Agriculture Reference
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market and investments in femininity meant they might garner potential assets on
the marriage market. In this way, the women extended improvement to every facet
of their lives - their minds, bodies and relationships - as a means to distinguish
themselves from members of the working-class who did not seek to improve. They
worked hard to develop tastes which they hoped would enable them to escape
classification and 'pass' as not working-class. Yet their limited cultural capital meant
that they lacked the knowledge to be able to judge what it means to 'get it right'.
For the women of Skegg's study, the home is a 'central site' where claims
to respectability and legitimacy in relation to the self are made. The women felt
positioned by their aesthetic tastes in furniture and decor, to the extent that when
Skeggs entered their homes, they apologised. Skeggs uses Press (1991) to argue that
since the women of her study knew few middle-class people, their access to images
of middle-class lifestyles came from television. In these ways, Skegg's study shows
how mediated lifestyle images enact symbolic violence against the working-class.
Interaction with images of middle-class aesthetics added to the doubts about tastes
the women already experienced. For Skeggs, the home is therefore a site where the
working-class can never feel at ease with their own aesthetic choices; rather they
feel as though they stand under the judgement of the ever-present (middle-class)
surveillant other. Located by anxiety, powerlessness and insecurity, their tastes are
articulated from positions of doubt:
The working-class are never free from the judgements of imaginary and real others that
position them, not just as different, but as inferior, as inadequate. Homes and bodies are
where respectability is displayed but where class is lived out as the most omnipresent
form, engendering surveillance and constant assessment of themselves (Skeggs, 1997,
90).
This review of recent literature yields important tenets for my own research
questions around gardening, identity, consumption and class. The literature shows
that despite the claim that the contemporary climate is characterised by shifting
forms of identity, structurally class continues to make a significant difference
to peoples' life chances (Walkerdine et al. 2001; Skeggs 1997). Empirical and
ethnographic studies illustrate that differential access to forms of capital determine
the kind of lifestyle choices people are able to make; in this way, class is expressed
symbolically through consumption practices (Savage et al. 1992; Wynne 1990).
Furthermore, despite claims that people no longer experience class as a collective
entity, similar features characterise forms of consumption in ways which suggest
that there are shared cultural and aesthetic class practices (Southerton 2002; Skeggs
1997). However, while class is still a category of identity and belonging, it is always
cross-cut by other social variables, like gender or race, which impact on identity with
the same force (Savage et al. 1992; Skeggs 1997). And class must also be conceived
as a flexible entity, able to withstand dialogue with the type of social theory which
examines the consequences of epochal social change. For example, Southerton's
(2002) work illustrates that the social changes wrought by post-industrialisation
have meant that some middle-class factions have geographical mobility, which is
another social factor which impinges on modes of identity and belonging. These
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