Reality television Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Reality television is awash in representations of region/alisms: Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Redneck Island, Swamp Pawn, Deadliest Catch, Chainsaw Gang, Ax Men, Swamp People, My Big Redneck Wedding, My Big Redneck Vacation—the list could go on. Central to most of these is the region of the South, albeit a south vague enough to encompass even the rural areas of Pennsylvania and Michigan.1 Less a geographical place than a socio-economic and cultural space in the national imaginary, the South as represented in reality television centers around the classist, racialized, and ableist figures of the ‘hillbilly,’ the ‘redneck,’ and, a little less regionalized yet ubiquitously linked to and epistemologically informing the previous figures, poor ‘white trash.’2 Not just from an academic perspective are these figures easily contestable in their ‘othering’; their stereotypical presentation and, as others have coined it, rednexploitation,3 are also readily apparent to the lay viewer.
Nevertheless, academics and journalists alike have become fond of practicing what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls ‘paranoid readings’ of these cultural sites that are informed through our ‘hermeneutics of suspicion,’ as Paul Ricœur has so aptly labeled it (cf. Sedgwick 125). When we peruse the many articles that have been published—mostly in major newspapers, magazines, and in some online journals—on the topic of representations of Southernness in reality television, we come face to face with the performative nature of knowledge. These readings have much in common with traditional notions of regionalism as an epistemological project in which either the allegorical or the essentializing function of certain regions is deconstructed (cf. Jackson; Mahoney and Katz). Following Cheryl Temple Herr and Douglas Reichert Powell’s call for a new ‘critical regionalism,’ I want to move from a ‘paranoid’ inquiry of representations of Southern regionalism to a materialist, reparative reading of the cultural work that the critiques of and audience engagements with these representations perform.
In his 2007 publication Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape, Douglas Powell develops a materialist pedagogy of critical regionalism in which “critical regionalism self-consciously shapes an understanding of the spatial dimensions of cultural politics in order to support projects of change” (8). Challenging the blind spot of elitist cosmopolitanism, which has, according to Powell, elided its proponents’ own locatedness—oftentimes because academics tend to ignore their own class positions and lives of mobility (20)—Powell calls for a rethinking of critical regionalism as a “transdisciplinary ethic that link[s] cultural criticism to material social change” (23). Such projects, Powell stresses, bring together local participants with academic thinkers and public intellectuals in order to transform “regional landscapes into more hospitable, generous, and just places” (23). As I argue in this chapter, critical regionalism as Powell advances it can be a productive methodology for reality television studies, especially in its focus on the locatedness of knowledge producers and the importance of a materialist perspective. Applying a materialist, critical regionalist lens to reality television can reveal the hidden classism of its production and critical reception, highlighting how that classism remains invisible to most because of its embeddedness in capitalist-ableist, regionalist, and racialized tropes.4
In the following, I will first outline the theoretical backdrop against which I perform my reading of the reception of reality television: Eve Sedgwick’s epistemology of ‘paranoid’ and ‘reparative’ reading positions, Simon Frith’s materialist idea of ‘low theory,’ and Thomas McLaughlin’s similarly motivated ‘vernacular theory.’ While my analysis of ‘paranoid’ readings includes articles on all reality television shows that represent the South, my analysis of viewer feedback will focus on the show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (TLC). With my analysis, I hope to contribute to the larger discussion of knowledge production in cultural studies, highlighting the ways in which it is itself implicated in a neoliberal capitalist imaginary that has been theorized by David Harvey, historicized by Daniel Rodgers, and challenged by the Kilburn Manifesto editors. It has also been adopted by scholars in disability studies, such as David Goodley, whose work recasts our current paradigm as neoliberal-ableism.5 While I want to trouble the ubiquitous employment of a rhetorics of neoliberalism to explain all current forms of oppression, dispossession, and domination,6 Sedgwick’s critique of ‘paranoid’ reading practices—practices that are limited in their epistemic reach—can still be useful despite its complicity in a neoliberal logics of agency, desire, and performance. Sedgwick’s work has served mainly as an inspiration for affect theory, but I want to exemplify how her thinking can be useful in developing critical approaches that are based on a materialist approach to knowledge production in order to bring into dialogue two epistemological traditions that both offer rich archives of knowledge despite their ontological differences.