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The aim of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework for exploring the ways in which class and gender interact in occupational fields. In recent years, very little research has been specifically concerned with the relationship between gender and class. Much of the literature which grapples with the question of how gender and class interact contains theoretical limitations which appear to stem from a reliance on categorical theories of both class and gender. In this paper it is proposed that, when used in conjunction, the approaches of Bourdieu and Butler provide a framework for exploring class and gender in terms of embodied practice. In order to illustrate the possibilities enabled by 'appropriating Bourdieu and adding Butler', the paper suggests ways in which this conceptual framework makes possible the examination of the complex relations between gender and class within one particular area of 'women's work': the field of nursing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been countless efforts to test and ‘update’ Pierre Bourdieu’s thesis that there is a correspondence between the space of social positions and the space of lifestyles. The best known of these targeting the UK are the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion project and, more recently, the Great British Class Survey, but their conceptual and methodological limitations mean their findings are questionable and hinder closer investigation of an oft-sidelined piece of the puzzle one of the projects specifically highlighted: the significance of gender in structuring taste. Drawing on the 2012 wave of the British Cohort Study, which included a battery of questions on cultural consumption, and deploying a logic and measure of class closer to Bourdieu’s own, I thus seek to offer an alternative examination of not only the nature and degree of correspondence between the social space and lifestyles but its entwinement with masculinity and femininity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]