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Self-Projects
Makeover Shows and the Reflexive Imperative
The Biggest Loserâs âwowâ factor is mesmerizingâover a period of maybe twelve weeks to see someone completely change what they look like by their own hard work. I think that element could appeal to any people of any size. But what draws you in initially, for a thin person, might not be the same as a fat person. Where a fat person is drawn into the show with a âwhat ifâ concept, like âWhat if that was me?â or is approaching it as âMaybe Iâll learn something from it.â And I think that maybe thatâs the side of the show that is lacking in my opinion, is that there arenât manyâitâs very fleeting. It comes on, I watch it, Iâm enthralled, I love the concept of it. When itâs done, I donât really think about it until itâs on again. It doesnât teach me anything; it doesnât give me life lessons; itâs not an instruction book for how you at home could do it. Itâs portrayed as a contest to win money, and thatâs the primary objective. And so thatâs my one criticism is that Iâm not learning anything. Iâm just watching someone like me have the motivation and desire to do what I canât do, and then they achieve it and I wish I was them, and then the showâs over, and then I just continue my life as a person who doesnât do that.
âSeth, The Biggest Loser interviewee
Midway through interviewing people who watch makeover television shows, I had a conversation with Seth,1 a white, single, heterosexual man in his thirties. He was a fan of the United States version of the popular competitive weight loss show The Biggest Loser who wanted to lose about eighty pounds in weight. In the course of the interview, Seth articulated his complex and contradictory perceptions of this show that help to frame some of the central themes in this study. Above he notes the âwowâ factor of seeing contestants going through dramatic physical transformation and the possibility of identifying with the contestants. He expresses his disappointment that the show is not more explicitly pedagogical, as well as his regret that he cannot convert these fleeting images of transformation into changes in his own life. He went on to note how body size and appearance are structured through gendered norms and modes of looking on The Biggest Loser:
I think that itâs a by-product of our society that success in life is tied to body image in some sense for both genders. As a guy who struggles with weight, Iâm interested in that dynamic of a show, to see other guys. But itâs fascinating to me to see how much, even though I am like that, that I also prescribe to the way we are as a culture, in that I see these women go on there and Iâm like, âOh, shit! Look at the size of her!â And the complete and utter disaster. My initial reaction is, âHow could they do that to themselves?â Itâs kind of a selfish thing, kind of an arrogant thing, to be a guy who struggles with that and feels that [way] personally, to be able to look at someone else and be like, âYou fat whale.â
He was frankly aware of the double standards of appearance applied to women and men, and struggled between this awareness and his own contempt for the women contestants on the show. Makeover shows represent the transformation of ordinary people, most often women, through appropriate consumption, and in doing so reproduce norms of attractiveness and legitimize the audiencesâ scrutinizing gaze. But shows such as The Biggest Loser also bring men into these traditionally gendered modes of representation and inspection. The male turn in the makeover forces Seth to consider his own contradictory position in which he critically assesses the overweight women on the show at the same time as he must deal with his own heavy body within similar regimes of representation.
Seth considered how The Biggest Loser exposed the candidates as overweight and underdressed. As did many interviewees, he believed that however harsh, these routines of representation promoted shame that was functional for contestants on The Biggest Loser:
I think that people that are as big as the people on that show are, itâs like they have bottomed out, to want to be involved in a show on a major network, thatâs viewed by millions of people that are going to see them in awful shape in ill-fitting clothes, and a lot of skin. Itâs a pretty embarrassing thing, and I think that those people are at their breaking point for the most part.
Seth assumed that âbottoming outââreaching a nadir of self-esteemâexplained why candidates would expose themselves on broadcast television in a range of unflattering and revealing outfits. Bottoming out invokes a 12-step program ethos where the recognition and confession of shame is the first step toward personal transformation. As did other participants in this study, Seth saw such public shaming on The Biggest Loser as helpful in forcing candidates to change.
Seth went on to assume that a willingness to be represented this way was a guarantee of the candidatesâ authenticity. He said, âI really think that the people involved are genuine. I wouldnât have watched it a second season if I got the impression the first season that all the people there were motivated by the monetary aspect.â He and other interviewees put a high premium on the authenticity of candidates, evidenced by having good reasons to go on a reality television show: to really work to change rather than to simply be in it for money, fame, or career reasons.
Seth was also aware that the show was constructed, despite all the claims to reality that the genre assumes. In his discussion of the genuineness of the candidates he continued, â[The producers] could be manufacturing or eliciting that response from me, but I really buy into it. I think [the candidates] are people who really want to improve their life and think that this show is going to do that.â Even with his awareness that the production routines of the show could shape his responses, he nevertheless remained highly invested in the emotional realism of the show.2 This was not only predicated on contestants taking part for the right reasonsââreally want[ing] to improve their lifeââbut also evidenced by contestantsâ emotional expressivity.
Together, Sethâs comments exemplify some of the tensions that structure audiencesâ discussions of makeover television that are the foundation of this project: tensions that involve learning, identification, gender, shame, authenticity, realism, and feeling. Seth acknowledged being inspired by candidates but unable to apply the showâs techniques to himself. He recognized gendered standards of appearance, where women are judged unfairly according to their looks; at the same time, he saw the shame induced by being on a makeover show as a necessary part of its success. He was aware that the show is constructed, and how the producers and editors shaped his responses. He was nevertheless invested in the authenticity of the candidates, gauged by their motives for taking part and their emotional expressiveness. In order to hold these tensions in a productive relationship, I draw on contemporary theorizations of reflexivity across a number of fields. I do not mean reflexive as in reflex: an uncontrolled, unthought, instinctive reaction to a stimulus. On the contrary, Sethâs quote reveals a sophisticated appraisal of himself and his engagements with The Biggest Loser, a reflexivity shared by many of the people we talked to about makeover shows. Instead, reflexivity describes how makeover shows rework ideas about the self through the particular demands of contemporary television programming. These shows mobilize audiencesâ reflexive engagements with the texts, their viewing habits, their social relations, and their ideas about themselves as projects to be worked on. I do not share the view of some of its celebrants that reflexivity is a natural attitude inherent to modernity, nor do I believe that reflexivity necessarily produces the freedom and insight that its most ardent advocates assume. Instead, I explore how audiences talk about the reflexive self as an accomplishment produced in part through their engagement with makeover television.
Makeover television shows offer a rich opportunity to consider contemporary anxieties about âthe self,â variously characterized as fragmented, performative, narcissistic, therapeutic, anxious, self-surveilling, and governmental. The genre also fuels a broader anxiety about reality television and its effects on audiences. Specific makeover programs will come and go; indeed, two of the shows I consider here, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Starting Over, have been cancelled since I started this project. The genre morphs into novel forms and themes, as we have seen with shows that have emerged more recently (How to Look Good Naked and Bridalplasty, for example). Makeover shows nevertheless articulate a particular set of concerns that mobilize contemporary ideas about the self within a much longer history of selfhood. The makeover genre draws on earlier, Romantic investments in interiority, expression, and authenticity. The reaffirmation of personal authenticity has been seen as especially important at a time when traditional frames of reference have been eroded. As Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn write, âOlder forms of authority and securityâthe law, democratic government, judiciary, medical experts and so forthâhave been critiqued and displaced by an increasing public political cynicism and a turn to the self as the only possible marker of integrity.â3 I consider analyses of modern, mediated selfhood and offer an intervention into the field of scholarly critiques of reality television that are based largely on textual analysis of television shows. To complement these, I draw on extensive conversations with audiences about their engagements with makeover television. As with earlier studies of media reception, I found that audiencesâ responses to these programs were far more nuanced and compelling than textual approaches alone could account for. These conversations with audiences about makeover television require a reconsideration of the meanings these shows have for the people who watch them, and illuminate their significance in the production of a reflexive self.
Makeover Television: Contexts and Characteristics
Makeover television shows can be a source of information, a point of identification, a guilty pleasure. They are also a densely articulated set of texts that encourage audiences to reflect on themselves and allow scholars, in turn, to reflect on the production of the self through contemporary media. Rather than taking for granted a self that is stable and preexisting, I draw from contemporary scholars to consider how media are used by audiences as a resource for constructing a reflexive self.4 Like other reality television programs, makeover shows have proliferated rapidly as a product of particular economic, industrial, and technological circumstances in the first decade of the new century. These circumstances demand fast, cheap, and popular programming to counter the worst effects of audience fragmentation and the challenges this poses to advertising revenues. Makeover shows draw on already popular genres, including self-help literature, soap operas, and talk shows, that are attentive to intimacy, value emotional expression, and offer narrative frames within which audiences, especially women audiences, interpret their experiences.
The genre of makeover television, broadly defined, has rapidly expanded in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Brenda Weber, for example, studied hundreds of different shows among the 2,500 hours of makeover television she analyzed.5 This burgeoning of makeover programming, and of reality television in general, has been met with significant scholarly attention.6 Most of this attention has been directed toward reality texts, with some notable exceptions from the UK.7 Suspicious of popular and scholarly critiques that dismiss the genre and disparage the people who enjoy it, I wanted to supplement this textual focus by turning attention to the people who watch makeover programs. A team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and I conducted extensive audience research on four US makeover shows. In addition to The Biggest Loser, we also looked at Queer Eye, where five gay men make over a hapless heterosexual guy; Starting Over, which features six women living together to get their lives in order; and What Not to Wear, in which mostly women are transformed from frumps and floozies into models of respectable upward mobility.8 These typify distinct subgenres of makeovers: weight loss, male lifestyles, psychological change, and womenâs self-presentation, respectively, although each show contains some elements of the others. Even with these different emphases, all four shows exemplify the subgenre of reality television known as makeover shows. They feature âordinaryâ people, even though, as Laura Grindstaff argues, there is little that is ordinary about the people who volunteer and are chosen to participate in reality shows.9 The action is largely unscripted, with the work of constructing narratives taking place in the editing room. They focus on transformation precipitated by expert intervention and exemplified in the moment of ârevealâ at the end of the episode or season. Each of these shows are unapologetically commercial; they are distributed on for-profit network and cable channels, and are thus dependent on revenue from advertising, ratings, product placements and tie-ins, multi-platform distribution, branded products, and so on. Finally, these shows focus on personal transformationâof the body, appearance, and psycheârather than transformations of candidatesâ homes (Trading Spaces, Hoarders) or professional lives (The Apprentice, Project Runway).
For all the formulaic presentation of problems with their banal resolutions, this genre articulates a collection of attitudes and techniques that take the production of the self as their central, vexed concern. These shows represent a way of thinking about and working on the self that is historically and culturally specific to our contemporary economic, media, and social climate in the United States, although self-transformation is neither a new nor a specifically American phenomenon.10 How are narratives of the self articulated through this commercial form in our particular space and time? How do their shifting aesthetic, technological, and economic conditions frame these narratives? How do audiences engage with makeover shows as a resource to consider and express their selves? Among the group of highly invested viewers with whom we talked, makeover shows were part of an active project of self-making. This was not a playful, performative, poststructuralist, post-identity type of self-making, but was a sincere articulation of their inner, essential selves and the fraught problem of manifesting that real self in the world. The shows are a resource for this project, in which participants were reflexive about their selves, their media consumption, and their involvement in the academic project of research. However lowbrow, commercialized, feminized, and exploitative they may be, makeover shows offer a prism through which to consider the question, âHow to live?â
All audience research must tread a treacherous path between textual determinism, which usually assumes that texts do terrible things to people (especially women and children), and the excesses of active audience theory, which celebrates peopleâs freedom to make what they like of the texts they consume. In this book I hold in tension the ideological imperatives of the text with the need to do justice to audiencesâ investments in and negotiations with the texts. I offer a critique of makeovers showsâ didactic instruction toward narrow versions of appropriate gender and race self-presentation, assumptions of upward mobility, and consumer appeals, as well as the demands on the shows to make enjoyable, profitable television. At the same time, I take seriously the ways in which makeover shows are made meaningful and important in the lives of the (mostly) women who watch them. As with other audience research studies, I have struggled to retain a critique of the shows without damning their viewers and fans, and to recognize the commercial, popular conventions of the shows without dismissing them as a hopelessly corrupted genre. By addressing audiencesâ engagements with the texts, their selves, and the research context as reflexive, I hope to avoid the impasse of earlier debates about media reception. This book explores how audience research enriches our understanding of reflexivity, and how thinking through reflexivity challenges audience research. Rather than uncritically celebrating reflexivity, I consider how audience research risks collaborating with an ideologically tempting but ultimately naive view of the modern reflexive self.
Queer Eye, Neoliberalism, and Governmentality
I began this project in 2005 as I was completing an analysis of the Bravo cable channelâs show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.11 I was interested in this program because it appeared to be an inevitable outcome of the construction of gay taste and expertise that has become prevalent in mainstream consumer culture.12 In this show, gay men were openly recognized for their labors in the style industries, and were particularly useful in the ongoing challenge of cultivating heterosexual menâs domestic and intimate consumption. This analysis drew from scholarship that looked at reality television as a vehicle for neoliberal values of disciplined, self-monitoring, responsible citizenship. Scholars such as Laurie Ouellette and James Hay see the reality genre as doing important ideological work for the state that has reduced traditional forms of social support, for a labor economy that requires workers to be mobile and flexible, and for a media industry that needs cheap popular programming.13 In this criti...