The social space, the symbolic space and masculine domination: the gendered correspondence between class and lifestyles in the UK

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.