The labour of transformation and circuits of value ‘around’ reality television

Abstract

Drawing on recent research from a project which included both textual and audience research, this paper will explore the involvement of women viewers with 'reality' TV as 'circuits of value'. These relationships cannot be adequately described as deconstructions of representations as in a text-reader framework of media theory. Rather, we examine these relationships as an extended social realm, whereby the immanent structure of reality television generates emotional connections to the labouring undertaken by participants on the programmes. 'Reality' television develops different traditions of women's genres from melodrama, magazines to lifestyle television, it drawing attention to those who need transformation. By promoting different forms of women's emotional, appearance and domestic labour, it parallels broader political shifts to an 'affective economy'. Rather than these texts producing wholly divisive moral reactions in viewers, we noticed how our audience participants assessed the forms of labour performed through their different classed resources, made judgements through pursuing connections with their own lives, and ultimately tended to value care over condemnation.

Working hard on the outside: a multimodal critical discourse analysis ofThe Biggest Loser Australia

“…We will argue that in doing so TBL is reinforcing cultural beliefs surrounding the character failings of fat people and the aesthetic value of fat bodies. Further we will show that in line with the findings of Skeggs and Wood (2008) and Skeggs (2009) in relation to reality television, success is inextricably linked to labour (or "the work" as it is called in TBL); contestants' achievements are the result of the amount of emotional and physical work they are willing to do. In the logic of TBL, body size is "work" made visible.…”

Young people's uses of celebrity: class, gender and ‘improper’ celebrity

“…In this way, they distanced themselves from 'improper' celebrities and celebrity aspirations, and the pathologised status attached to them, and established themselves as ideal neoliberal subjects concerned with investing in the self. This positioning of the self as a 'sophisticated', distanced critic of improper celebrity mirrors the strategies of class distinction taken up by the middle-class women in Skeggs and Wood's (2008) research. In their study, middle-class responses to Reality TV drew upon 'a broader cultural debate about celebrity culture and in particular with a perceived lack of labour involved in "making it" ... [in which] effort and labour are directly connected to the rewards of paid work reliant on legitimate skills and education' (p. 566).…”

What a girl's gotta do: the labor of the biopolitical celebrity in austerity Britain

“…In addition to such economic policies, pop cultural forms and recurrent themes are also included in some analyses of neoliberalism (Couldry and Littler, 2008;Skeggs and Wood, 2008;Holmes and Negra, 2011;Tyler, 2013), such as the celebration of the entrepreneur, tabloid scare stories about abuse of dwindling resources, and new reality genres. In these new media genres, a similar stock scenario is incessantly replayed, in which social problems are foregrounded not to be solved through state intervention, let alone the welfare state safety net, but to rather be met with neoliberal solutions, such as Workfare, charity and private enterprise.…”

“…In addition to "the labour of transformation" (Skeggs and Wood 2008) 'male' working-class manual and skilled labour to an emergent service economy and the socalled 'feminisation' of labour (Hochschild 1979;Strangleman and Warren 2008, 285-289).…”