Laurie J Ouellette

WOMEN'S WORK

This essay raises the possibility that participation in convergence culture may not enhance womens recreational pleasures, much less prepare them for public forms of political activity. Taking the Dr. Phil multimedia self-help franchise as a case study, we argue that womens ‘interactivity’ can be mobilized as a gendered requirement of neoliberal citizenship, that is, an ongoing, mundane regimen of self-empowerment that does not intensify the pleasure of the text as much as it intensifies and extends a ‘second shift’ of familial and affective labour historically performed by women in the home. The gendered labour of actively participating in the Dr. Phil television show, website, books and workbooks prohibits the fleeting pleasures and temporary distractions associated with earlier phases of domestic labour, such as soap operas and romance novels.

Reality TV Gives Back: On the Civic Functions of Reality Entertainment

Abstract Reality TV is more than a trivial diversion. Civic aims historically associated with documentaries (particularly citizenship training) have been radically reinterpreted and integrated into current popular reality formats.

TV Viewing as Good Citizenship? Political Rationality, Enlightened Democracy and PBS

This article draws on theories of political rationality, governmentality and cultural policy as well as historical analysis to examine how a philosophy of ‘enlightened democracy’ informed the historical formation of PBS. I analyse its early campaign to turn TV viewers into active citizens and show how the citizen subjectivities constructed presupposed a set of knowledge-power relations defined and managed by ‘opinion leaders’. Following a cultural studies approach I analyse policy and popular discourses to show how requirements of professionalism, reason, civility and detached objectivity served as a means of differentiating good citizens and as a form of social control.

The Trump Show

Trump is more than a symptom of manipulative infotainment and cultural decline: His political ascendency speaks to reality TV’s long-established role in governing practices.

Reinventing PBS: Public television in the post-network, post-welfare era

The death knell for the nightly network newscast has been ringing for over twenty years now. Even seventeen years ago, in 1992, CBS Washington bureau chief Barbara Cohen noted, “It has become fashionable to predict the demise of network news in general and the evening news broadcasts in particular,” as she then added to the chorus she described while making some exceptions.1 Perhaps this phenomenon can be dated to an even earlier moment, but refrains forecasting the end began with considerable regularity by 1986, the year Fred W. Friendly, former president of CBS News and professor emeritus at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, publicly opined that, “Unless the networks make their product appreciably and dramatically superior, I doubt there’s much of a future for network news.”2 More than two decades later these newscasts remain on daily schedules, and arguably not as a result of the appreciable improvement he suggested. Since then, the newscasts, the networks, and even television-at-large has come to be challenged in ways these commentators could not have imagined...

Bare enterprise: US television and the business of dispossession (post-crisis, gender and property television)

This essay examines the quotidian forms of dispossession and bare enterprise that emerge when homes and belongings are repossessed and auctioned off for profit while TV cameras roll. Focusing on a spate of recent US reality programs revolving around pawnshops, repossession agents, storage unit auctions and foreclosed home flipping businesses, I chronicle an unabashedly ruthless performance of homo economicus. I link the biopolitics of disposability evidenced across these programs to an emerging stage of neoliberal governmentality that has little interest in transforming ‘failed’ citizens and, therefore, differs from the charitable interventions and makeover regimens circulated by US television. Finally, I consider some tensions and points of resistance that television’s cruel new turn may register.