Gardening Taste: Theoretical Concepts and Framework - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 38

analysis of class (Frow 1995; Moi 1991; Reay 1995). Bourdieu's concept of habitus
- a relatively fixed conceptual tool, faces limitations in relation to gender (Lovell
2000; McCall 1992). Here I explore why Bourdieu's concept of habitus has been
attacked by poststructuralist and post-modern feminists. Turning to Butler's (1990)
theory of performativity, I explore what her theory might offer an understanding
of how and why subjects make investments in the practice and performance of
masculinity and femininity. However, both Bourdieu and Butler (1997) have
opposing theories about the status of performatives, especially in relation to their
institutional limits and social possibilities. Focusing on the debate between Butler
(1990, 1997) and Bourdieu, I ask what the terms of their arguments have to offer my
analysis of gendered garden practices.
Bourdieu, Class and Social Distinction
Bourdieu argues that taste is socially constructed and that the hierarchies of taste
which govern the acquisition and consumption of goods are inextricably linked to
class divisions within a society. In his analysis of French 1960s culture, Distinction:
A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1986), Bourdieu argues that goods
possess symbolic significance within the social order and that taste operates as a
central organising principle for how resources are distributed both through and across
it. In this way taste has a central role in reproducing and maintaining the dominant
order, the effects of which are at least as significant as the political and economic
factors which might serve to maintain the unequal distribution of a culture's assets.
It is through the consumption of taste that people, themselves part of class groups,
struggle and vie to gain social status within the 'cultural field'. The dominant groups
in society maintain the eminence of their positions by conferring superiority on their
tastes and by dismissing working-class tastes as vulgar and base. In doing so, they
affirm their lifestyle choices as distant from others who occupy a hierarchically
lower position in the cultural field. By contrast, the stigmatised working-class suffers
the affective pain of what Bourdieu describes as a kind of 'class racism' (Bourdieu
1986, 179). 'For Bourdieu,' Fowler argues, 'the game of culture which is at stake in
relations to consumption, always has the working-class as its negative classificatory
foil' (Fowler 2000, 11).
Class, according to Bourdieu's thesis, is not simply defined by the amount of
economic capital one has - it is also determined by one's cultural, social and symbolic
capital. Economic capital refers to financial assets: inherited wealth, the monetary
status derived from occupational income, investments in the form of stocks and
shares and so on. Cultural capital or 'informational capital' (Bourdieu and Waquant
1992, 119), acts as a form of symbolic wealth in the realm of culture. It exists in
three states: embodied, resulting in durable dispositions of both body and mind;
institutionalised, in the form of educational qualifications and antiquated forms of
knowledge; and objectified, existing as cultural objects and goods. Social capital is
predicated on access to resources acquired through social connections and society or
group affiliation. And finally, symbolic capital is, as Bourdieu describes, 'the form
that one or another of these species takes when it is grasped through categories