Abstract
In The Makeover: Reality Television and Reflexive Audiences, Katherine Sender examines audiences of makeover programmes to analyse how media are used by them as a resource for constructing a reflexive self (p. 5). Sender situates the study within both a ‘feminist cultural studies approach to media reception’ (p. 9) and in the context of a history of televised ‘gendered self-improvement’ (p. 22). By analysing audiences of four different makeover shows in the United States, relying mostly on one-on-one interviews with viewers, Sender is able to show how audiences engage with media in a reflexive way. In this study, the audiences are reflexive about themselves, the programmes they watch, as well as the research process (p. 15). Throughout the book’s eight chapters, Sender explains how exactly this reflexivity is constituted or created. The publication corresponds with other recent analyses of reality television audiences such as Skeggs and Wood (2012; reviewed in European Journal of Cultural Studies (EJCS) 16/2013) and can be seen as an important contribution to a contemporary debate in media and cultural studies.
After describing the study’s purpose, frameworks and aims in the introductory chapter, Sender offers an account of the current academic work about makeover shows in Chapter 2. By contextualising makeover shows within women’s culture and characterising them as media texts in which candidates are constructed as ‘gendered projects’ (p. 32), the chapter concludes with the call for broadening the research focus to how audiences engage with these shows (p. 46).
In Chapter 3, Sender presents the findings of her audience study with regard to the instruction and consumption offered in makeover shows. Here, Sender finds a ‘much more complex engagement with the shows’ instructional elements and commercial appeals than critiques based on texts alone allow’ (p. 48). Most striking in Sender’s findings is her observation of how media reflexivity works and which contradictions it inherently carries. Sender namely observes that audiences, in particular the regular viewers, were highly media reflexive about the instruction and advice offered by makeover shows; however, media reflexivity did not necessarily protect them from accepting the overarching assumptions of progress towards a better version of the self as proposed by the shows (p. 78).
In the following Chapter 4, Sender takes on the topic of schadenfreude and surveillance as it is discussed in the context of makeover television. Once more, Sender shows how audiences possess a more complex engagement with the shows’ representations of candidates than the spectrum between schadenfreude and a willing submission to self-surveillance suggests (p. 85). Again, Sender can show that assumptions of negative social effects of makeover shows are complicated by the data from the audience research project by the articulation of ‘complex moral hierarchies of shame and humiliation’ (p. 104).
In Chapter 5, Sender addresses the topic of empirical truth and emotional authenticity in makeover television (p. 105). In this chapter, she shows that audiences also possess ‘a high degree of media reflexivity in their challenges to the realism of reality TV’ (p. 108). While many interviewees in the study were reflexive about the role of production processes and commercial demands in shaping the realism of makeover shows (p. 111), there were ambivalences within the audiences’ engagement with television. Sender thus concludes that, on the one hand, audiences were critiquing the artifices of the reality TV genre, while on the other hand, this paradoxically reinforced their sense of the genre’s emotional realism (p. 106).
Sender continues with contemplating ‘the reflexive self’ and how this is expressed through makeover shows in Chapter 6. Here, she argues that audiences draw on the shows’ self-reflexive motifs, narratives and rituals to cultivate an intimate and intense engagement with the self. Instead of producing a rational, self-governing subjectivity, however, Sender finds that the self-reflexivity encouraged in makeover programming invokes a much older, romantic model of the self that values interiority, authenticity and expression (p. 137). The makeover genre, she concludes, itself produces problems of the self, while offering (commercialised) solutions for viewers. Furthermore, Sender finds analogies between these processes used in makeover shows to promote self-reflexivity and processes of audience research (p. 163).
In the chapter that follows, this argument of ‘research reflexivity’ is expanded. Sender offers a critical account of qualitative methods in audience research as well as of participants’ and researchers’ reflexivity in the research process. Sender notices that participants were reflexive about taking part in a research study (p. 164). For example, participants were aware that fans of reality TV are often viewed negatively (pp. 165–166); they also constructed narratives about the shows for the media researcher (p. 166) as well as situated themselves in the interview. Another striking aspect of Sender’s study is that it uncovered a divergent viewpoint compared to existing audience research. As opposed to other studies on reality television audiences (e.g. Skeggs et al., 2008), Sender found very few differences among regular viewers in terms of education, race or gender; regular viewers across all education levels were active critics of the makeover shows and reflexive about the production conditions and commercial pressures (p. 178).
In Chapter 8, Sender takes up the notion of reflexivity and uses the findings of her study to reconsider debates in audience research. She points out that the primary engagement of audiences with media texts is reflexive and that ‘media reflexivity became part of the reflexive self who is aware of her social and mediated contexts as she is invested in an authentic, expressive inner self’ (p. 187). However, she also notes that the reflexivity found in her research was limited: participants could critique the particular iterations of a makeover, but not the underlying structure that gives the genre its rationale (p. 192). Nevertheless, Sender uses reflexivity in her study as a fruitful framework that ‘describes the ability to see a phenomenon – the self, social structures, a text, or a method – in context, and to be able to consider the influences of this context on the phenomenon’ (p. 192).
In sum, the book offers a rich analysis of audiences’ engagement with television texts and particularly illuminates the interrelations between media and self-reflexivity with a great emphasis on the ambivalences that come along with it. The author presents a highly self-reflexive and instructive study that highlights not only the ambivalences and contradictions of audiences’ engagements with media texts but also the fact that further research on audiences in contemporary media cultures is desperately needed.