Haunted houses: Gender and property television after the financial crisis

The persistence of the domestic medium

Although it continues to play an important ambient role in public settings, and has become increasingly mobile and peripatetic, television is still often seen as synonymous with the domestic sphere (McCarthy, 2001). This is no less true in reality TV regimes that focus on the spaces of the home, including shows that highlight family and family-like configurations of friends and co-workers. But perhaps nowhere has the reimagined relationship of TV to the home become more apparent than in the popular and ever-evolving arena of property television. Begun in the United Kingdom in the 1990s as renovation shows in the aftermath of the great privatization scheme of Margaret Thatcher’s conservatives (Nunn, 2011) and in tandem with the emergence of HGTV and high-end shelter magazines (Matheson, 2010; Shimpach, 2012), property shows have spread over the past three decades to encompass an ever-proliferating array of formats. In the first decade of the 21st century, home improvement television took the form of aspirational real estate shows where property value was put front and centre. During this decade of global real estate bubbles, property shows themselves became valuable commodities and began to be sold as formats in the intensifying global television trade (Moran, 2009).

After the global economic crisis of 2008, which was precipitated in part by risky sub-prime mortgage loans in the United States, property TV shows transformed yet again. Instead of the lux aspirational shows of the early 2000s, post-crisis series increasingly highlighted ways to find economic value in newly straitened times. Strategies for fixing up properties, such as DIY repairs and crafting, and how to cash in on the foreclosures and find treasure amidst the trash, often profiting at the expense of others, began to come to the fore.

The contributions to this issue suggest that the tension between using homes as a stage for the domestic dramas of intimacy – long a feature of so-called ‘women’s genres’ – and thinking about houses and property as a means for shoring up financial security provides a compelling short cut to an analysis of the radical changes that have occurred in how the domestic is imagined in popular culture. The home – intimate space and financial asset – becomes uncanny, at once homely and unheimlich, familiar and strange, private and public.

One of the most important theoretical approaches to reality-based television in the past decade has been inspired by Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’. Developed as part of his lectures at the Collège de France in the late 1970s (translated into English in 2008), Foucault identified a neoliberal logic emerging in post-War Europe that shifted from a reliance on the state – tarred by association with Communism and Fascism – to a reliance on the marketplace. Related to this shift was a consideration of new ways of imagining the individual as a purely economic subject, or homo economicus, responsible for managing him- or herself as an enterprise (Foucault, 2008: 147). In their influential volume, Better Living Through Reality TV, Laurie Ouellette and James Hay (2008) convincingly identify the Foucauldian thematic of managerial self-work that ran through American reality television in the early 2000s. Neoliberalism had arrived as a social and political norm that was amply reflected in popular entertainment. The shows Ouellette and Hay analysed included a presentation of what amounted to a neoliberal ethos: the imperative to develop one’s own human capital was in the best interests of all. On these shows, ideal government is shown to be minimal, ‘economical and efficient’ (p. 11). Each person is taught to manage his or her own security and risk to the best of his or her ability. Failure is presumed to be the outcome for some, if not many, but such results are blamed on lack of individual foresight rather than on structural causes.

Certainly, the neoliberal ‘ownership society’ promoted by both Margaret Thatcher and George W. Bush provides a compelling backdrop for the reality formats that developed concurrently with it. But reality TV is arguably more than simply a source of descriptive, secondary representations of the process of neoliberalization. Ouellette and Hay claim that reality television is also one of the mechanisms – a pedagogy – by and through which the ‘financialization of daily life’ (p. 144) operates.

While the relevance of governmentality for studying reality TV has been qualified by commentators such as Beverly Skeggs and Helen Wood (2012), and is certainly open for debate, it has become axiomatic that reality TV engages and attempts to normalize ideas of the marketplace and those who operate successfully within it. In her article in this issue, ‘Bare Enterprise: US Television and the Business of Dispossession’, Laurie Ouellette advances the analysis of reality television’s governmental aspect by focusing on how shows about property mobilize a discourse for understanding and profiting from the widespread dispossession that followed the 2008 market crash. In the notable proliferation of shows such as Hardcore Pawn, Operation Repo, Storage Wars and Flip Men, Ouellette identifies the rise of a kind of ‘recessionary entrepreneurialism’ that she terms ‘bare enterprise’. The protagonists of these shows tend to be working-class white men trying to find profit in other people’s loss. Ouellette sees in them a caricature of the idea of homo economicus. These predatory, low-level capitalists ‘stand in for and deflect attention from broader corporate processes of accumulation through dispossession’, providing a cypher for the harshness of free market social policies and the intensifying cruelty of neoliberalism.

Lifestyle programming has traditionally been a technology of femininity, teaching women how to treat their bodies, their families and the domestic space, which is seen to be their primary domain (Sender, 2012). In its current iteration, property TV blurs gender lines, reaching out to masculine viewers who are considered to be interested in the drama of making money from both homes and objects. In her essay ‘Picking Through History: “Mantiques” and Masculinity in Artifactual Entertainment’, Madeleine Esch explores a subgenre of property TV geared to men emblematized by the Pickers and Storage Wars formats. The blue collar hosts of American Pickers, Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz, drive across the rust belt on an archaeological hunt for relics of America’s industrial past. Where a show like Hoarders pathologizes the collector, the piles of worthless ‘junk’ held by elderly rural people featured on Pickers are shown to both harbour historical interest and pecuniary potential: these hoarders are sitting on ‘rusty gold’. The hosts stay to listen to their stories, but the ethnographic impulse that Esch identifies in the show is offset by its extractive logic. Ultimately, they just want to take advantage of the market value of the ruins of ‘petroliana’ scattered across the rural landscape.

Just as American Pickers demonstrates a particularly American approach to mobilizing its past in the quest for profit, the post-2008 discourse of austerity in the United Kingdom has led to some very particular manifestations on British property programming. Ruth McElroy argues that aspirational programming such as Property Ladder was quickly wrapped up and replaced by ‘we’re all in it together’ (though distinctly ‘classed’) shows about crafting and economizing, such as Kirstie’s Homemade Home on one hand, and spectacles of poverty on shows such as Benefits Street on the other. Austerity of the wartime ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ type was adopted as part of British character and history, neatly recalling a moment of solidarity across class lines that obscured racial and class relations. McElroy argues that the use of lifestyle programming to provide a vision of the economic crisis limited the scope of imagination about the causes of the failures of neoliberal policies and potential future policy directions.

Another theme that has played a crucial role in the discussion of reality TV and governmentality is surveillance (Andrejevic, 2004). In this issue, Jean Bruce considers the ways in which an aesthetic of surveillance is utilized in the show Love it or List it (LIOLI) to advance the domestic drama being played out. Bruce identifies in LIOLI the ghostly remnants of the screwball comedy that compete with the voyeuristic gaze of the show on the couple’s marital troubles. The bantering, competitive male-realtor/female-designer host pair provides a light-hearted, ironic echo of the struggles going on between the owners. While the hosts act as proxies for the home-owning couple, in the tradition of screwball, love can be renewed for all concerned at the end – including, love for the home. However, lurking beneath the surface – and literally behind the walls – Bruce also finds the skeletal remains of the gothic, the uninhabitable haunted house being perhaps the most apt image for the uncanny domesticity expressed either wittingly or not by the property show.

The uncanniness of the commodified home reappears in the short-lived HGTV show Buy Herself, considered in this issue by Zoë Druick in her article ‘Property TV: Financialized Femininity and New Forms of Domestic Labour’. Druick analyses the way the show used melodramatic conventions to transition the viewer into ‘financialized women’s entertainment’. Where the classic melodrama orbited around domestic romantic relationships, in the new configuration expressed by this show the home itself has become the site of women’s struggle for independence in and through the marketplace. While typical lifestyle shows focus on women’s management of health and appearance, this show indexes a shift to a discourse that equates self-care with prudent wealth management. Yet, the show’s need to create (melo)drama paradoxically leads to a focus on the difficult experiences associated with neoliberal insecurity and the increasing social and financial pressure on women to buy homes by themselves in ways that draws attention to the ascendant logic of the financialization of everyday life. For these homeowners, buying a home means adopting a large and decidedly un-liberating debt load, something that evokes anxiety on the part of several of the women depicted. Druick’s analysis of the contradictions expressed in Buy Herself allows her to consider property television as a ‘genre about domestic life that potentially allows for the broadcasting of the anxieties and contradictions surrounding both shifting gender formations and the post-crisis housing situation’. In this regard, property TV can serve as something akin to what Lauren Berlant terms ‘a sentimental public’, where women experience the dissatisfaction of capitalist patriarchal relations collectively, if obliquely.

The range of shows about homes in varying degrees of crisis, from Big Brother and Wife Swap to How Clean is Your House and, on the extreme end of the scale, Hoarders, indicate that all is not well in what Anna Hunt (2009) calls the ‘domestic dystopia’ lurking uncannily close to the surface of lifestyle programming. Ironically, this dystopic element is true of what is perhaps the longest running and seemingly most anodyne property show of them all: HGTV’s House Hunters (1999–), the subject of Mimi White’s analysis in this issue, ‘A House Divided’ (see also White, 2013). While it can be argued that House Hunters established the three property format that has become standard for property shows, and provides the viewer precious little to differentiate its 2000 plus episodes, White points out that the show is actually structured by a foundational domestic conflict. Like Love it or List it, the activating plot element of House Hunters is a fundamental and seemingly unbridgeable difference of opinion between two domestic partners who apparently want diametrically opposed outcomes. He wants a suburban bungalow, she insists on living in a downtown condo, and other seemingly irreconcilable desires. White argues that the retrograde ‘battle of the sexes’ that structures the shows attempts to substitute minimal domestic drama for the more complex material constraints that actually control real estate markets. The compromises that lead to the resolutions (however fictionalized) give the lie to the promise of ‘dream houses’ and ‘forever homes’ found elsewhere on HGTV, clearly indicating the transience of ‘domestic harmony’. The sheer number of episodes demonstrates that it is precisely this ambivalence and unfinalizability, which White calls the ‘always unfinished business of home’, that has made HGTV’s parent company, Scripps International, into the most successful global property TV entertainment empire.

Well into the second decade of the 21st century, the obsession with property on lifestyle reality TV continues unabated across global broadcast and web platforms. The contributions to this Special Issue consider this cultural phenomenon in terms of both earlier cultural forms and new configurations of capital and property in which gender figures centrally. As the neoliberal economy renders domestic and collective security ever more precarious, property TV finds ways to help viewers imagine these economic relations. At the same time, through the global television industry itself, the shows contribute to capitalist relations. Built on what Ouellette calls the ‘ruins’ of recessionary consumer culture, property television provides an unstable and incomplete vision of gender and the domestic as experienced in everyday life.

If anything, the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath have demonstrated that neoliberalism is an incomplete and on-going process. Even in the moment of the neoliberal economy’s greatest crisis, property television has shown itself to be an integral way to imagine the importance of real estate and the privatization of welfare in the new economy. Even if the papers in this issue identify a turn after 2008 to shows that highlight domestic conflict, dispossession, abjection and exploitation, they nonetheless place property at the centre of individual and collective aspiration. Nevertheless, despite its partial confrontation of the harshness of the neoliberal experiment, property TV leaves much out of the story, from political agency (McElroy, Ouellette), to non-capitalist economic relations (Druick) and non-binaristic gender relationships (Bruce, Esch, White). Their proliferation and on-going refinement indicates the traumatic kernel of the Real to which the shows – and their viewers – are responding: namely, the failures of what McElroy calls the ‘broader logic of consumerist aspiration that characterizes the neoliberal imagination’. These failures live on in the texts of these popular shows as hauntings and other uncanny traces.

The papers gathered in this Special Issue were presented at a symposium on ‘Women, Property and Realty TV’ held in May 2014 at Ryerson University (Toronto) that received funding from Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council. The editors would like to thank each of the contributors and our wonderful research assistants Itrath Syed (SFU) and Jessica Thom (Ryerson).