From bingeing booze bird to gilded cage: teaching girls gender and class on Ladette to Lady

Abstract

One genre of reality television constructs working-class youth as the dysfunctional antithesis of the aspirational middle-class consumer who normally features in lifestyle media. Sent to boot camps, unruly youths undergo makeover by education into ways of living deemed to accrue superior cultural capital. This article analyses how one lifestyle show, Ladette to Lady (UK), pathologises binge-drinking, working-class girls who are didactically instructed how to improve by adopting conservative upper middle-class modes of femininity. Examining intersections of class, gender and youth, we argue that Ladette reproduces a broader logic through which young people are symbolically marked out as successes or failures in neoliberal performance evaluation culture. This includes Britain's framework of national school tests and the management of youths through techniques of intervention that discipline anti-social behaviour (such as ASBOs). We conclude that the symbolic violence in the show legitimates class and gender inequality in the name of meritocracy.