Agriculture Reference
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performatives derive their power firstly from the institutional authority which
sanctions their status, and secondly, through the habitus which honours that authority.
Unlike Butler, whose view of performatives offers agency to the subject through
which to transform the self, Bourdieu's habitus and doxa are too rigidly sedimented
to allow for the flexibility of identity. What Bourdieu's theory offers, as Lovell
argues, is a powerfully rooted sense of the 'compelling presence and effectiveness'
of the social (Lovell 2000, 15). For him, Butler's post-modern performances are
mere performances; too easily the signs of identity can be removed and re-cast as
simply and straightforwardly as donning a new set of clothes. Social reality, for
Bourdieu, remains too solidly embedded within the subject to be left behind through
transformation.
There are problems with both of these positions, yet both theorists offer efficacy
to the debate about performativity. Bourdieu, 'at times reads like a structuralist with
an 'oversocialised' concept of the individual, who … is destined to become what
he/she 'always already' was: a mere bearer of social positions, one who comes to
love and want his/her fate' (Lovell 2000, 15). Yet the value of his argument lies
in the insistence that almost erasable traces of social learning escort the individual
throughout life; for Bourdieu performativity is grounded by the solidity of both
institutions and the social. Butler on the other hand is a voluntarist: for her social
agents are free to delete or re-fashion the markers of identity at will, with an
additional margin of freedom in relation to the choice of the new self. Yet Butler's
strength lies in the will to effect some kind of social transformation in a bid to resist
political paralysis. Both writers are guilty of choosing contexts which fit the terms
of their own theoretical concerns. Bourdieu tends to fight shy of analysing areas
where social reality can be exposed as manufactured and open to re-construction;
whereas spaces of leisure - the sites typical of post-modern analysis of play, leisure
or carnival - are precisely the spaces Butler chooses to focus down upon. In these
ways, Bourdieu and Butler offer useful contributions to the debate on performativity,
but they are positions which, if left whole, are irreconcilable. The answer is surely to
draw on both: to identify the potential for intervention by challenging the discursive
construction of gender in order to augment social transformation while recognising
the tight social and material circumstances which strenuously bind men and women
to their gendered roles.
Bourdieu, Butler and the Performance of Gendered Gardening
Application of the terms of the debate between Bourdieu and Butler generates
an interesting set of ideas about what one might expect to find out about gender
relations in the field. In particular, it poses questions about the relationship between
the institutional site where modes of gendered gardening are represented and my
empirical findings of gardening by men and women.
If, as Bourdieu suggests, performatives are fettered by institutional authorisation
and if habitus acts to honour institutional authority, one would expect there to be
some relationship between the textually mediated representations of gendered
gardening in the media and how the men and women of my study take up modes of
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