Abstract
This article discusses MTV’s Geordie Shore against the backcloth of current social conditions for working-class youth. It suggests that the aesthetic, physical and discursive features of excess represent hyperbole, produced from within an affective situation of precariousness and routed through the labour relations of media visibility. Hyper-glamour, hyper-sex and hyper-emotion are responses to the ideologies of the future-projected, self-governing neoliberal subject and to the contemporary gendered contradictions of sexually proclivity and monogamous heteronormativity. By ‘flaunting’ the realities of self-work and making the labour of themselves more/most visible, the participants of Geordie Shore are claiming an animated type of ill/legitimate subjectivity.
Highlights
Season One of MTV’s Geordie Shore, the British version of the US programme Jersey Shore, first aired in the summer of 2011
The schizophrenic moving backwards and forwards between exaggerated positions of bodily control provides further, if confined, space through which to perform and show the work and labour on oneself expressed as hyper-femininity. This reading of Geordie Shore has described the ‘hyping’ of character, sex and emotion as features of the broader labour conditions of media visibility for working-class youth and the limits imposed by gender
In Imogen Tyler’s (2013b) discussion of the dialectic nature of the ‘revolt’, she discusses how social abjection is made in politics and struggled over by those made abject
Summary
Season One of MTV’s Geordie Shore, the British version of the US programme Jersey Shore, first aired in the summer of 2011. Tyler’s emphasis is to attempt to theorise the struggle between subjectivity and sovereignty because in the process of marking the boundaries of exclusion, waste populations are made instrumental to the ‘imaginary repertoires of the dominant culture’ (citing Stallybrass and White 1986:6 in Tyler 2013b: 20). In this way, moving on from Kristeva’s (1982) more totalising psychoanalytic account of the notion of an abject subjectivity, Tyler argues for greater understanding of social abjection accounting for the potential subjectivities of those that are made abject as vital tos understanding the discursive orders of social abjection itself. In this spirit this article turns to the aesthetics and histrionics of the reality television participants in Geordie Shore, addressing in more common parlance an understanding of ‘what’s in it for them?’ rather than the more dominant question in reality television literature of ‘how does it position us?’ In so doing the article discusses how the participants actions are framed as forms of ‘hyperbole’ which are direct responses to being made abject and where reality television’s role in the production of identity generates forms of exaggeration which externalise the struggle of contemporary socio-economic conditions
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