Working Stiff(s) on Reality Television during the Great Recession

Sean Brayton

doi:10.3390/soc2040235

Abstract

This essay traces some of the narratives and cultural politics of work on reality television after the economic crash of 2008. Specifically, it discusses the emergence of paid labor shows like Ax Men, Black Gold and Coal and a resurgent interest in working bodies at a time when the working class in the US seems all but consigned to the dustbin of history. As an implicit response to the crisis of masculinity during the Great Recession these programs present an imagined revival of manliness through the valorization of muscle work, which can be read in dialectical ways that pivot around the white male body in peril. In Ax Men, Black Gold and Coal, we find not only the return of labor but, moreover, the re-embodiment of value as loggers, roughnecks and miners risk both life and limb to reach company quotas. Paid labor shows, in other words, present a complicated popular pedagogy of late capitalism and the body, one that relies on anachronistic narratives of white masculinity in the workplace to provide an acute critique of expendability of the body and the hardships of physical labor.

Highlights

There is a scene in John Wells‘ recent film The Company Men (2010) where a jobless BobbyWalker lays beside his wife Maggie
If the recent strain on masculinity andemployment is expressed from a middle-class perspective in Hollywood, it unfolds in markedly different ways on reality television, where we find a cycle of paid labor shows like Ax Men (2008), Black Gold (2008) and Coal (2010)
With the recent deluge of paid labor shows, it seems that images of work are quite desirable, but only in circumspect ways

Summary

Introduction

There is a scene in John Wells‘ recent film The Company Men (2010) where a jobless Bobby. If the recent strain on masculinity and (un)employment is expressed from a middle-class perspective in Hollywood, it unfolds in markedly different ways on reality television, where we find a cycle of paid labor shows like Ax Men (2008), Black Gold (2008) and Coal (2010). Coal), these early paid labor shows situate physical work in a predictable idiom of masculinity, saving unpaid affective labor and domestic details to the women of programs like Nanny 911 (2004–2007), Supernanny (2004–2011)and Trading Spouses (2004–2007) They complicate the middle-class sensibility of reality television by emphasizing the hazards of blue-collar work where fantasies of upward social mobility are notably absent; instead, crab fishermen and long-haul truckers struggle to reach company quotas and make ends meet rather than bask in luxury. Coal offers lucid reflections on the working body and expendability

Masculinity by Proxy and the Popular Pedagogy of Paid Labor Shows

Findings

Conclusions