6
The Reflexive Self
The Expressive Subject in Makeover Television and Audience Research
ABSTRACT
Drawing from a large audience research project conducted by a team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, I consider how the methodological challenges of doing audience research can inform a broader investigation of the production of a reflexive self. Looking at responses to four US makeover reality shows, our data suggest that neither of the two main perspectives that dominate reality TV research, the uses and gratifications approach and the governmentality critique, fully account for the meanings the viewers we talked to brought to makeover texts. They acknowledged learning some things from these shows, while pointing to big differences between the shows. Yet producing themselves as disciplined citizens appears far less significant than their investments in the possibilities of self-transformation: specifically, transforming the self's relation to the self. Makeover shows facilitate an articulation of a particular kind of self, which has insight into itself, has agency about itself, and that cares for itself. Yet this reflexive self is also produced through the research process, where implicit hierarchies of value concerning expressivity and self-reflection are paralleled, even reinforced, by the apparently diverse routines of low-brow makeover television and high-brow academic research.
The capacity to reflect tends to be seen, first, as a distinctly modern phenomenon and, second, as something fundamentally good.1 Given the emphasis, in reality television and in makeover shows in particular, on the production and performance of the self, audience research in this area seems an ideal place to consider what we mean by reflexivity, how this is shaped, and what its values and limits might be. Makeover shows encourage viewers to see themselves as if from the outside and to consider their lives within overarching narratives of transformation, meanwhile promising that consumption is the answer to the question of the self. As part of a larger genre of reality television, makeover shows present audiences with glimpses of their production processes, allowing a reflexive distance in the construction of reality. Other media technologies, especially online, provide access to communities of critics who weigh in on the shows' production routines. Makeover shows and their reception epitomize shifts toward increasingly reflexive modes of mediated engagement, which deserve analysis. Further, investigation into reflexivity makes its own reflexive demands. What role might audience research play in reproducing assumptions about the cultural value of reflexivity? This chapter draws on data gathered for a large audience research study of viewers of US makeover shows (Sender, in press). I consider here the extent to which audiences of makeover television shows can be seen as reflexive about their engagement with the shows, the manner in which audiences draw on makeover narratives to produce a reflexive self, and the manner in which reflexivity might be a product of the research process itself.
Anthony Giddens (1991) sees the modern identity as inherently self-reflexive. In contrast to the pre-modern self, constrained as it was by role and structural position, the modern self “has to be reflexively made [ . . . ] amid a puzzling diversity of options and possibilities” (p. 3). The flexible capitalism that characterizes the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has manifested in part through diversifying media technologies and genres. These mediated forms offer unprecedented opportunities for self-representation and demand reflexive attention to the idea of self-presentation and assembly. Makeover television's raison d'être is to help people navigate through the puzzling diversity of possibilities that this new media landscape offers: What to wear? How to eat? Who to be? Makeover television is paradigmatically self-reflexive in Giddens' terms: its narratives and modes of representation posit identity, the body, affect, and behavior as intensely involving projects of the self; the genre narrates that self as one having a (traumatic) past and an (idealized) future in a journey of self discovery; the project of the makeover involves constant self-scrutiny and revision; its stories reproduce and rework other narrativized and mediated modes of self-production, borrowing from what Rose (1999) calls the “psy disciplines,” as well as from women's magazines, talk shows, and self-help literature (see for example Gamson, 1998; Woodstock, 2002; Grindstaff, 2002; McGee, 2005). Finally and most seductively, makeover television shares the modern romantic idea that only through self-reflexivity can subjects find their authentic, inner being – a self capable of being “true to oneself” (Giddens, 1991, p. 78).
Giddens and others argue that reflexivity allows agency and choice, thereby granting individuals greater personal freedom. Ulrich Beck, for example, argues that reflexivity promotes autonomy from social structures and hierarchies: “The more societies are modernized, the more agents (subjects) acquire the ability to reflect on the social conditions of their existence and to change them accordingly” (Beck, Giddens, & Lash, 1994, p. 174). Reflexivity produces agency and allows for “detraditionalization” – that is, for freeing oneself from structural forms of determinations, norms, and expectations. Both Giddens and Beck hold an optimistic view of reflexive modernism, seeing the increasing autonomy that reflexivity affords as a way for subjects to contemplate and critique the social and economic conditions of modernity. It is precisely the freedom to be in control of one's own image and destiny that makes the fantasy of the makeover so appealing.
This freedom that reflexivity seems to offer has proven especially important for scholars interested in media reception – both as a way to resist some of the top-down models of media effects and as a way to engage with audiences' perceptions of texts. John Corner (2009) argues that reality television draws from two contradictory traditions in documentary film: the reflexive style that acknowledges the production process within the film itself; and the observational, “fly-on-the-wall” style of shooting and editing. “Much reality television [. . .] mix[es] moments of self-conscious and playful artifice with moments of intensive commitment to the truthfulness of their images, the ‘reality claims’ of which at least equal the much-discussed ‘ideology of transparency’ of classic observational work” (p. 62). For Corner, the friction between the fantasy of the window on the world and the revelation of the window frame itself precipitates some degree of reflexivity in audiences. As in other reality genres, makeover show production conventions encourage a reflexive position by showing candidates talking directly to the camera and by offering glimpses of production equipment such as microphones and cameras.
In her large audience research project, Annette Hill (2007) also argues that contradictions within reality television promote reflexivity in its audiences. She suggests that reality television's uneasy location between transparency and artifice demands that viewers reflect on its truth claims: “The intermediate space of [reality television] can be transformative, and at times we will personally connect with something in a programme, reflecting on what that person or real event means to us, creating a powerful self-reflexive space” (p. 110). For Hill, media reflexivity is an outcome of reality television's precarious position at the interstices of fact and fiction. She calls her respondents' skepticism about reality television a “chain of distrust” (p. 140) and appreciates that viewers are critically more engaged with the truth claims of reality television than with those of news programs and documentaries, where she would like to see more reflexivity. Although both Corner and Hill are ambivalent about the virtues of reality television, this genre's frank acknowledgement of its production processes might be one of its more progressive aspects, offering audiences space to reflect on its claims to represent the real world.
Reflexivity also has a long tradition in social science research and writing (see for example Van Maanen, 1988 on reflexive writing, and Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995 for an overview). Pierre Bourdieu (in Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) has advocated “epistemic reflexivity” (p. 36), through which sociology “continually turns back onto itself the scientific weapons it produces” (p. 214). This is consistent with Bourdieu's analysis of habitus and field; within the field of intellectual inquiry, the scholar must rigorously investigate her own habitus and the routines of thought that shape her production of knowledge. Loïs Wacquant describes this approach: “What has to be constantly scrutinized and neutralized, in the very act of construction of the object, is the collective scientific unconscious embedded in theories, problems, and (especially national) categories of scholarly judgment” (p. 40). For Bourdieu and Wacquant, this means that researchers must pay attention not only to their social position (gender, class, etc.), but also to the investments and limits of their intellectual field – indeed to the assumptions that underpin the intellectual enterprise itself, which radically separates the thinking from the object of thought. “The subject of reflexivity must ultimately be the social scientific field in toto” (ibid.).
Importantly, for Bourdieu reflexivity must be a social commitment, not an individual one, and he derides what he considers to be a US fashion in the social sciences, taking it for a narcissistic, solipsistic focus on feelings and textuality. Nor does Bourdieu have much patience for the radically relativistic position taken by some reflexive social scientists, which he sees as undermining the intellectual project. For Bourdieu, a socially embedded reflexivity
compels us to repudiate the absolutist claims of classical objectivity, but without for all that being forced into the arms of relativism; for the conditions of possibility of the scientific “subject” and of the scientific object are one and the same. (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 214)
The challenge, in reflexive sociology, is to consider collectively these conditions of possibility. Like the other kinds of reflexivity noted above – self-reflexivity and media reflexivity – epistemic reflexivity is, for Bourdieu, a kind of freedom, in this case one that offers “the means of a potentially liberating awakening of consciousness” (p. 215). Bourdieu's rather pessimistic view of social change is leavened by an optimism of method.
Given the different foci of these three types of reflexivity – of the self, of media, of method – does it make sense to consider them together? For Giddens, reflexivity means being able to reflect upon one's life and history and to construct a coherent (if changing) narrative about the self. For Beck, reflexivity means being able to consider, and possibly detach oneself from, the limits posed by one's class and gender. For Corner and Hill, reflexivity involves assessing generic conventions and aesthetics in order to critique their truth claims. For Bourdieu and others with methodological concerns, reflexivity is fundamental to the researchers' responsibility to consider our own habitus and investments in shaping the assumptions and techniques of research. As a preliminary attempt to articulate what might be the overarching features of reflexivity, I suggest that there are three key attributes that link these perspectives: to be able to see a phenomenon (the self, social structures, a text, a method) in its context; to be able to consider the possible influences this context has on the phenomenon; and to be attentive to processes and not only to outcomes, because phenomena are always contingently situated in time and space. Further, all three perspectives hold that reflexivity affords freedom from tradition, from ideology, from a partial world view.
How might the idea of reflexivity be useful in understanding some of the ways in which people discuss makeover television? Conversely, in what ways can audience research help clarify what we mean when we talk about reflexivity? In what ways can reflexivity be seen as a valuable attribute or perspective, and what might be the limits of this value? After an overview of the methods used in this audience research, I go on to discuss examples of reflexivity within the three frames outlined above: self-reflexivity, where respondents used makeover shows to imagine themselves from the outside; media reflexivity, where they discussed elements of the shows they believed were constructed and/or manipulated; and research reflexivity, where interviewees commented on their participation in the research process itself. I conclude the chapter by considering the extent to which these examples of reflexivity are an attribute of audience engagement with texts and what, by contrast, may be a classed and gendered performance of reflexivity demanded by the research context.
Methods for Audience Research
After an earlier textual analysis of Queer Eye (Sender, 2006) I became frustrated with my own and others' rather top-heavy critique of makeover shows and with the assumptions that this approach allowed about the influence of such shows on everyday life. There is a rich history of audience analyses, especially feminist, of traditionally women's genres (see for example Radway, 1984; Ang, 1985; Press, 1991; Bird, 2003), which seemed to have been forgotten in the rush to make sense of the new (and not so new) contours of reality television. I was especially interested in makeover shows because of their expressly pedagogic approach to the self and its transformations: what did audiences make of these exhortations to change? Did they laugh and point at the unfortunate candidates on the screens, or did they obligingly adopt the consumer instruction that saturates the texts – or both? How might asking the audience what these shows mean to them complicate most critics' assumptions of audience effects?
Between fall 2005 and spring 2007 a team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and I conducted extensive audience research on four US makeover shows: The Biggest Loser, where 14 contestants compete to lose most weight; Queer Eye, where five gay men give a makeover to 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 women are transformed from frumps and floozies into models of respectable upward mobility.2 Rather than getting an impression of people's responses to reality television broadly, as Hill (2005) had done, or even of responses to lifestyle reality shows in general, as Skeggs and her colleagues did (Skeggs, Thumim, & Wood, 2008; Wood, Skeggs, & Thumim, 2008), I was interested in responses to shows that privileged certain types of makeover narratives: weight loss, image makeovers, televised psychological interventions, and male makeovers. I chose these four shows because each epitomized one of these narratives (although they often combined more than one type), because they had the highest ratings in their type of makeover shows, and because they featured non-actors.
There were three phases in the audience research: conducting four online surveys, one for each show (fall 2005 to spring 2006); doing interviews with regular viewers recruited from that survey (spring and summer 2006); and doing interviews with a comparison group that was neither recruited online nor made up of regular viewers of the shows (fall 2006 to spring 2007). For each show, I selected every episode produced in the space of two seasons (2005–2006) and I coded it for candidate and host characteristics, definitions of the candidate's problem, nature of the makeover, type of instruction, amount and type of product placement, and so on. I also analyzed the press coverage of these and other makeover shows, intending to look at popular discourses about them.
The Survey
The survey was designed to investigate some of the key themes that had emerged from existing textual and audience approaches to reality television and to makeover shows in particular: what viewers liked and didn't like about the show; whether they picked up tips and passed them onto others, and to whom; whether they identified with the shows' candidates and hosts; what other shows they watched and what sense they made of these. We also asked for basic demographic data (gender, age, education level, occupation, and so on) as well as for data about viewing habits – in relation to the show in question and to makeover viewing more generally.
We posted requests for participants on a variety of reality-show themed websites. Some were message boards specific to the shows; others were blogs about reality television in general. We assured participants that their information would be kept confidential. We received 1861 completed survey responses: 464 for The Biggest Loser, 230 for Queer Eye, 544 for Starting Over, and 623 for What Not to Wear. Women out-numbered men in responding to all four surveys; the largest percentage of women was for Starting Over (95%) and the smallest for Queer Eye (75%). White respondents made up almost 90% of the survey participants; with around 6% African Americans, 2% Asians, and 2% reporting “other” or “mixed race.” Fewer than 4% identified themselves as Latino/a. Almost 90% of the Biggest Loser, Starting Over, and What Not to Wear respondents identified themselves as heterosexual, compared with 72% of the Queer Eye respondents. The modal age group for respondents to all four surveys was 30–39; The Biggest Loser and What Not to Wear skewed slightly younger than Queer Eye and Starting Over. Just under two thirds of the respondents to each show were married, in a civil union, or living with a partner; around a third were single. Almost 40% of all the respondents had a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree. Because of the limited availability of Nielsen data, it is hard to estimate how like the “actual” (i.e., Nielsen-rated) audience our respondents were. A comparison with the general population shows that our survey respondents were in general likely to be white women aged between 20 and 40, with an education above the average level.
Once we collected the surveys, two graduate students and I designed a coding scheme for all the open-ended responses, looking at such things as the extent to which respondents valued the instructional aspects of the shows, how much they picked up tips and what kinds of things they had used in their lives, whether they had passed on tips to others, how they critiqued the experts' instruction, and what their perceptions were of the commercial appeals embedded in the shows. The survey responses were co-coded by at least two of us and were checked for intercoder reliability, which exceeded the acceptable minimum degree of agreement of 0.7 in almost all cases.
Interviews
We contacted all the survey respondents who had indicated that they were willing to talk to us about the shows and about their own viewing habits, and we interviewed 110 in this group: 24 on The Biggest Loser, 22 on Queer Eye, 37 on Starting Over, 22 on What Not to Wear, and 5 on multiple shows (where respondents had completed more than one survey). The gender, race, education, sexuality, and relationship profiles of the interviewee group were very similar to those of the survey.
All the interviews were set up via email and conducted on the telephone. Some researchers have used more ethnographic techniques to investigate viewers' immediate reactions to scenes in reality television shows; such was Helen Wood's “text-in action” approach (Skeggs et al., 2008). Others have employed participant observation in order to understand how people interact with media in their homes and in public places (see for example Seiter, 1999; McCarthy, 2001; Hoover, Clark, & Alters, 2004; Hoover, 2006). While being similarly committed to an “ethnographic way of seeing,” in which researchers try to “get close to those studied as a way of understanding what their experiences and activities mean to them” (Bird, 2003, p. 8, quoting Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw, 1995, p. 12), telephone interviews have the advantage of efficiently gathering interview data from a large group of people distributed over a wide geographical region. Further, I was less interested in viewers' immediate reactions to the textual features of the shows or to the general use of media in everyday life than in collecting a range of narratives about how people interpret the place and meanings of makeover shows.
All interviewees were given pseudonyms, and their audiofiles were transcribed. These were imported into NVivo ethnographic coding software and coded for the themes that had emerged both in the survey and in the interviews: references to transformation, instruction, the inner and the outer self, emotion (the candidates' as well as their own), realness, identification, engagement with the commercial appeal of the shows, activities while watching the shows, and so on.
Comparison Group Interviews
Our survey and interview recruitment strategies oversampled people who had access to the Internet and to email and who consumed (and in some cases produced) online content about reality television. These methods were therefore likely to overemphasize the views of people who were well educated, employed, and affluent, on one hand, and who were highly engaged in and informed about reality television, on the other. As a point of comparison, we interviewed 20 people who were recruited through local advertising and temp agencies and were not regular viewers of the shows.3 Participants in this group were paid for their time. Their demographic information reflects much more closely than our group of regular viewers the gender, race, and education profile of the US, although they tended to be younger than the national average.
The group of 20 was divided into four sets. Five participants in each set watched individually an episode of one of the four shows and then answered questions similar to those of the regular viewer group. Unlike the telephone interviews, these comparison interviews tended to be both much shorter – ranging from 15 minutes to just over half an hour – and more diverse in their responses. The length might be accounted for by the media laboratory setting for the interview and by the unfamiliarity these interviewees had with the shows: they only had the one example to draw on in their responses, even if they had watched other types of makeover shows. Unlike most of the regular viewers we talked to, who generally expressed positive views about the shows even if they had some criticisms, some comparison group interviewees expressed strong skepticism, cynicism, and hostility to the show they watched for the study. Others, however, said that they enjoyed watching it, so much so that they would start to watch it at home – an inadvertent form of promotion for the shows that I hadn't anticipated! Like the regular viewer interviews, these were transcribed, imported into NVivo, and coded according to the same coding structure. Even though the comparison group data are somewhat scarce and were gathered in rather artificial circumstances, they nonetheless offer some insight into what people who don't participate in online forums about the shows and who aren't familiar with the shows might make of them.
To summarize, the data for this reception project consisted of textual analyses of the four shows and press coverage of them and of makeover television in general, survey responses from more than 1800 people, in-depth phone interviews with 110 people, and comparison group interviews with 20 people. The survey provided us with a large amount of relatively anonymous data, which we used for broad assessments of the uses and meanings of the shows and mined for themes to explore in subsequent interviews. The interviews with regular viewers were open and exploratory and they drew on interviewees' often deep knowledge of the shows and of their genre. The comparison group interviewees were more like the population as a whole: they were not already fans of the shows, and therefore they were likely to reflect a rather casual viewer's impression of the genre. Triangulating between textual data and different kinds of interpersonal data demonstrates that highly engaged viewers reflect upon makeover narratives in describing their relationships with themselves, their social worlds, their media engagements, and the research process.
Three Modes of Reflexivity: Self, Media, and Research
Unsurprisingly, these combined methods yielded a great deal of data about people's sense of makeover shows and of their relevance to their own lives. I explore these themes more thoroughly elsewhere (Sender, in press). Here I focus on the ways in which the viewers we talked to engaged reflexively with the shows. If reflexivity is the ability to see a phenomenon in a contingent and reciprocal relationship with its context, in what ways can both the regular viewers and the comparison group viewers be said to take a reflexive approach in their discussions of the shows? What might reflexivity among our respondents suggest about audience research and its usefulness in assessing the cultural significance of media forms? Three types of reflexivity permeated discussions with the audiences: self-reflexivity, media reflexivity, and research reflexivity.
Self-Reflexivity
Regular viewers frequently made reflexive statements about how the shows encouraged them to see themselves in the broader context of their lives through the mediated frame of the candidates' experiences. This process was captured more powerfully, because viewers saw the candidates as real people with whom they often identified, and strongly so. One example came from Casey, a Biggest Loser woman viewer, who said:
Even by watching the show, it can help you realize changes that you need to make for yourself. Not only are they talking to the people on the show, but they're also talking to the audience that's watching the show. And you realize, “Oh, if I am overweight, then I could have problems with this down the line.”
The increasing possibility that ordinary individuals' lives may appear in public and mediatized forms intensifies self-reflexivity. Rachel's husband and home were the object of a makeover in Queer Eye. She described how, as a result of the production and airing of the episode in which they appeared, she was more likely to make long-term changes in their lives. In the interview Rachel discussed what she thought was most effective about the experience:
The reality of seeing yourself on television, I think. Because, you know, people go to counseling, people go to Weight Watchers, all that kind of stuff, and it's not until you actually see yourself on TV that you go, “Oh, I really have to do this.” And you realize that other people besides your immediate family are seeing whatever the situation is.
Rachel's reflections on the self and on interpreting her personal circumstances through a mediated gaze were not unique to her, but they were imaginable for viewers who hadn't been on the show. Gareth Palmer (2004) argues that “to be filmed by cameras is suddenly to share the look of the other, to objectify yourself from a vantage point in which this look is inscribed within the seemingly ‘objective’ gaze of the surveillance footage” (p. 183). Participants frequently described how the shows and the hosts encouraged audiences to adopt the “look of the other” to see themselves as if from the outside. A What Not to Wear viewer, Gabby, described other people's posts on an online discussion board: “I've read many people who say that they have Stacy and Clinton in their heads when they're getting dressed or going shopping or whatever.” The use of non-actors, the rendering of experience through new technologies, and the genre's claim to authenticity maximize this process whereby viewers put themselves in the candidates' shoes and, after looking at them, turn a similarly appraising eye on themselves.
Giddens (1991) has argued that a fundamental feature of self-reflexivity is the production and revision of narratives that ground identity in a world that no longer permits the fixed, stable sense of place that is supposed to have existed before modernity. “The reflexive project of the self, which consists in the sustaining of coherent, yet continuously revised, biographical narratives, takes place in the context of multiple choice as filtered through abstract systems” (p. 5). As one of these abstract systems, the media offer a confusing array of possible narrative components. At the same time they also suggest that these narratives are particularly suitable to make sense of this array, in what Nick Couldry has termed “the myth of the mediated center” (Couldry, 2003, p. 2). Makeover shows offer narratives structured around the candidates' failures and the need for transformation, and these narratives are taken up, if unevenly, by viewers. They were most common in responses to Starting Over – perhaps inevitably, given this program's reliance on psychotherapeutic discursive techniques that call subjects to account for themselves. Peggy, for example, recalled one housemate, Kelly, whom she had particularly identified with:
I understood that Kelly had those issues, and it probably came from her childhood and things that were said to her, how they linger with you. Somebody had said to her that she was being sexually [provocative] with her father, and although that wasn't said to me in that way, my father said he wished I had died when I had cancer. And that has always been with me my whole life, that one thing you can't just let go. So I understood when she said that was one statement that kind of changed her whole life; that one changed me.
Peggy's story links her own devastating experience of being told something unbearable to Kelly's similar experience; the link here is not the thing told but the significance of their experiences in shaping both their lives. By sharing this experience with her on-screen proxy, Peggy made it possible to reintegrate this statement in a different framework, in which, like Kelly, she was no longer responsible for it.
Even the most compelling narratives of transformation, however, may not offer all respondents the kind of agency and autonomy from the past that the advocates of modern self-reflection might hope for. A Biggest Loser viewer, Rebecca, told us her story of a long struggle with weight gain and loss:
When September 11th happened, I was working on the thirteenth floor, and we had 26 flights of steps to go down. I thought I was going to die. And that made me rejoin [Weight Watchers] again, and I lost almost 100 pounds. And I kept it off, I did great. And then little by little, when stress starts coming into my life, I'm eating non-stop again. This is ridiculous! So, even though the stress was there then, I would look at [Biggest Loser candidates] and say, “Wow, look at how great they look!” And then I'd get a bowl of ice cream. I'm like, I don't understand why I would do that.
Although Giddens and others assume that self-narratives are likely to be empowering and freeing, it may be as important that they conform to what Eva Illouz (2003) calls a “culture of suffering” (p. 111), where stories of struggle become the primary means to construct a narrative of the self. On the basis of the paradigmatic figure of Oprah Winfrey, Illouz argues that suffering has become constitutive of modern identity, especially for women.
Stories of suffering are not only the domain of women, however, nor are they articulated only by participants already committed to the self-project of the makeover show. Terrance, a man in the comparison group who had not previously seen Starting Over, related to a housemate's financial problems in the episode. He said:
Thank God I'm not who I was. I'm not who I was, but I'm not who I want to be. But I'm moving towards where I want to be. But I mean honestly, I would have been in that same situation [as the housemate] maybe four or five years ago.
Terrance's self-appraisal suggests that makeover show narratives of the self are not unique to the genre but rather draw from broader cultural impulses to tell these kinds of stories. Further, he gives weight to Illouz's (2007) claim that the twentieth century saw an “increased emotional androgynization of men and women” (p. 37). In general, however, we can look at the impulse to produce narratives of the self not as a means toward autonomy from structural constraints such as gender and class, but as a reworking of gender and class norms, in part through changing media and communication technologies.
I don't intend here to undermine these interviewees' uses of narratives in dealing with painful experiences. I do, however, want to consider these uses in terms of Giddens' assumption that narrativization allows a seemingly infinite freedom to invent oneself from arbitrary life events, where “the line of development of the self is internally referential” (Giddens, 1991, p. 80). The only criterion is whether it all makes sense in terms of one's own internally generated narrative. However, as Ellen Granberg (2006) argues on the basis of her research on how people who have lost a great deal of weight construct stories about themselves and this process, narratives of the self must be recognizable and credible. They tend to draw on “a stock of ‘canonical’ narratives” (p. 112) and must be met with at least some acceptance from others, to whom they are told. As Foucault (1978) observes about religious and sexual confession, Rose (1999) about discursive practices within the psy disciplines, and Prosser (1998) about transgender autobiographies, these narratives are embodied and felt, at the same time as being institutionally convenient, even necessary. Far from offering the freedom to invent oneself that Giddens proposes, self-narratives are as likely to deliver the narrator into affective and economic systems that are disconnected from her own interests, however comforting these narratives might feel at a personal level.
Further, commercial communication technologies have been fundamental to the very idea of a “self” that we recognize in the modern era. Some interviewees discussed how they used online sites as an intensified means toward self-reflexivity. Starting Over viewer Tori talked about updating her MySpace page daily:
I was doing quotations every day; I do it every couple days now. [I'm] thinking about posting a biography that I'm writing but I'm not sure. I posted the links to it. I post about my struggles – like I have anger issues and panic attack issues . . . I get panicky and then I get angry. I write when I have episodes about that.
Henry Jenkins (2006) is optimistic about the possibilities of convergence and interactivity for audience productivity, where new media technologies offer an unprecedented range of venues, texts, and other resources for self-representation. Mark Andrejevic (2004), however, is suspicious of the role of new interactive technologies as a route to “self-expression and self-knowledge” (p. 97). He is concerned that only by submitting to external and – increasingly – internal monitoring will we come to believe ourselves to be authentic. Andrejevic also warns us that the ideal realm of democratized media, what he calls “participatory interactivity,” is too easily co-opted by media companies to extract more labor from engaged audiences, in the form of “productive surveillance” (p. 2). What might seem to us like the freedom to create ourselves can readily be transformed into what Maurizio Lazzarato calls “immaterial labor” (1996). This formula describes activities not normally perceived as “work,” but that nevertheless generate profit from ephemeral commodities – information, knowledge, cultural capital. Like other types of capitalization, these profits do not return to those doing the labor.
Giddens sees the ability to be self-reflexive as affording a welcome autonomy from the structural determinants of the past. Audiences' discussions of the makeover shows suggest that self-reflexivity is mobilized by their viewing practices and that it forms a common and pleasurable mode of engagement with the shows. Self-reflexivity does not represent, however, the freeing from constricting identity categories as promised by optimists of postmodernity,; audiences' engagements suggest that reflexivity re-essentializes an authentic inner self that must be expressed. Self-narratives tend to conform to generic expectations that are shaped within the commercial demands of the makeover texts. These programs thus facilitate a self-surveillance that feels like self-awareness, an intimate relation with the self. The extent to which self-reflection is mediated through surveillance technologies and through canonic narratives demands a revision of Giddens' model of a pure, self-referential reflexivity, uncontaminated by economic, technological, and cultural conditions.
Media Reflexivity
The second kind of reflexivity involved the respondents' perceptions of what they saw on screen and how these perceptions were shaped by the economic, technical, and aesthetic contexts in which they were made. First, audiences were highly critical of some of the instruction offered in the shows; they criticized advice from the hosts especially when they saw it as promoting the sponsors' products. Biggest Loser interviewees commented on the “shameless plug” of oatmeal and Jell-O dessert: when we asked Seth if he remembered products that were featured on the show, he chanted “Jell-O; Jell-O, Jell-O!” But, even though the regular viewers whom we talked to criticized particular styles or product placements, they did not dismiss the commercial premises of the shows in toto. In contrast, members of the comparison group were more likely to reject the shows as a genre on the grounds of their expressly commercial appeals.
Second, both regular and comparison group interviewees were attentive to the reality status of the genre. According to writers such as John Corner and Annette Hill, reality television's aesthetic conventions and this genre's blending of fact and fiction generate spaces for audiences to consider their truth claims. Like Hill's respondents, many of the viewers in this study were well aware of how scripting, editing, and even genre expectations not only shaped but also challenged the realism of the shows. Robert, for example, spotted the producers' sleight of hand in What Not to Wear:
When it comes to the unreality aspect of the show, and as I told you, I am a freelance writer and there's spots where I can tell that [the hosts'] responses are completely scripted; typically it's when they're coming up with these really smart-ass zingers. I mean, yes, some of those are real. But particularly when you see them watching the makeover [candidate] shopping, on the day when they go out shopping alone . . . If you look, the way the lines come out, it's definitely scripted. I think what happens is, they sit down, they look at everything, and Stacy and Clinton will make comments – I think the comments Stacy and Clinton originally make as they're watching it are genuine. And then the scriptwriters get it and they tweak it a little bit.
Some viewers criticized the shows for what they saw as formulaic editing that manipulated the emotional ups and downs of the episodes. Cathy, a What Not to Wear regular, said:
I think there is a pattern, and I think they could be more creative with their editing on the pattern, because it's almost like after a while, they've just kind of gone into a pattern, more or less. Like, the start is [candidates] are resistant, and by the middle they're being a little more emotional and softening up, and then by the end they're saying how great Stacy and Clinton are. That's pretty much across the board.
Many respondents mentioned that their online interactions cultivated a more reflexive approach to the shows. For example, Deborah, who was recruited through a women's support website based on Starting Over, said:
[The producers] show good and bad with all of [the housemates], but I think sometimes they may show more good of one or bad of another, again for TV purposes. But I think most of the people who watch it tend to realize that they do that [. . .] Going on the [message boards] you get a lot of interaction with people and what they think about stuff that happened, and mostly everyone that I've seen their messages thinks the same way I do about all of that.
Another interviewee who was quite active online was Bill, a Starting Over viewer. He offered the most sophisticated analysis not only of editing conventions, but also of how the show's production routines linked with existing genres. Bill notes that Starting Over:
blends the two great things about daytime TV, which is the self-help focus of a talk show with [sic] the hyperbolic drama of a soap opera [. . .] What's refreshing about soaps is that people get hysterical, and that's sort of fun, it's sort of nice [. . .] [On Starting Over] it's often like someone's had a horrible fight with another houseguest, and theys get all worked up trying to talk to somebody on the phone or one of the other houseguests. And that I find interesting, because it definitely does have that reality show thing of people that get used to having cameras as a part of their world, so if it's not completely manipulated, it's definitely like their guard is down and something's happening in front of the camera, and there's something thrilling about that.
Bill was a regular participant on Television Without Pity (TWoP), a particularly astute and witty website that has forums for the synopsis and critique of numerous US television shows. TWoP raises audience critique to an art form, as Mark Andrejevic (2008) argues; the website pays “recappers” to provide often hilariously snarky synopses of episodes that “often focus on production details such as lighting and editing, thereby helping to direct the attention to the formal aspects of the shows they describe” (p. 26). Andrejevic argues that part of the pleasure of participating in TWoP is in the construction and representation of the self as “savvy” (p. 38), duped neither by the artifices of the production processes nor by the promise that their activities will have any influence on the producers. Yet Andrejevic concludes that savviness does little to protect TWoP participants from the extraction of labor entailed in the work of being watched while watching shows, to paraphrase Dallas Smythe's famous phrase. On the contrary, the pleasures of critique intensified the participants' investment in and loyalty to particular shows.
Further, it is striking that, despite this savviness, many of the people we talked to remained highly invested in what Ien Ang calls the “emotional realism” of television (1985, p. 45). This describes the audiences' attribution of emotional authenticity to a television show (Dallas, in Ang's research) that is also seen as highly artificial at the “empirical” level, in terms of setting, apparent wealth, plot, and so on. In my makeover study, the audiences' recognition of the genre's constructed elements sometimes enhanced their sense of the shows' emotional realism. Danielle acknowledged that The Biggest Loser producers recruit a particularly emotional group of contestants, but nevertheless she saw the show's rituals as precipitating expressions of real feeling:
I think [the emotions are] realistic because of the intensity of their circumstances . . . They might pick people who are more emotional, or people who express themselves well because obviously they want people who are going to be expressive because otherwise the show might be boring. So partly it's the selection process, but I also think it's the circumstances that bring out emotion – anybody would be emotional in such circumstances when they're making these dramatic changes in their lives and they're in these intense circumstances with competition and exercise and diet [and] getting weighed on national TV on the world's most gigantic scale. [Laughing]
The viewers' often quite sophisticated critiques of the impact of production processes on the empirical realism of the shows sits in an uneasy tension with the same viewers' perception of the shows' emotional realism.
The regular viewers were highly reflexive about the production contexts, the need to produce good television for audiences, and the commercial demands on the shows. Even if reality television allows audiences a reflexive distance from its processes and aesthetics, however, Corner (2009) is not optimistic that this involves either “a new reflectiveness on the part of program makers” or “a new refusal on the part of audiences to accord reality status to what they see on television” (p. 62). Savviness about production processes does not herald an era of media literate and critically distanced viewers in any simple way. For many of the regular viewers in this project, critical appraisals of the shows intensified their engagements with them, especially when these appraisals were shared in online discussions with other fans. Critiques of the shows' empirical realism do not dislodge perceptions of emotional realism; the regular viewers who participated in this study saw the emotional expressions as real, despite – or even because of – the constructedness of the circumstances in which such expressions appeared. Media reflexivity does not necessarily offer protection from the ideological and industrial contexts of watching the shows, as advocates of media literacy would assume.
Research Reflexivity
Occasionally respondents were also reflexive about their participation in the research project, being aware that they were constructing narratives about the shows for a particular audience: a media researcher. They reflected about the research process in three ways. First, interviewees indicated that they were aware of their own narratives as constructions, a way of telling a story. One viewer, for example, struggled to tell a coherent narrative about what she saw housemates going through on Starting Over:
That's really tough because I'm trying to figure out what angle to come at it from. I guess the easiest way for me to break it down in my head is the different seasons; I actually started watching it towards the last part of season two. I was home and stumbled across it and got hooked. And then on another channel they started showing season one. So it was kinda cool; I was watching Chicago one day and LA the next. And it was a totally different feel.
This interviewee suggests that she consciously selects both “in [her] head” and for the interviewer one out of several narrative options to describe her watching two Starting Over seasons in parallel.
In the second type of research reflexivity, interviewees indicated that they were aware of popular and academic critiques of media audiences as dupes. This may have been especially acute for women viewers, who are used to defending genres that are traditionally associated with women and are considered to be low-brow forms of entertainment. One woman, for example, wanted to avoid being seen as a dupe of The Biggest Loser. When the interviewer asked whether she felt that the show's editing allowed viewers to see participants in a relatively real way, she said:
Yeah. I almost hesitate to say that because so much of reality shows, everybody just hates them, or they say they hate them and watch them in private . . . I don't want it to come out as “Marci says . . . and boy is she an idiot!” [Laughing]
This interviewee was most explicit about her awareness of how her perceptions of The Biggest Loser may confirm negative stereotypes about (women's) fandom of reality television. The interviewees' awareness of negative characterizations of audience behavior came through in many interviews, however, where these people expressed embarrassment about the kinds of shows they watched and about their emotional connections with the candidates.
In a third type of research reflexivity, the interviewees acknowledged that they were in a reciprocal conversation between interviewee and interviewer. What Not to Wear viewer Barclay teased the interviewer for posing leading questions to her, in a way similar to that of the hosts on makeover shows:
This exchange suggests that Barclay was well aware of media conventions whereby unequal distributions of power produce the discursive outcome of the encounter. Credentialed interviewers (makeover hosts, journalists, academic researchers) shape what interviewees (ordinary people) will say and then use it in a quote, in order to confirm what the interviewer already wanted to argue.
Some interviewees thus saw the interview encounter reflexively. Although observations about the research context were fewer than about self-reflexivity and media reflexivity, respondents frequently saw themselves, their media consumption, and even their participation in this research within broader social and institutional contexts.
Producing Reflexivity
Three types of reflexivity – addressing the self, media production, and research processes – come into play in the study of makeover television audiences. These are not distinct, however, but rather intersect within the contemporary project of producing a self that is generally reflexive. The fact of seeing and representing the self as reflexive offers a defense against the broadly held assumption that television audiences are media dupes. Self-reflection allows a pleasurable relationship with a self that can be explored and expressed. Further, interviewees' research reflexivity draws one's attention to the power differentials between researchers and subjects: the latter wrest back a portion of the control usually assumed to belong to researchers. Collectively, reflexivity has been constructed as an ideal mode of subjectivity in which people represent themselves as being apart from, and therefore as having agency in relation to, both themselves and their contexts.
Reflexivity did not, however, function equally across all the shows and all the viewers. The degree to which regular viewers reflected about their engagement with makeover shows depended to some extent upon the specific show they watched and their degree of social interaction with other people about that show. The four shows mobilized very different levels and types of self-reflexivity among the participants in this study. Regular viewers were most likely to discuss What Not to Wear and The Biggest Loser in terms of self-reflexivity conceived of as self-surveillance; the emphasis placed in these shows on the scrutinizing and sometimes hidden camera was adopted by many interviewees as a technique they applied to themselves. Starting Over interviewees were most likely to exercise self-reflection through the construction of life narratives that echoed the narratives profiled on this show. Queer Eye interviewees were not especially reflexive about self or media, which surprised me, because it is the one most similar to What Not to Wear in its style and techniques. This makes me wonder whether the emphasis on men's transformations made this show less successful in engaging the kind of self-scrutiny and stories that characterize feminine approaches to the self.
Those interviewees who had a lot of social contact with other viewers were most likely to be reflexive about the media contexts and techniques of the shows. Those who were active on online message boards were especially articulate about their perceptions of the production conditions and generic formulae of the shows. The ability to learn and share background knowledge about the shows seemed to encourage sometimes high levels of skepticism about the truth claims of the makeover genre, if not the shows' emotional realism.
What did not seem to make a great deal of difference in reflexivity among regular viewers was their gender or their levels of education. Andrea Press (1991) and Skeggs and her colleagues (2008) found that middle-class women were much more likely to distance themselves from television content, whereas working-class women were more likely to identify with the characters or candidates on screen. The middle-class women in Skeggs and her colleagues' research reflected upon lifestyle reality shows' manipulative techniques and low-brow status and tended to ally themselves with the researchers who they assumed shared this view. Working-class women, in contrast, seemed less comfortable with the research process, tended to identify with the women in the shows, and placed themselves in the narratives by imagining how they would feel or respond, which the researchers call “immanence” (p. 15). On the other hand, I found very little difference among regular viewers, across genders or a range of education levels, in terms of how much they reflected about themselves and their viewing practices.4 If self-reflexivity is an immanent position and media reflexivity a distanced one, regular viewers' expressions of immanence and distantiation were more related to the shows they watched and to the amount of online interaction they had than to their own gender or education levels. Further, some of these interviewees expressed both immanent and distanced perspectives on the same texts, which suggests that these approaches are not mutually exclusive. Among people already invested in the makeover shows, immanence–distantiation is not a single continuum determined by gender and class but can describe positions held simultaneously by the same person – for example someone who is emotionally highly invested in a candidate and sees herself in a similar position, while also critiquing the artifices of the show.
I found more differences between participants across education levels and gender in the comparison group, however, in a way similar to that described by Skeggs and her colleagues (2008), although these differences were less marked than in their research. The comparison group as a whole made fewer observations about production context, probably because these necessitate some familiarity with the show over time, and there were fewer examples of self-reflexivity in this group. Within the comparison group cohort, interviewees with fewer years of education tended to describe the contents of the show with less critical comment than those with more education, and they were less likely to be self-reflexive in response to the texts. There were still moments of reflexivity here too, though: Chris, a man with a high school education, commented on the editing of What Not to Wear: “It did look like they made you see what they wanted you to see.” Comparison group interviewees with more education tended to be more frank and more critical. Peter, who had a bachelors degree, commented on the editing in Starting Over: “I mean it's TV. It's trying to manipulate you. John Forrest said ‘When faced with telling the truth or telling the legend, always tell the legend.’ Well, the same goes for reality TV.” Peter's comment might be more literary than Chris', but I wouldn't claim that it is more reflexive. The middle-class distanced and working-class immanent associations that Press and Skeggs and her colleagues found in their studies may be somewhat stronger in the comparison group, but not overwhelmingly so.
The very similar levels of reflexivity among regular viewers of different genders and educational levels may be interpreted in a number of ways. High degrees of reflexivity demonstrate the persuasiveness of the text: the shows effectively interpellated their regular audiences by encouraging particular ways of talking about the self in relation to the shows. Regular viewers who were recruited on internet message boards participated in social online activity that cultivated a shared critical perspective among a group of savvy viewers. Additionally, high levels of self reflexivity prioritized the perspectives of the affluent and educated people who were overrepresented in the self-selecting group of regular viewers. These arguments have weight, but aren't sufficient to fully account for the contrast in degrees of reflexivity between the regular and comparison group viewers. The first may account for the self-reflexive, immanent engagement with the shows but not the distanced view that media reflexivity affords. The second ignores the many respondents who said they had minimal online interactions with others and merely went online to get information about the shows. The third argument fails to account for the highly reflexive statements among the regular group interviewees who had fewer years of education than the cohort mean.
I began to consider the high levels of reflexivity among the regular viewers who self-selected into this project partly as a product of the research exchange itself. Whereas Giddens argues that reflexivity is an inherent attribute of modernity, Adkins (2003) and Skeggs and her colleagues (2008) argue that reflexivity is a performance of selfhood in situated moments. They write: “In our research, the groups of women recruited from different classed and raced backgrounds deploy their available cultural resources to produce ‘performances’ of class, made rather than found, in each particular type of research event” (p. 7). Because the regular viewers were self-selecting, those who volunteered were already likely to be invested in reflexive self-performances, irrespective of gender or educational background. This group wanted to talk about the shows, what these meant to its members, and how they contextualized them in their own lives. These participants were aligned with the overarching project of the four makeover shows that encourage, allow, or demand self-reflexivity. But this is also the project of audience research: both makeover shows and audience research require that participants produce a reflexive self, someone who can see the self as if from the outside, who can tell stories about the self, and who values authentic self-expression.
Both research and makeover television offer people across genders and a range of educational backgrounds the possibility of performing self-reflection, which comes with certain pleasures and privileges. Self-reflexivity suggests leisure, media reflexivity suggests literacy, and both are historically the product of privilege and status. Makeover shows democratize both kinds of reflexivity by situating them in the ordinary; audience research expands the reach of reflexivity through its commitments to representativeness. Reflexivity isn't a part of modern identity because it is inherent to the modern condition, but because it's valuable and valued and it grants status.
This is not to simply celebrate reflexivity as a freedom afforded by media engagements and research participation. As Rose (1999) and others have noted, self-monitoring and therapeutic techniques are less freedoms to create oneself than they are expectations of modern citizenship. Self-reflexivity is compatible with the neoliberal values of responsibility, agency, and choice, and media reflexivity does not in itself liberate audiences from the commercial reach of media systems. Even commitments to epistemic reflexivity may obscure the possibility for co-optation. Those of us engaged in audience research must consider how our practices situate participants within larger frameworks of good citizenship: “Look! Audiences have agency! They aren't dupes! They are self-aware!” Further, we must be cautious about reifying identity categories (gender, class, race, age) that are as much an invention of biopolitics and market segmentation as they are meaningful ways to compare audiences. This is particularly so when we valorize reflexive performances that may be more likely (though not necessarily) to be articulated by well-educated research participants.
Audience research neither demonstrates that audiences are free from textual influence through their reflexive practices, nor offers the opportunity for participants to free themselves from such influences by reflecting upon their experiences. Instead, like makeover shows, audience research invests in an economy of knowledge that produces reflexivity for institutionally useful ends (even if these may also be ends that we prefer). Such considerations should not paralyze audience research, however. Rather than looking from the outside in at how the media promote expressive and reflexive performances of selfhood, we can consider how both makeover shows and the research interaction encourage expressivity and reflexivity that are part of a larger cultural impulse toward these modes of selfhood.
NOTES
1 This chapter develops themes originally presented at the Affective Audiences preconference at the International Communication Association's annual conference in Chicago, 2009.
2 Thanks to research fellows Christopher Finlay, Nicole Rodgers, Adrienne Shaw, Riley Snorton, and Margaret Sullivan for their efficient and enthusiastic efforts on this project.
3 Thanks to Diana Mutz for generously sharing research subjects from her study.
4 Because class is a notoriously difficult concept to define, especially in the US, I take education as a measure of people's likely access to economic, social, and cultural capital.
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FURTHER READING
Weber, B. R. (2009). Makeover TV: Selfhood, citizenship, and celebrity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Wood, H., & Skeggs, B. (2008). Spectacular morality: “Reality” television, individualisation and the remaking of the working class. In D. Hesmondhalgh & J. Toynbee (Eds.), The media and social theory (pp. 177–193). London, UK: Routledge.