Even You can Turn Trash Into Treasure: Reality TV and Secondhand Markets at the Jersey Shore

Abstract

This monograph represents an effort to understand the significance of a subgenre of reality TV (RTV) that I call Trash and Treasure TV (shows about flea markets, auctions, pawn shops, etc.), to people in an area of New Jersey known as the “Jersey Shore.” Trash and Treasure TV programs surfaced from the wake of the Great Recession and were informed by capitalist mentalities articulated through a “masculine” calculating and accumulative voice. In turn, the forms of reproductive labor that occur in homes and communities were subordinated to individualistic, entrepreneurial discourses that suppressed intersubjective and cooperative discourses, which are associated with “the feminine.” In undertaking this effort, I apply a critical media/cultural studies and feminist radical–empiricist approach to textual analysis and ethnographic methods. My research makes visible multiple audiences and reveals a failure of media governmentality and the erasure of reproductive labor, the underemployed, and the working poor from Trash and Treasure TV representations of Recession-era secondhand markets.