Gardening Taste: Theoretical Concepts and Framework - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 50

which impinge on the domains between which women often have to mediate: the
masculine/public sphere of work and the feminine/private sphere of the home.
Bourdieu's conception of habitus fails to 'fit' women: it is flawed because it is
unable to account for the complexities of women's everyday institutional and social
experiences.
Moreover, feminist critics argue that habitus is problematic because Bourdieu
theorises it as a set of transposable, ' unconscious regulating principles' (Garnham
and Williams 1980, 302). Habitus is a mode of being that agents acquire as a result
of socialisation - it cannot be consciously learned or imitated; rather, it is procured
through what Bourdieu calls lived practice. Habitus affords agents the competence
to be able to move efficiently through a given social field with what Bourdieu calls
a 'feel for the game'. It releases schemes of perception and appreciation that seem
and feel entirely natural to the agent. In this way, the abilities of habitus cannot
necessarily be expressed as conscious forms of knowledge. From a gendered
perspective however, McCall takes issue with the idea that women can ever feel a
sense of unconscious 'feel for the game' in a gender-biased male-dominated culture.
Just as working-class people use the slogan 'that's not for the likes of me' because
they make the practical recognition that they cannot have the cultural and economic
opportunities afforded to the dominant classes, so women, 'are continually entering
and struggling in environments that are not for the likes of them' (McCall 1992,
849). Rather, she argues, women develop the exact opposite - they acquire self-
consciousness from continually attempting to join male-dominated fields in which
they cannot find a positive equal position. In this way, MacCall argues, habitus as a
concept fails to fit the social realities of women's experiences.
In similar vein, Lovell takes issue with the social fixity of habitus, for her it,
'tends towards an 'overdetermined' view of subjectivity in which subjective
dispositions are too tightly tied to the social practices in which they were forged'
(Lovell 2000, 11). Lovell reads habitus as an over-restrictive concept, for despite
the fact that its social, non-essentialist construction is underlined by Bourdieu, the
literal embodiment of habitus and its natural schematic attributes tend to emphasise
its 'corporeal sedimentation' (Lovell 2000, 14). She uses historical examples of
gender-passing as instances through which to challenge the unconscious element
in Bourdieu's account of habitus. Using Dutch research, Lovell cites 119 cases of
women who successfully lived and cross-dressed as sailors and soldiers in Northern
Europe between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries (Lovell 2000, 13). Garfinkel
(1987) also documents the case of 'intersexed' Agnes, who successfully passed as
a woman Los Angeles in late 1950s. If it is possible for women to convincingly
inhabit and perform masculine modes of being, including the ability to, 'assume
the bodily hexis and habitus characteristic of the militia' (Lovell 2000, 13) she
reasons, then the natural, unconscious 'feel for the game' characteristic of habitus is
rendered untenable. What these examples show is that despite Bourdieu's thesis of
the acquisition of social identity through the practical sense, a 'feel for the game' can
be consciously learned: it is possible for a woman to develop a masculine habitus.