Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
to secure respectability, the act of feminine construction was both a site of pleasure
and an opportunity to collectively enjoy their own forms of female competence.
Dressing up was a chance to validate locally generated feminine capital - it was
one site where middle-class approval could be excluded: 'Style is not seen to be
something that middle-class women know anything about. It is seen as a working-
class competence' (Skeggs 1997, 104). Generating and creating shared meanings
around looking good was also about enjoying collectivity. Producing femininity, is
a site of contradiction: it is a process of anxiety where 'passing' as feminine induces
anxiety; yet it is also a pleasurable arena for displaying local competencies in the
context of supportive friendship groups.
While post-modern feminism has been attacked for showing scant regard for
questions of lived agency (see Weedon's discussion, 1999), Skeggs's analysis offers
a wider position: while she argues that the subject positions these women are able
to occupy are the effects of institutional structures and discourse, her analysis holds
on to lived experience, 'as a way of understanding how women occupy the category
“woman”' (Skeggs 1997, 27). Her choice to produce an ethnography acts as a means
to value, legitimate and take seriously the voices and experiences of those previously
relegated to the margins. And, while her work is about the discursive limits of
subjective locations, her ethnography insists that questions about lived subjectivity
and agency be addressed; as a result, discursive locations are always anchored by
materiality.
In these ways, Formations of Class and Gender (1997) draws together a set
of theoretical concepts, ideas and methods which are politically empowering for
my analysis of the ways in which classed and gendered subjectivities are lived out
in the humdrum practices of gardening. Her work generates interesting questions
in relation to class and gender for my own study. Skeggs highlights the profound
class differences between the lived locations occupied by middle- and working-class
women in terms of their access to respectability. Her work provides a means of
understanding why respectability has historically been such an important facet of
working-class life for both men and women and shows why investments in femininity
- such as my own grandmother's use of feminine aesthetics of both the self and
the home - have enabled women to dis-identify with working-classness. Skeggs's
work enables an understanding of why the 'sign-laden' 8 garden, a site fastened
between the private and the visible public realm, is a key space where attempts at
respectability are made and differently expressed. Yet Skeggs' study is about more
than working-class anxiety and the search for approbation; it is also about the value
and pleasures of local competencies and about exploring the gap between approved
national aesthetics and those which fight shy of compliance. In this way, her work
helps to provide an explanation for the creative, specific local language of creative
shared gardening practices.
8 The women of Skeggs' (1997) study were extremely self-conscious about how their
bodies communicated meaning to (potentially judgemental) others; she refers to it as the
'sign-laden body'. Here I borrow the phrase: the garden as also a site which signifies meaning
about those indoors.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search