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.

“It’s a mix of authenticity and complete fabrication” Emotional camping: The cross-platform labor of the Real Housewives

“…Her analysis shows that for women, "doing what they love" online in fashion, retail, and beauty may come with social and economic gain, but not without conforming to conventional ideas about gender and class. Finally, tracing similar phenomena back to early systems of capitalist expansion in the 16th century, Hearn (2016) argued that RH specifically launches other kinds of aspirational labor in gendered ways, such as "housewifization." This refers to the hidden, precarious, and unregulated labor behind RTV, which also happens to depend on the disparagement of "women's work.…”

“…The protection is from the network; Bravo owns part of any business or brand endeavor the women undertake while part of the franchise. When the women's enterprises succeed, so does Bravo, which will obtain a majority of the financial return (Hearn, 2016).…”

Never give up, never surrender: Game live streaming, neoliberal work, and personalized media economies

“…Concepts of self-branding, empowerment, and management of emotions provide an imperative primer for understanding the gendered and personalized consumption that occur on game live streaming. Scholarship that has interrogated the neoliberal, gendered, and affective forms of social media work in recent years vary from reality television to managing one’s cross social media presence (Hearn, 2017; Ouellette, 2016), musicians and creating conditions for sustained work (Baym, 2018), influencers and the marketing of selfies (Abidin, 2016), beauty apps and self-tracking and performance of body modification (Elias and Gill, 2018), and fashion blogging and entrepreneurial femininity (Duffy and Hund, 2015; Pham, 2015). Media studies and esports scholar T.L.…”

The Digital Economy of the Sourdough. Housewifisation in the Time of COVID-19

“…The competition of the home-bread beakers went along with proud images of all types of home-baking and cooking that presented the meritocratic message accomplishment. The processes of self-branding formalised by reality television and enhanced by the social media according to Hearn (2016) has intensified and 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 (Hearn 2016, 11).…”