Domesticating Citizenship: The Kairotopics of America's Post-9/11 Home Makeover

Abstract

This essay analyzes how Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is making over democratic citizenship in post-9/11 America. Seeking to counter a temporal bias that displaces attention to the spatial in communication scholarship, I conduct a kairotopic, or temporal-spatial, analysis of this program to illustrate how it mediates citizenship through a particular material space-time: the contemporary American home. Overall, I argue that this show operates to domesticate political practices by relocating social responsibility from public institutions to private corporations and redirecting political agency into familiar (nuclear) familial space-times. In so doing, the program paradoxically combines the economic and governmental imperatives of neoliberalism with the moral and social norms of neoconservativism to build a new national home that is both post-dissident and postfeminist.