Witches and bitches: Reality television,housewifization and the new hidden abode of production

Abstract

The governance of affect by capital has seen its ideological legitimation and emblematic site of production in the mainstream television industry, specifically reality television programs, as they provide templates for affective self-presentation to the public at large. As even a cursory glance at most reality television production demonstrates, it is most often women’s bodies and self-concepts that bear the burden of signifying and legitimating the message of this new economic formation: ‘conform to our template, be seen, and build a reputation!’ This article will focus on the Real Housewives franchise, which along with its network Bravo is credited with saving the fortunes of NBC, as the paradigmatic example of these new narrative trends and business models. It will interrogate the historical resonances and discontinuities between the economy of affective visibility now apparent on reality television and its modes of production and the origins of the ‘real’ housewife in early capitalism. At this time, women’s skills, bodies and reproductive capacities were violently restructured; forbidden from earning a wage or having money, women’s work inside and outside the home was simultaneously appropriated and concealed. As reality television inaugurates new kinds of labor and value creation in the 21st century, it does so in ways that are deeply gendered or ‘housewifized’; reality television’s forms of hidden, precarious, and unregulated labour recall the appropriation and denigration of the value of women’s work by systems of capitalist expansion in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Keywords

Branding gender housewifization labor reality television reputation

In Caliban and the Witch (Federici, 2004), Silvia Federici provides a compelling description of the diaspora of ‘heretics escaping persecution, discharged soldiers, journeymen and other humble folk in search of employment, … foreign artisans, evicted peasants, prostitutes, hucksters, petty thieves, [and] professional beggars’ (p. 82) roaming the roads of Europe during the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the 16th and 17th centuries. Cast adrift from their homes as a result of war, disease, food shortages, processes of land privatization and the radical restructuring of forms of work, the most vulnerable of these vagabonds were young, unmarried and elderly women. Many were forced into prostitution and subject to brutal punishment, or persecuted for being witches and burned, providing potent illustration of the fact that, during times of political and economic crisis, it is most often women who are on the front lines, suffering the very worst of the privation, discipline and repression at hand.

To be sure, it is a very far cry from the rutted roads of 16th-century Europe teeming with vagabondage to the affluent gated communities of the Botoxed, entitled and shopping-obsessed women populating the Real Housewives reality television franchise. Indeed, at first glance, it might appear ridiculous even to make this kind of connection. And yet, in this article, I will argue that the ways in which women were disciplined and produced as ‘real’ housewives during the brutal transition from feudalism to capitalism have much to offer our understanding of Real Housewives and reality television production practices in general today. Then, as now, ‘housewives’ were made, not born; their work was deeply necessary but was also structurally pushed aside, rendered invisible and appropriated by others. As reality television inaugurates new kinds of labor and value creation in the 21st century, I contend it does so in ways that are deeply gendered and that recall the appropriation and denigration of the value of women’s work inside and outside of the home by systems of capitalist expansion in the 16th and 17th centuries. Feminist critic Maria Mies (2007) terms these contemporary processes of ‘invisible, unregulated and unprotected labour’ ‘housewifisation’ (p. 270).

There can be no doubt that women are bearing the brunt of the current political and economic crisis. A recent report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in 2012 found that women’s participation in standard forms of employment is decreasing and that they are overrepresented in non-standard precarious work around the globe by wide margins (ILO, 2012: viii–ix). Women’s salaries compared to men’s for the same jobs remain at around 80 percent and as low as 40 percent in some cases (ILO, 2011b: 19). In the developing world, growing numbers of women are subject to increasing exploitation and degradation; contractions across vast sectors of waged work depress wages across the board and push women back into the informal economy, such as street vending and domestic or sex work, where they become even more vulnerable. Data from 2011 show that one in three workers around the globe is unemployed or poor, including well over 300 million indigenous people and 81 million young people. Totally, 829 million people living in poverty in the world are women, compared to 522 million men (ILO, 2011a: 7–9).

Against the backdrop of these heavily gendered levels of poverty, the success of reality television programming continues, fueling profits for transnational media corporations and television networks in developed countries, specifically the United States. CBS, home to reality television pioneer Survivor, in its 29th cycle at the time of writing, posted an 8 percent increase in advertising sales in the first quarter of 2012 (James, 2012), while MTV’s hit Jersey Shore drove VIACOM’s profits up by 33 percent in 2011 (Chozick, 2011). Bravo’s popular Real Housewives docusoap franchise is valued at half a billion dollars (Hollywood Reporter, 2012), has eight different versions in North America, has been sold to over 178 territories (Becker, 2008) and has licensed franchises from France to Athens to Australia (Clark and Haskett, 2 April 2013, personal communication). Bravo is credited for the financial resurrection of its parent company NBC-Universal, whose earnings rose by over 38 percent in 2010 (Friedman, 2011).

In light of these impressive figures, there can be no doubt that reality television has become a powerful site of ideological and material production in recent years. Indeed, reality television stands at the forefront of new modes of capitalist value-generation. It has created novel production and business models, which require flexible workers to put in long hours for little pay or benefits, intensified the role of advertisers in the creation of ‘branded’ television content and developed entertainment formats exchanged on media markets around the globe. Its production models have also initiated new ways to monetize online user-generated content, including ‘reality advertising’ (Shaw, 2010), and have pioneered the development of numerous ‘brand extensions’ – in which goods and services, such as live events, DVDs, music, books and fashion lines, developed in and through the shows generate lucrative profits (Hearn, 2014).

Most importantly, reality television has inaugurated the means for individuals to pursue a form of reputational capital by agreeing to become participants and subjecting themselves and their identities to the shows’ structuring logics and demands. Reality television not only produces branded content, formats and goods and services, then; it also produces branded selves. Lured by the seductive promise of temporary celebrity, participants offer themselves up to the television cameras for little remuneration, work to model attention-getting forms of subjectivity for viewers and, with any luck, produce public personae that might be traded for cash down the line. This ‘monetization of being’ (Hearn, 2013: 27) is best characterized by reality television personae such as Adrienne Maloof from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills or Bethenny Frankel from The Real Housewives of New York, who have capitalized on their generated fame and come away with handsome profits (Galloway, 2011). As I will outline below, reality television’s texts and modes of production are bound together; they work to narrate, embody and advance the broader logics of contemporary capitalist production, predicated as they now are on an overt kind of ‘affective visibility’. These logics rely heavily, as they always have, on the exploitation of women’s bodies, work and reputations.

The housewifization of labor

In 1867, Marx first argued that ‘labour power’ was the only commodity capable of producing more than it costs to make. In order to understand how capital is generated or profit is made, then, we cannot be distracted by the processes of market exchange, but must instead ‘take leave of this noisy sphere’ and follow the worker and the capitalist into the ‘hidden abode of production’ (Marx, 1976: 279). Here, beyond the apparently freely entered into contract of the employment/wage relation, Marx argues, we can finally see the exploitation of workers’ time and energy by the capitalist, as well as the fundamental antagonisms that result in the production of profit or monetary value.

After 150 years, clearly, the mode of capitalist production is profoundly changed. Post-Fordist capitalism, now dominant albeit crisis-ridden, is characterized by what David Harvey has called processes of ‘flexible accumulation’ (Harvey, 1990), which include subcontracting, just-in-time decentralized production, extensive communication networks and an emphasis on the production of knowledge and symbolic products – including image design, branding and marketing – over concrete material goods (Goldman and Papson, 2006; Harvey, 1990). These developments, in turn, have resulted in a bifurcated labor market in which well-paid, stable long-term jobs with secure benefits and wages, often protected by unions, are undergirded by a growing informal sector of precarious employment (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005), characterized by short-term contracts and part-time work, ‘low wages, (the) absence of any job security and high “flexibility”’ (Mies, 1998: 16). The paradigm for this kind of informal labor, of course, is the (traditionally female) domestic worker or housewife, but the sector now also includes interns, sex workers, garment workers and retail and service workers. While this type of labor historically has been located within the home in industrialized nations and within the ‘underdeveloped’ colonies of capitalism throughout the world, in recent years, due to drastic cuts in social safety nets and the rise of free-market neoliberal ideology, ‘the conditions which are prevailing for the vast majority of people in the underdeveloped world are returning to the centres of capitalism’ (Mies, 1998: 17).

Not only have we seen an increase in contract work or precarious employment in the last several decades in the West, we have seen a qualitative shift in the nature of many jobs as well. As computerization and new technologies have made over the world of work, and knowledge and symbolic production have become central sites for the accumulation of wealth, forms of ‘immaterial labor’ – analytic, symbolic and linguistic tasks – and affective labor, which ‘produces and manipulates affects, such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement or passion’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 108), are now widespread. Increasingly workers are asked to put their own life experience, communicative competency and sense of self into their jobs in order to produce a feeling of well-being, ease or satisfaction in the consumer. Indeed, the management and public presentation of self have become immanent to the capitalist mode of production (Read, 2003).

In light of the growing predominance of precarious, insecure forms of affective labor, critics argue that current capitalist production processes now extend outside traditional workplaces into all areas of life and actively produce new forms of human sociality and subjectivity (see Hardt and Negri, 2000; Lazzarato, 1996; Neilsen and Rossiter, 2005). This kind of biopolitical production constitutes, in the words of Frederic Jameson (1998), the ‘becoming cultural of the economic and the becoming economic of the cultural’ (p. 60). These widespread shifts in the nature of capitalist production and the housewifization and socialization of labor upon which they depend render the processes behind the making of profit even more obscure and difficult to trace. Given that reality television production represents the apotheosis of these new labor practices, predicated as it is on the extremely cheap labor of its production workers and participants and the disciplining of participants’ reputations in the service of profit-producing ‘entertainment’, it only makes sense to critically examine its ‘new’ hidden abode of production – the mechanisms through which it creates profit – in detail and with reference to the construction of the housewife in early capitalism.

Reality television’s ‘housewifized’ production models

It is no small coincidence that the Real Housewives (and most other reality television productions) stand as exemplars of a new form of first world housewifization. These shows are made on the cheap, with an average cost per episode of US$300,000, as opposed to budgets in the millions of dollars per episode for scripted dramas (Carter, 2010). Very little of these costs go to workers or participants, however. It has been estimated that casting budgets can be as low as US$10,000 an episode (Galloway, 2011); on-air participants are paid a minimal ‘appearance fee’ (Podlas, 2007: 147), usually in the hundreds of dollars, and are often expected to cover their own costs of travel and accommodation, while fees to executive producers, on the other hand, can reach as high as US$200,000 per episode. In addition to the poor pay, contestants on shows such as The Bachelor or Hell’s Kitchen are often cut off from the outside world, deprived of sleep and encouraged to drink alcohol in order to fire up their personal vulnerabilities and produce more dramatic footage. As participants are not considered actors, they are not governed by union rules concerning work or break times; contestants on Project Runway have reported being awakened at 6:00 a.m. in the morning and forced to work 18-hour days (Wyatt, 2009c). While the participants on The Real Housewives of Vancouver, for example, do not have such intensive shooting schedules, usually working 4 days a week for a shooting period of 22 weeks (Clark and Haskett, 2 April 2013, personal communication), they do not earn much money. Participants on The Real Housewives of Beverley Hills reportedly made US$135,000 each for the entire second season of 24 episodes (Galloway, 2011).

As networks and cable broadcasters demand compelling, cheap and quick-to-produce shows, production companies regularly undercut each other on production costs. While reality television producers insist that the shows are unscripted and do not involve writers, in fact, they rely on editors to build the story in the editing bay and simply rename writers ‘segment or field producers’ (Elisberg, 2008; Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW), 2007). Workers, such as production assistants, drivers, segment producers, assistant editors and loggers, are often asked to work 18-hour days, 7 days a week, and to go without lunch and dinner breaks, healthcare benefits, pensions or overtime pay (Elisberg, 2008; Laist, 2008; WGAW, 2007). These exploitative conditions threaten the safety of all involved in the productions. For example, the non-union drivers often work 18-hour days and do not receive alcohol or drug testing (Elisberg, 2008). These workers are also forced to accept precarious short-term contracts, which easily can be terminated without cause. A former American Idol production assistant reports that his hourly wage, when averaged over the hours he worked, amounted to US$4.50. He goes on to state that ‘when I even mentioned the possibility of getting a raise I was threatened with losing my job, told that I was replaceable, and that I’d be blacklisted from working on any other show if I spoke out’ (WGA, 2008).

In effect, the production practices of reality TV function to destabilize the labor relations of the television industry as a whole by producing a new bottom tier of workers who see the industry as glamorous and are willing to put up with the abuse to get a foot in the door. As a result of strict non-disclosure agreements (which prohibit all workers from talking about their jobs), the lack of any traditional job protections and a very informal economy of job distribution based on word-of-mouth, executive producers are able to pressure these primarily young people into silence and simultaneously demand that they do ‘whatever it takes to get the job done’ (WGA, 2008). The phrase ‘reality television’, then, simply names inexpensive, just-in-time production practices, which compromise working conditions and silence workers while extracting as much unregulated labor as possible (Hearn, 2014).

The types of precariously employed and exploited workers and participants involved in reality television production are like ‘housewives’; they work, but their labor tends to be discounted or invisible, and as such can become a ‘source for unchecked, unlimited exploitation’ (Mies, 1998: 16). As Mies argues, this ‘housewifisation of labour’ has rarely been recognized or counted in economic terms. Even Marx failed to consider women’s work in the home as directly productive for capital because it was not seen to generate commodities and therefore exchange value; it was considered valuable only insofar as it reproduced labor power. As Mies (2007) notes, this kind of reproductive or affective labor is the ‘optimal labour for capitalism because it is structurally free of costs’; tends to be invisible, unregulated and unprotected; and is considered to be a ‘free or naturally occurring good’ (p. 269).

Indeed, a two-tiered economy marked by visible and invisible workers has been a central feature of capitalist processes of accumulation right from the beginning. As Silvia Federici argues, capitalism was not built ‘exclusively or primarily on contractual relations … the wage relation hides the unpaid, slave-like nature of so much of the work upon which accumulation is premised’ (Federici, 2004: 7). Reproductive labor in the home – the position of the housewife – is, of course, the most prominent example of this. Federici goes on to trace the ways in which the subject position of the housewife was actively constructed, its contours brutally forged, during the imposition of capitalist relations in the transition from feudalism.

The constitution of ‘real’ housewives in the transition to capitalism

The years 1450–1650 were bloody and violent, as Europe began to colonize around the globe and to privatize what previously had been common land. The changes that took place at this time not only involved the severing of European workers from their means of subsistence, the configuration of men as ‘free’ wage earners rather than indentured serfs and the enslavement of people overseas but also required a wholesale transformation in social relations. As Federici (2004) argues, this period of primitive accumulation involved ‘an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies based upon gender, as well as race and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat’ (p. 64). As feminist historians Martha Howell and Anna Clark argue, gender roles and market relations have always been mutually constitutive and, therefore, should always be read together (Clark, 1995; Howell, 1986).

A series of historical events and conditions combined to produce our view of the ‘housewife’ as some sort of naturally occurring subject position. Land privatization and the hedging of the commons resulted in the destruction of rural villages and widespread displacement of the lower classes. The webs of social cooperation that ran through feudal villages were torn, leaving women, specifically older women with no husbands, particularly disadvantaged. Elderly women were the first to be pauperized; unable to pay rent, they were often accused of theft and trespassing, thus stoking the kinds of petty resentments that would form the backdrop for the witch hunts (Mendelson and Crawford, 1998: 292–293).

The loss of common land for subsistence also brought about changes in the systems of work, specifically family-based putting-out systems (whereby a central agent would subcontract work to be completed off-site, often in homes or small workshops) and cottage industries. Once the means of subsistence slipped away, more and more workers were rendered vulnerable and dependent on external wage sources. This led, in turn, to increased competition for jobs, wage reductions and a longer working day. These developments resulted in concerted efforts to push women out of artisanal and textile workshops by their male counterparts (Clark, 1995: 139). In addition, in England a ‘married man was legally entitled to his wife’s earnings’ (Mendelson and Crawford, 1998: 285), and women who worked outside the home had to have their husbands or fathers collect their wages. As a result of these developments, women became subject to what Federici calls the ‘patriarchy of the wage’ (p. 97); exiled from their traditional places of work, forbidden from having money of their own and forced into the home, women’s work at this time was simultaneously appropriated and concealed.

As working-class populations began to decline due to famine and disease, we see the beginning of a biopolitics in which the exercise of power was increasingly concerned with the management and production of a robust workforce for the purposes of wealth generation. To this end, the state began to criminalize many of the impoverished working classes, bringing in brutal laws against vagabondage, prostitution, property crimes and collective gatherings, pushing social life and social reproduction from ‘the open field to the home, from the community to the family, from the public space to the private’ (Federici, 2004: 84). In addition, ‘severe penalties (were) introduced in the legal codes of Europe to punish women guilty of reproductive crimes’ (Federici, 2004: 87). Women were forced to register their pregnancies with the authorities; midwives in France were required to report any woman who had an abortion or engaged in infanticide; and even housing an unwed mother was subject to criminal charges in Britain (Mendelson and Crawford, 1998: 250). As Federici notes, these policies turned women’s bodies, specifically their wombs, into ‘public territory controlled by men and the state … and procreation was placed directly at the service of capitalist accumulation’ (p. 89).

Control over women’s bodies by the state, the religious Reformation’s insistence on the sanctity of motherhood and the systematic devaluation of women’s work outside the home by craft guilds, tradesmen and urban authorities resulted in a new sexual contract, one which worked to naturalize all women’s inferiority and subjection (Sommerville, 1995: 23). This new sexual contract explicitly positioned working-class women’s bodies and labor as commonly held resource; ‘in the new organization of work’, Federici writes,

every woman (other than those privatized by bourgeois men) becomes a communal good, for once women’s activities are defined as non-work, women’s labour begins to appear as a natural resource, available to all, no less than the air we breathe or the water we drink. (p. 97; emphasis added)

Crucially for our purposes, the structural devaluation of women’s work and social status was deeply connected to processes of social and cultural degradation and the deployment of representations in popular literature of women as harridans, shrews and scolds, obsessed with wresting men’s authority away from them. As D.E. Underdown (1985) argues, writers at this time were ‘uncommonly preoccupied by themes of female independence and revolt’ (p. 117), a product of anxiety about the mounting economic and social crises which threatened the patriarchal order, including ‘excessive population growth, inflation, land shortage, poverty and vagrancy’ (p. 116). Other forms of social degradation included women’s legal infantilization; women lost the right to make contracts or represent themselves in court and had their access to public spaces restricted. Perhaps the most notable and violent examples of the vilification of women during this period were the witch hunts, which worked to define women as demonic beings and subject them to all manner of hideous punishments (Federici, 2004: 165). Those in positions of power most often based these accusations and indictments of witchcraft solely on circulating rumor and ‘reputation’ (Underdown, 1985: 120).

The constitution of the housewife in the 16th and 17th centuries, then, involved twinned processes: the appropriation by men of the value of women’s work and its simultaneous concealment, degradation and mystification. Women’s lesser social status was naturalized and disciplined into being in and through popular cultural texts, the circulation of rumor and the attribution of demonic reputations. With this in mind, I would like to turn back to reality television, the Real Housewives, and the new forms of labor on the self that it both models and produces.

Real housewives, reputation and the production of the self-brand

As deregulation and reality television business models have broken down barriers between networks, producers, and corporate sponsors and advertisers, we have seen the rise of ‘branded content’: shows explicitly designed to market a specific product or service. Often sponsors and marketers are on board with program development from the very beginning, devising concepts, sitting in the writers’ room and developing marketing opportunities along with the storylines. In addition, we are seeing more and more ‘advertiser-produced content’ – reality shows, short videos and films developed and produced directly by corporate brands to showcase products and services. One of the first of these was a reality show entitled Escape Routes built around the Ford ‘Escape’ car (Buss, 2012). For the last decade at least, the emphasis in reality production has not been on the content of the show per se, but rather on how that content can function as a clearing-house, or ‘brand portal’, for products and services and as a source of diverse revenue streams beyond the shows themselves. NBC’s The Biggest Loser, for example, earned US$100 million in 2009 from its brand franchises, including cookbooks, fitness videos, diet drinks and gym equipment (Sauer, 2009; Wyatt, 2009a, 2009b). But perhaps the most lucrative revenue stream generated in and through reality television production comes in the form of the shows’ branded people/participants.

As reality television becomes a brand-marketing vehicle par excellence, the stories it tells re-inscribe and celebrate those same processes of marketing and selling, specifically in relation to its participants. No matter what the content of the show might be – real estate hunting, pawn shop owners or rich ladies sparring in some up-scale restaurant – reality television shows work to promote the cultural value of personal visibility and fame. While shows like The Voice or American Idol explicitly narrate the hard work involved in becoming a celebrity brand and makeover shows tell stories about the construction of a ‘successful’ body according to the dictates of the television industry and its celebrity culture, shows like Bravo’s Real Housewives are portraits of a life free of work; rich and privileged, the stars of these shows effectively model what it is like to ‘live on TV’ and make money doing so by becoming a brand. Of course, this is not to discount the many fruitful ways we might read the specific texts of the Housewives shows – as promoting women as vapid, superficial and voracious consumers, for example, or perpetuating stereotypes of women as vain, catty, bullying and emotionally unstable, or creating a kind of campy vilification of the numbskulled uber-rich for the delectation of audiences suffering through an economic recession (see Cox and Profitt, 2012; Lee and Marcowitz, 2013). Rather, it is to underline the co-implication of the reality television texts with their specific mode of production and value-generation; the texts work in the service of an overarching meta-narrative line that celebrates the carefully crafted display of certain kinds of affect, the legitimating power of the television camera’s gaze and the financial gain it promises (Hearn, 2014).

Reality television doesn’t just tell stories about processes of lucrative self-production, however; it materially enacts those same processes. The women featured on Real Housewives are simultaneously ‘people’ and ‘actors’, or hybrid ‘person-characters’ (Bellafante, 2009). As they work and live in front of the cameras, their work/lives are, apparently, one seamless flow of value-generation. Here, ‘being’ is labor and seems to produce value for the individual person-characters, their producers and the Bravo network. By appearing on reality television, contestants can become salable image commodities – or branded selves.

In his book A Grammar of the Multitude (Virno, 2004), Paolo Virno argues that, these days, all working people are required to be ‘virtuosos’ in some form or other. As mentioned above, employees are expected to put their personalities to work, embody their employer’s brand, socialize and build relationships with customers, contribute their thoughts and insights to the workplace and build social networks with other workers; increasingly, we must perform an employer-approved version of ourselves in order to succeed. Given this, Virno argues, ‘productive labour, in its totality, appropriates the special characteristics of the performing artist’ (Virno, 2004: 54–55), and as a result, the culture industries, including reality television, become centrally important, providing the templates for forms of profit-generating self-performance in all sectors of the economy. Self-branding is a form of affective, immaterial labor that is purposefully undertaken by individuals in order to garner attention, reputation and, potentially, profit. It is a function of an image economy, where attention is monetized and notoriety, or fame, is capital (Hearn, 2008). Reality television is ground zero for the production of lucrative branded selves.

Many reality shows have provided previously unknown people with monetizable self-brands, which they parlay into lucrative endorsement deals and other branded goods and services. The Kardashian family, as one example, recently signed a US$100 million deal with E! to renew their series for 4 years (McRady, 2015) and are estimated to have made US$65 million in 2010 as a result of their paid endorsements, appearance fees and branded products (Newman and Bruce, 2011). Almost every member of the Real Housewives casts has some form of personal brand extension and can now demand appearance fees in the tens of thousands of dollars (Galloway, 2011). Show participants have produced at least 12 different books; some have developed perfumes; others have built brand-based businesses, such as Bethenny Frankel, who parlayed her Skinny Girl brand into a lucrative spirits business, which she recently sold for US$120 million (Hollywood Reporter, 2012), and has gone on to host a daytime talk show. Jill Zarin, one of the original cast members of The Real Housewives of New York City, argued that she should get a cut of anything developed by fellow former cast-mate Bethenny Frankel because she helped bring Frankel to the show and, thereby, aided in the development of her self-brand (Bruce, 2012).

It is crucial to remember, however, that most of reality television’s image entrepreneurs do not fully control the construction or distribution of their self-brand (Hearn, 2014). Often producers actively work to cultivate mini-celebrities ‘in house’ and lock down a percentage of participants’ future money-making potential via endorsements and brand extensions by way of 360° deals (Galloway, 2011). The cable channel E!, for example, has increased its advertising revenue 50 percent since 2004 by creating ‘an alternative universe of reality-based celebrities’ (Hampp, 2010). At Bravo, these homegrown celebrities are called ‘Bravo-lebrities’ (Littleton, 2010). A significant portion of the half a billion dollars in profits generated by MTV in 2010, for example, came from the Jersey Shores stars’ brand extensions (Bruce, 2010).

The potential profit that a reality television participant is able to make from their new branded self is seriously constrained by the contracts they sign with the production companies and networks. While reality television contracts are notoriously difficult to track down due to the imposition of strict non-disclosure agreements, those that have surfaced over the years reveal tight employer control over the participants’ public personae; participants are often required to sign away control of their voices, images and life stories. A section of an American Idol contract reads, ‘other parties … may reveal and/or relate information about me of a personal, private, intimate, surprising, defamatory, disparaging, embarrassing or unfavorable nature, that may be factual and/or fictional’ (Olsen, 2002; emphasis added). A leaked MTV Real World contract stipulates that participation in the program ‘carries with it the potential for death, serious physical injury, extreme emotional distress, mental or physical illness or property loss’ (Dodero, 2011). It grants the show producers access to the participant’s credit history, school records or any government forms and requires that the participant agree to be humiliated or ‘portrayed in a false light’ during the program (Hearn, 2014). Ultimately, a reality television participant’s public persona, or ‘right to publicity’, is considered a form of property under the law and, as such, is fully alienable and appropriable by others (Madow, 1993). As these contractual requirements show, and as entertainment labor lawyer Jonathan Handel (7 May 2010, personal communication) describes, ‘the producer has all the leverage and the participant has none’.

Barry King argues that, given reality television’s conditions of production, ‘the exercise of “personality” is closer to the fulfillment of a task specification than a process of expression’ (King, 2007: 320). Real Housewives of Orange County participant Peggy Tanous quit the show because she ‘started getting anxiety thinking about all the forced drama that does happen on occasion’ (Hollywood Reporter, 2012). And Audrina, from The Hills, has stated, ‘because it’s for TV, you push yourself to do things that you normally wouldn’t’ (Gay, 2008: 46). A reality television editor insists that, insofar as ‘the act of observation influences the result, … [the participants] become the persona the show creates for them’ (Anonymous, 2008, personal communication). Reality participants learn to ‘perform to a format’; any emotion or personality on display arrives already highly delineated and controlled, anticipating and reflecting the demands and expectations of its producers and audience (Hearn, 2014). No matter how rich a reality participant might get from her self-brand, then, that brand will be strictly controlled by the disciplinary presence of the camera, by the editing room, where personae and storylines are constructed, and by binding contracts, which effectively strip the participant of any legal control over their person-character for a period of several years. In this way, reality television participants’ performances constitute a clear form of housewifized, affective labor. The outcome of this work (the TV show itself) is then deployed in order to confirm the desirability and ‘naturalness’ of these highly disciplined forms of affective visibility.

It is also crucial to remember that, as the housewives offer their lives up week after week to the cameras, working to become profitable self-brands and modeling how effective self-branding might be done, assistant editors and loggers are often locked in rooms for over 12 hours at a time, reviewing and logging the thousands of hours of tape of Lisa Vanderpump or Bethenny Frankel. Reality television’s branded selves and its precariously employed production workers are inextricably tied together in a hidden abode of capitalist production that actively extracts value wherever it can, in whatever ways possible (Hearn, 2014).

Conclusion

In recent years, with the rise of social media, the processes of self-branding and self-promotion entrenched and formalized by reality television have intensified as they have spread across the population at large. Indeed, the popularity and ubiquity of social media seem to confirm the centrality of socialized production, flexible, immaterial and affective labor and capitalism’s ‘new’ hidden abode of production. On sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube, individuals can craft a public presentation of self that is ostensibly a reflection of their ‘reality’ – no need for television networks or brand sponsors – and can make money by cultivating large numbers of followers or subscribers. The amount of your Twitter and Tumblr followers, or Facebook and GooglePlus friends, also can be tracked and aggregated and transformed into a digital reputation, such as a ‘Klout’ score, by social media intelligence experts. Your online ‘Klout’ can then be traded for free stuff and maybe, eventually, a paycheck.¹ In a world marked by increasing economic and social insecurity, it is easy to see how the opportunity to develop and invest in a potentially lucrative self-brand could appear appealing to many people (Hearn, 2013).

But the ‘real’ chances of an individual actually achieving fame and fortune remain very slim. And while there may be proliferating sites and opportunities for us to communicate, play, create, rate, rank and entertain ourselves, we must take leave of this particular ‘noisy sphere’ and remember that the forms of profit-making we have traced in the hidden abode of reality TV production also obtain here. What is produced in the form of a reputation inevitably exceeds the grasp of those individuals who generate it or the individual who must ‘carry’ it. As we have seen with reality television production, while we might labor to build and stoke our ‘reputations’, we are also ‘subjected to’ them via externally imposed formats, commercial constraints, editing and other mechanisms of measurement and control.

In the end, we can argue that the kinds of labor involved in the production of reality shows like the Real Housewives are ‘housewifized’ not simply because they are precarious and easily exploited but also because, for the participants at least, they require the manipulation of emotion and the carrying of a ‘reputation’ not entirely one’s own in the service of capitalist accumulation. Like the women in the brutal transition to capitalism, whose labor was exploited and rendered invisible and who suffered processes of social and cultural degradation (in some cases actual branding and burning), the bodies of the television housewives also work to signify and legitimate the message of a new, economic formation fixated on self-promotion: ‘conform to our template, be seen, and build a reputation!’ The ‘real housewives’ may be living in fabulous gated communities, but their constitution as reality stars resonates far beyond those gates, out into the general population, where messages about self-branding seem to offer potential escape from precarious work and economic hardship. Of course, in the end, the dreamy promise of a lucrative self-brand only serves to mystify what feminist critics have worked for years to bring to light: capitalism extracts value from all kinds of material activity, waged and unwaged, but those who have historically occupied the position of the unwaged are doubly subjugated. As women well know, having borne the weight of what Linda Williams (1989) has called ‘an excess of signification’ for centuries, having a reputation feels like a burden because something is being carried on the body and in the heart – the alienating weight of cultural and economic commands being silently imposed.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Biographical note

Alison Hearn is an associate professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario, where she teaches cultural theory and media studies.

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