“I’m Here to Do Business. I’m Not Here to Play Games.” Work, Consumption, and Masculinity in Storage Wars

Abstract

This essay examines the first season of Storage Wars and suggests the program helps mediate the putative crisis in American masculinity by suggesting that traditional male skills are still essential where knowledge supplants manual labor. We read representations of "men at work" in traditionally "feminine" consumer markets as a form of masculine recuperation situated within the culture of White male injury. Specifically, Storage Wars appropriates omnivorous consumption, thrift, and collaboration to fit within the masculine repertoire of self-reliance, individualism, and competition. Thus, the program adapts hegemonic masculinity by showcasing male auction bidders adeptly performing feminine consumer practices. Whether the feminine is assimilated into the male body or represented as its Other, we contend that the expressions of masculinity in Storage Wars render women obsolete and subjugated in the marketplaces of the 21st-century economy and contribute to the mediation of the contemporary crisis in masculinity.

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

“…Those practices are ignored by Trash and Treasure TV, in favor of an entrepreneurial depiction. As demonstrated Rademacher and Kelly (2016), Esch (2017), and my research, the secondary market, which is traditionally composed of/by feminized spaces and labor, is represented in terms of masculinized tastes, ruthless competition, and capitalist logics. This even held true on Flea Market Flip , which, like Storage Wars and American Pickers , depicted secondhand markets as sites of masculine entrepreneurialism, rather than feminine spaces for the multiple types of labor performed in families and communities that amount to the modes of social reproduction at the foundation of the economy and society.…”

“…This program exemplifies Trash and Treasure TV as a form of what media theorist Michael Schudson (1984) calls "capitalist realism," that is, the way that capitalist aesthetics promote ways of life centered on private consumption rather than social, public achievements. As with American Pickers, Storage Wars depicts men investing in feminine forms of labor and consumption that have been traditionally marginalized, and converting them into activities considered valuable to society and the economy (Rademacher & Kelly, 2016). The masculinized performance of the secondary market on Storage Wars turns on the acquisition of goods (to sell or keep) and/or money (the title of the theme song is "Money Owns This Town") and takes place in a context that is unconcerned with the actual economic conditions or their significance to the lived experiences and quality of life of others (Rademacher, 2015;Rademacher & Kelly, 2016).…”

“…The forms of labor performed on Trash and Treasure TV programs straddle the formal and informal labor and consumer markets, as cast members scour collections, storage unit auctions, flea markets, and other secondary market sites for objects to be resold in peer-to-peer, under-the-table exchanges, or through established businesses in which taxes are collected. Moreover, the labor and representation of those performing secondhand markets are highly masculinized (Esch, 2017; Rademacher & Kelly, 2016). This is consistent with how Recession-era media culture largely placed men and masculinity at the center of economic crisis narratives and ignores the secondary market’s centrality to the social reproduction of women’s domestic work (Banet-Weiser, 2014; Negra & Tasker, 2014, p. 2).…”

“…In regard to gender representation, Storage Wars cast members, including Brandi Passante, the lone woman among the competitors, perform in the secondhand market within the context of contemporary masculinities in crisis (Rademacher, 2015; Rademacher & Kelly, 2016). Selling their winnings on the secondary market, the cast members work in traditionally feminine consumer and labor markets and apply masculine capitalist logics of individualism, aggressive competition, and accumulation.…”

“…It is a relational, intersubjective voice. Instead, the programs of the subgenre are mostly concerned with masculinized instructive conceptualizations and representative performances of aggressive competition, individualist accumulative consumption, and neoliberal capitalist entrepreneurialism (Esch, 2017; Rademacher & Kelly, 2016). Those features of Trash and Treasure TV are consistent with Recession-era media culture, which treated the 2007–2009 downturn as an affront to a masculinity that needed to be recuperated and privileged “male subjectivity” within the contexts of economic decline (Banet-Weiser, 2014; Negra & Tasker, 2014, p. 2).…”