 23). Skegg's project was to interrogate how the women of her study occupied
and identified with locations of both class and gender. This involved an investigation
of her subjects' whole way of life, from their employment in the caring professions,
to their cultural constructions of self in terms of their homes, bodies and relationship
to fashion and beauty, to how they inhabit or identify with locations of class, gender
and sexuality.
In order to produce an understanding of the construction of contemporary classed
and gendered locations, Skeggs looked at the textual emergence of femininity since
the eighteenth century. The ideal concept of the 'lady' appeared in magazines and
conduct manuals of the day and was produced in conjunction with the habitus of the
upper classes and signified 'ease, restraint, calm and luxurious decoration' (1997,
99). Being a lady meant the cultivation of particular practices of both appearance
and conduct, and by the nineteenth century, femininity had become established as
a middle-class entity. As a classed sign, femininity could be infused with varying
degrees of status and value. Middle-class women already had access to the distinctive
moral superiority of femininity, it gave them a vantage point from which to judge
the femininity, and therefore the respectability, of others. Working-class women
on the other hand, who were already defined negatively as physically strong and
sturdy against the frailty of middle-class women, were denied access to femininity.
Working-class women's labour, 'prevented femininity from ever being a possibility'
(1997, 99).
Skegg's argues that contemporary constructions of working-class femininity are
framed by these historical antecedents. Working-class women have been historically
denied access to respectability, yet its acquisition respectability a means by which
they can dis-identify with the pejorative associations of working-class femininity
as worthless and sexually lascivious. Investments in femininity offer a way of
providing distance from, 'being positioned by the vulgar, pathological, tasteless and
sexual' (1997, 100). But their performances are produced in order that they be taken
seriously, Skeggs's subjects have no access to forms of knowledge which might
enable them to play with identities with post-modern irony. Rather, their attempts to
'pass' as feminine, through acts of glamour and dressing up, are always constructed
out of an affective context of fear and anxiety that they might not 'get it right'.
Drawing on post-modern theory (Butler 1990) Skeggs views femininity as
a masquerade; the women of her study become, try on, practice and do feminine
performances. For Skeggs, femininity is an unfixed category, historically and
discursively constructed and always relative to the cross-cutting categories of class
and race, which are themselves contingent and open to change. Female subjectivity is
produced by discourse and disseminated within representational systems. The women
use the textually mediated forms of ideal femininity found in popular mediums to
inform and legitimate their constructions of a feminine appearance. Yet while the
women were conscious of doing the 'right' kinds of feminine performance in order