[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
action, skipping the culturally condoned steps of diet, physical stress
and strain and consumer related weight loss (2003, p. 270). Similarly,
Anne Diamond, one of the celebrity contestants on the 2006 edition
of the UK weight-loss show Celebrity Fit Club, was condemned for her
surgery while her fellow contestants underwent the pain and hard-
ships of a military regime of exercise, diet and lifestyle changes. What
we can draw from this is that the easy route and the self who under-
takes it is a cheat: only hard labour and effort secure a respectable,
authentic and morally praiseworthy process of becoming. Inciden-
tally, this goes someway to explain how the contemporary popularity
and growing acceptability of cosmetic surgery has involved gruelling
in-surgery footage and why painstaking and gory recovery periods are
Makeover Culture 51
aired on shows like Extreme Makeover and Ten Years Younger. While the
shots of blood and gore might be expected to put people off, instead
it serves to elevate the moral acceptability of surgery as it reveals its
own laborious journey. This is a point not lost on Anne Diamond s
publicists who over 2008 and 2009 released the full story of Anne s
long battles with weight and her survival from botched up surgery
to restore her to the public s affections.
To return to Jones, she is not suggesting that being is replaced by
becoming , but rather that becoming increasingly becomes the ways in
which being is done. For our purposes, this means that the taking up
of a lifestyle, such as the yummy mummy, is not an end in itself,
but rather that lifestyle options become sites for the expenditure of
continuous energies and concern. As this chapter s opening quote
illustrates, betterment and self-improvement are endless. Indeed, for
Jones, the activities of becoming are increasingly coded as the activi-
ties of life itself: to stop, to have reached betterment and perfection,
to be the best you can be, to be a finished product relegates the self
outside of intelligible life. If life is the activity of becoming better, then
being better can be understood as moments where energies are force-
fully stilled, where life is not enough and the self occupies what
Jones likens to a still life and spaces of the living dead (p. 147).
The fact that many makeover shows have revisits where presenter-
experts surprise past participants to see just how they are getting
on with their new look testifies to the expectation that ongoing
labours are necessary. Revisits also suggests that lifestyles are them-
selves launching pads for new ventures beyond simply maintenance.
The point here is that the happy endings offered by journeys of trans-
formation may be momentarily experienced, but more often than not
they are deferred or more correctly, they are points of entry for new
journeys.
There are two related lines in Jones argument that I wish to take
further over this and the next chapter. The first is the heightened
need for visibility. In order for becoming to be recognised, it must
be seen, displayed and known by others. As we might conclude from
the cautionary tales of Carnie Wilson and Anne Diamond there has
to be a visible act of labouring (p. 57) to becoming a sudden trans-
formation is a cheat. There is then the vital dimension of public
performance of moving from one self to another (p. 57) and this will
occupy the discussion of the next chapter. The second, explored here,
52 Lifestyle Media and the Formation of the Self
is that visible performances of becoming are neatly enfolded into
contemporary constructions of the good citizen. In the makeover
culture, good citizenship is forged from the self-determination, dis-
cipline and labour necessary for an endless project of becoming
better: good citizens of makeover culture effect endless renovations,
restorations and maintenance on themselves and their environ-
ments, stretching and designing their faces, their bodies, their ages,
and their connections with technologies and other bodies (Jones,
2008, p. 189). So strong is the connection between becoming and
citizenship that Jones argues that the makeover has left the realms
of aspirational, wishful thinking to become increasingly etched as a
cultural imperative as that which must be done.
Becoming and the self
The ideal citizen of the makeover culture is clearly premised on
the enterprising, calculating, highly individualised self required by
neoliberal organisation and rationality. Neoliberalism has been intro-
duced in the opening of this book as referring to a retreat of the
state and the heaping of responsibility, often bundled with pack-
ages of rights , on to the individual. One manifestation of the
displacement of state responsibility to the self is a cultural politics
imagining the self as obliged to improve a self often referred to as
the entrepreneurial self for whom biography is a project, improve-
ment is the goal and who will bend the body and mind to the
self-discipline and increasing self-surveillance demanded (Roy, 2008).
Widely understood as a means of governing at a distance (Miller,
2007), these activities are argued to create a self who is flexible, adapt-
able and mobile enough to meet the demands of an ever-changing,
fluid labour market; a Jack of all trades (Bauman, 2007, p. 9). While
there is some scope here for an enterprising self to find places and
resources to position themselves more favourably in discourses and
traditions of class, gender duties and racialised expectations, we need
to exercise care here to avoid replicating the blank slate thinking
discussed in the previous chapter. Critic Toby Miller (2007, p. 5) cau-
tions against any easy celebration of an enterprising self by stating
that the United States with its advanced neoliberalism has become
the least socially mobile advanced Western economy. Frankly, it is a
not a First World country for a fifth of its inhabitants .
Makeover Culture 53
The previous chapter went some way to argue that while some
were free to engage in a mobile selfhood, others were culturally
fixed. Valerie Walkerdine (2003, p. 239) is among those who have
dissected the norms of neoliberalism to argue that the autonomous,
entrepreneurial self is made in the image of the middle class and
constructed in relation to a deficient Other the working class. This
awareness invites us to be alert to the ways that normalised neoliberal [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl freetocraft.keep.pl
action, skipping the culturally condoned steps of diet, physical stress
and strain and consumer related weight loss (2003, p. 270). Similarly,
Anne Diamond, one of the celebrity contestants on the 2006 edition
of the UK weight-loss show Celebrity Fit Club, was condemned for her
surgery while her fellow contestants underwent the pain and hard-
ships of a military regime of exercise, diet and lifestyle changes. What
we can draw from this is that the easy route and the self who under-
takes it is a cheat: only hard labour and effort secure a respectable,
authentic and morally praiseworthy process of becoming. Inciden-
tally, this goes someway to explain how the contemporary popularity
and growing acceptability of cosmetic surgery has involved gruelling
in-surgery footage and why painstaking and gory recovery periods are
Makeover Culture 51
aired on shows like Extreme Makeover and Ten Years Younger. While the
shots of blood and gore might be expected to put people off, instead
it serves to elevate the moral acceptability of surgery as it reveals its
own laborious journey. This is a point not lost on Anne Diamond s
publicists who over 2008 and 2009 released the full story of Anne s
long battles with weight and her survival from botched up surgery
to restore her to the public s affections.
To return to Jones, she is not suggesting that being is replaced by
becoming , but rather that becoming increasingly becomes the ways in
which being is done. For our purposes, this means that the taking up
of a lifestyle, such as the yummy mummy, is not an end in itself,
but rather that lifestyle options become sites for the expenditure of
continuous energies and concern. As this chapter s opening quote
illustrates, betterment and self-improvement are endless. Indeed, for
Jones, the activities of becoming are increasingly coded as the activi-
ties of life itself: to stop, to have reached betterment and perfection,
to be the best you can be, to be a finished product relegates the self
outside of intelligible life. If life is the activity of becoming better, then
being better can be understood as moments where energies are force-
fully stilled, where life is not enough and the self occupies what
Jones likens to a still life and spaces of the living dead (p. 147).
The fact that many makeover shows have revisits where presenter-
experts surprise past participants to see just how they are getting
on with their new look testifies to the expectation that ongoing
labours are necessary. Revisits also suggests that lifestyles are them-
selves launching pads for new ventures beyond simply maintenance.
The point here is that the happy endings offered by journeys of trans-
formation may be momentarily experienced, but more often than not
they are deferred or more correctly, they are points of entry for new
journeys.
There are two related lines in Jones argument that I wish to take
further over this and the next chapter. The first is the heightened
need for visibility. In order for becoming to be recognised, it must
be seen, displayed and known by others. As we might conclude from
the cautionary tales of Carnie Wilson and Anne Diamond there has
to be a visible act of labouring (p. 57) to becoming a sudden trans-
formation is a cheat. There is then the vital dimension of public
performance of moving from one self to another (p. 57) and this will
occupy the discussion of the next chapter. The second, explored here,
52 Lifestyle Media and the Formation of the Self
is that visible performances of becoming are neatly enfolded into
contemporary constructions of the good citizen. In the makeover
culture, good citizenship is forged from the self-determination, dis-
cipline and labour necessary for an endless project of becoming
better: good citizens of makeover culture effect endless renovations,
restorations and maintenance on themselves and their environ-
ments, stretching and designing their faces, their bodies, their ages,
and their connections with technologies and other bodies (Jones,
2008, p. 189). So strong is the connection between becoming and
citizenship that Jones argues that the makeover has left the realms
of aspirational, wishful thinking to become increasingly etched as a
cultural imperative as that which must be done.
Becoming and the self
The ideal citizen of the makeover culture is clearly premised on
the enterprising, calculating, highly individualised self required by
neoliberal organisation and rationality. Neoliberalism has been intro-
duced in the opening of this book as referring to a retreat of the
state and the heaping of responsibility, often bundled with pack-
ages of rights , on to the individual. One manifestation of the
displacement of state responsibility to the self is a cultural politics
imagining the self as obliged to improve a self often referred to as
the entrepreneurial self for whom biography is a project, improve-
ment is the goal and who will bend the body and mind to the
self-discipline and increasing self-surveillance demanded (Roy, 2008).
Widely understood as a means of governing at a distance (Miller,
2007), these activities are argued to create a self who is flexible, adapt-
able and mobile enough to meet the demands of an ever-changing,
fluid labour market; a Jack of all trades (Bauman, 2007, p. 9). While
there is some scope here for an enterprising self to find places and
resources to position themselves more favourably in discourses and
traditions of class, gender duties and racialised expectations, we need
to exercise care here to avoid replicating the blank slate thinking
discussed in the previous chapter. Critic Toby Miller (2007, p. 5) cau-
tions against any easy celebration of an enterprising self by stating
that the United States with its advanced neoliberalism has become
the least socially mobile advanced Western economy. Frankly, it is a
not a First World country for a fifth of its inhabitants .
Makeover Culture 53
The previous chapter went some way to argue that while some
were free to engage in a mobile selfhood, others were culturally
fixed. Valerie Walkerdine (2003, p. 239) is among those who have
dissected the norms of neoliberalism to argue that the autonomous,
entrepreneurial self is made in the image of the middle class and
constructed in relation to a deficient Other the working class. This
awareness invites us to be alert to the ways that normalised neoliberal [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]