Makeover Television Research Articles

Promoting extreme fitness regimes through the communicative affordances of reality makeover television: a multimodal critical discourse analysis

ABSTRACT Taking off from the theory of social semiotics and using the methods of multimodal critical discourse analysis, this paper demonstrates how the communicative affordances of a Swedish reality makeover show, The Great Health Journey, are used to promote discourses normalizing extreme fitness ideals. It is a show that reduces health to body fitness and supports a particular health consciousness gaining prominence today, an ideology here depicted as fitnessism. Progressing the ideas put forward by Crawford with the notion of healthism, fitnessism accentuates the careful submission to strict fitness-related regimes as crucial for a healthy lifestyle. It turns the very fit body into a sign of good morals, indicating the values of self-discipline, self-control, and willpower, personal characteristics seen as crucial in the neoliberal era. But the healthiness of this fitness ideal can be questioned. Rather than serving the interest of public health, fitnessism seems to mainly encourage “aesthetic labour” and support commercial interests to exploit body dissatisfaction.

The Shamba Chef Educational Entertainment Program to Promote Modern Cookstoves in Kenya: Outcomes and Dose-Response Analysis.

Background: Globally, an estimated 3.6 billion people rely on solid fuels for cooking over open fires or in simple cookstoves. Universal access to clean cooking fuels and technology by 2030 is a United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal. Methods: The Mediae Company created a home makeover television and radio show, Shamba Chef, designed to promote modern, cleaner, safer cooking methods and improved nutrition in Kenya, which reached 5 million homes in late 2017. This was accompanied by a mobile phone platform called iChef. Researchers evaluated the effects of Shamba Chef on cookstove purchase, use, and attitudes, beliefs, and intentions. Results: The study revealed dose–response effects of Shamba Chef exposure on several key outcomes. Exposure to the program was associated with an awareness of improved biomass stoves (OR 4.4; 95% CI 2.8 to 6.9), and aspirations to own an improved biomass stove (OR 2.0; 95% CI 1.4 to 2.9). Receiving information about modern stoves from two or more sources generated greater awareness of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) stoves (OR 2.0; 95% CI 1.3 to 3.1). The qualitative study revealed that Shamba Chef explained how the stoves worked, communicated their benefits, and encouraged participants to trust and purchase those cookstoves. Conclusion: Shamba Chef was successful in influencing determinants of cookstove purchase and use, and there is evidence from the qualitative study that it influenced the purchase and use of improved biomass stoves.

Reinvention Through CrossFit: Branded Transformation Documentaries

This article analyses a set of branded promotional documentaries from the CrossFit YouTube channel, which depict new participants as they transition into a CrossFit lifestyle. These documentaries share narrative elements of reality makeover television’s hybrid entertainment/educational format, deploying popular tropes of reinvention and personal empowerment through guided consumption. In focusing largely on participants dealing with chronic health issues, the documentaries reproduce dominant neoliberal ideologies about personal responsibility for health through fitness and construct CrossFit as a socially engaged brand with an inclusive fitness mission. These documentaries may also mitigate dominant, intimidating media images of high-performing CrossFit competitors who embody the brand image, as well as CrossFit’s reputation as an extreme fitness practice. This article takes Dawson’s (2017) position that CrossFit is a contemporary reinventive institution, which makes omnivorous demands of its adherents’ lives in exchange for personal transformation. In these documentaries, participants’ successful transition into exemplary CrossFit membership hinges not only on capitulation to these demands but recognition of them as desirable steps toward self-making and health. Reinvention is depicted as willing conformity to CrossFit values and behaviours, rather than simply the achievement of physical fitness, and those who successfully transform are constructed as aspirational embodiments of the brand.

Can the TV makeover format of edutainment lead to widespread changes in farmer behaviour and influence innovation systems? Shamba Shape Up in Kenya

Edutainment, the combination of education with entertainment through various media such as television, radio, mobile phone applications and games, is increasingly being used as an approach to stimulate innovation and increase agricultural productivity amongst smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. Shamba Shape Up, a widely publicised makeover reality TV programme, is an example of edutainment that has received considerable attention, and airs in three countries in East Africa where it is estimated to be watched by millions of viewers.There is no published academic research on the influence of makeover television formats on innovation systems and processes in smallholder agriculture. Using an Agricultural Innovation Systems approach, this paper explores how makeover edutainment is influencing smallholder farmer innovation systems together with the effect this is having on smallholder farms. In the absence of previous research, it articulates a Theory of Change which draws on research traditions from mass communication, agricultural extension and innovation systems.Data came from two large scale quantitative (n = 9885 and n = 1572) surveys and in-depth participatory qualitative research comprising focus group discussions, participatory budgets, agricultural timelines, case studies and key information interviews in Kenya. An estimated 430,000 farmers in the study area were benefiting from their interaction with the programme through increased income and / or a range of related social benefits including food security, improving household health, diversification of livelihood choices, paying school fees for children and increasing their community standing / social capital.Participatory research showed SSU enhanced an already rich communication environment and strengthened existing processes of innovation. It helped set the agenda for discussions within farming communities about opportunities for improving smallholder farms, while also giving specific ideas, information and knowledge, all in the context of featured farm families carefully selected so that a wide range of viewers would identify with them and their challenges.Broadcasts motivated and inspired farmers to improve their own farms through a range of influences including entertainment, strong empathy with the featured host farm families, the way ideas emerged through interaction with credible experts, and importantly through stimulating widespread discussion and interaction amongst and between farmers and communities of experts on agricultural problems, solutions and opportunities. The fact that local extension workers also watched the programmes further enhanced the influence on local innovation systems.The findings indicate that well designed makeover edutainment can strongly influence agricultural innovation processes and systems resulting in impact on the agricultural production and behaviours of large numbers of smallholder farmers.

Captions and the Cooking Show

While the television cooking genre has evolved in numerous ways to withstand competition and become a constant feature in television programming (Collins and College), it has been argued that audience demand for televisual cooking has always been high because of the daily importance of cooking (Hamada, “Multimedia Integration”). Early cooking shows were characterised by an instructional discourse, before quickly embracing an entertainment focus; modern cooking shows take on a more competitive, out of the kitchen focus (Collins and College). The genre has continued to evolve, with celebrity chefs and ordinary people embracing transmedia affordances to return to the instructional focus of the early cooking shows. While the television cooking show is recognised for its broad cultural impacts related to gender (Ouellette and Hay), cultural capital (Ibrahim; Oren), television formatting (Oren), and even communication itself (Matwick and Matwick), its role in the widespread adoption of television captions is significantly underexplored. Even the fact that a cooking show was the first ever program captioned on American television is almost completely unremarked within cooking show histories and literature.

Exploring YouTube as a Transformative Tool in the “The Power of MAKEUP!” Movement

Exploring YouTube as a Transformative Tool in the “The Power of MAKEUP!” Movement

How to organise your body 101: postfeminism and the (re)construction of the female body through How to Look Good Naked

The aim of this article is to highlight the attention given by recent makeover shows, and specifically How to Look Good Naked, to the ‘underneath’ as a way of (re)organising the female body. I examine whether this ‘turn’ or change in media’s direction is an appreciation of the real female body (an unmodified body) or whether this is a mere (re-)organisation of the body into a controllable base of overall appearance and a further embedding of Western conceptions of beauty and of the notion that the manipulation of appearance is essential to the construction of the feminine identity and to the measure of women’s social worth. Informed by postfeminist discourse and critique, I analyse the British reality makeover television show How to Look Good Naked, discuss the extent to which it actually provides an alternative to prevailing cultural discourses around feminine beauty and scrutinise the impact that it seems to have on the identities of the women who participate. I analyse how the show, as the ultimate postfeminist show, inscribes gendered identities and practices, and I examine how postfeminism has created spaces for such shows to exist and affirm hegemonic gender constructions based on consumption practices.

Denigrating and being denigrated for a higher end: Constructing ordinary expertise through supportive and belligerent talk

This article explores the construction of ordinary expertise as a joint venture between experts and advisees in a Swedish makeover television show aired since 2006, Lyxfällan (Eng. The Luxury Trap). This show is also an exponent of belligerent broadcasting (Higgins et al., 2012) and circulates a discourse of consumption which promotes an individualistic consumer ideal.Drawing on methodological approaches from studies of broadcast talk as talk-in-interaction and multimodal discourse analysis, the article examines the ways in which performances by advisers, advisees and an unseen narrator are made to work together to construct ordinary expertise. The analysis reveals that Lyxfällan׳s construction of ordinary expertise heavily relies upon experts and advisees both following and breaking the general norms of ordinary conversations and the sociability of broadcast talk (Scannell, 1996), as well as the more specific conventions of the participation framework (Thornborrow, 2015) of exchanges between advisers and advisees. In following and breaking these norms and conventions, experts and advisees jointly construct ordinary expertise through the enactment of a dialectics of resistance and compliance, which in the end is tilted toward the advisers.

Negotiating Citizenship on Russian Makeover Television: Between Traditional and Neoliberal

Having being introduced to the Russian audience in the early 2000s, beauty makeover television – a lifestyle TV with the focus on ‘remaking’ the participants’ image, conduct and the self through the means of a wardrobe, makeup and hairstyle – has become widespread. Drawing from the concept of citizenship, this study uses data from the popular Russian makeover programs Modnyi Prigovor (Fashion Verdict) and Snimite Eto Nemedlenno! (Take It Off Immediately!) to examine the ways using which they transform women into ideal citizens by negotiating their relationships with and within public and private spheres. Via this examination, this study synthesizes two bodies of literature: citizenship studies and works on makeover TV. It is argued that on Russian makeover TV a specific type of citizen is suggested, created by two different yet connected discourses – (neo)traditionalist and neoliberal.

Bringing Sexy Back: To What Extent Do Online Television Audiences Contest Fat-Shaming?

Bringing Sexy Back: To What Extent Do Online Television Audiences Contest Fat-Shaming?

The power of celebrities: past experiences, current status, and a friendly encounter as key components to transform young individuals in It Gets Better

Makeover television is generally interested in transforming individuals. Often these programmes alter participants on an individual basis, ignore structural problems, and enforce normative ideas of the good citizen. An important role is preserved for celebrities, considered able to help these individuals by performing the role of expert. This article aims to demonstrate how celebrities are legitimised with the power to transform young individuals in a television programme. Specifically, the article inquires how celebrities are represented as key actors in the process of transforming young individuals within a Dutch context in which ordinariness is promoted. To this end, a textual analysis is conducted of the Dutch programme It Gets Better. This article reveals how the programme constructs celebrities as the only way to solve the participants’ problems. On the one hand, they are able to connect with audiences and participants because their ordinariness eases identification and access. The programme particularly emphasises the ordinariness of Dutch celebrities while connecting it to their personal experiences with the issue at stake in the past. On the other hand, their extraordinary status in society gives them authority. The articulation of the celebrity status to personal experiences is pivotal for the transformation to take place. The critical moment of change is when celebrities deliver their messages to the individuals personally and act as a friend; consequently, individuals feel honoured to interact with them and take celebrities’ messages seriously.

Own It! Constructions of Masculinity and Heterosexuality on Reality Makeover Television

Makeover television shows are notorious for presenting oppressive and unrealistic images of women, but a sizable portion of makeover contestants are men. What does this mean for the impact of such shows on gender culture? Using data collected from transcripts of five different programs, we find that gender, power, and heterosexuality intertwine within makeover plots in three ways. First, makeover shows link the promise of personal transformation to uncovering an accentuated femininity or masculinity lurking beneath surface-level shortcomings. Second, shows featuring male contestants make status and wealth central to their transformations. While female contestants focus on their bodies, men are offered opportunities and encouragement to engage in ‘manhood acts’ (Schrock and Schwalbe, 2009): deliberate efforts to claim membership in the privileged gender group. Third, makeovers rely upon heteronormative understandings of masculinity and femininity as opposites that attract. For men in particular, heterosexual relationships (whether real or imagined) provide the evidence within each episode that their makeovers have successfully rehabilitated their masculinity and their gender privilege. Thus the presence of men in the makeover genre reifies existing ideologies of gender inequality in which social status is a requisite component of masculinity, deference to men is a requisite component of femininity, and a male-dominated heterosexuality is a requisite component of both.

Rebranding Doctor Who and reimagining Sherlock: ‘Quality’ television as ‘makeover TV drama’

This article adopts an unusual approach to ‘makeover TV’ by suspending the ‘unities of discourse’ linked to discursive clusters of ‘quality’ TV drama and makeover television. These are typically positioned as two completely different arenas of TV output – one concerning valued, aestheticized fictions, the other involving devalued and artificial factual entertainments. While ‘quality’ TV is articulated with notions of auteurist vision, makeover TV is supposedly penetrated by consumer culture and its ideologies. Challenging these naturalized discourses, I argue via two case studies – BBC Wales’ Doctor Who and Sherlock – that celebrated TV dramas significantly engage in makeover modalities. Doctor Who repeatedly displays the branded ‘reveal’ of transformed content (new designs; new lead actors). And Sherlock exhibits an emphasis on transformative individuation rather than fidelity to Arthur Conan Doyle’s original writings, despite generally being discursively positioned by critics as an ‘adaptation’. Whether reinventing a brand or a character, Doctor Who and Sherlock share many of the processes of consumer-cultural ‘makeover TV’, albeit in the arena of ‘quality’ TV drama. By temporarily setting ‘facts of discourse’ to one side, it is possible to illuminate ideological ‘powers of transformation’ running across valued TV fictions and devalued factual entertainment.

Religion as makeover: Reality, lifestyle and spiritual transformation

In this article I discuss the relationship between religion, spirituality and processes of makeover and transformation as presented in a number of British reality television shows. Programmes including The Monastery, The Convent and Make Me a Muslim placed participants in scenarios where they experimented with adopting religious or spiritual practices as part of their journey of self-transformation. I argue that the nature of transformation in these programmes is in line with standard reality and makeover television practices. However, it also makes a claim to be more ‘authentic’ than these because of its unfolding within the more traditional environs of religious communities from which makeover culture’s narratives of transgression, repentance and salvation were originally derived.

Performing the Ultimate Grand Supreme: Approval, Gender and Identity in Toddlers & Tiaras

In spite of its popularity, makeover television is controversial with reality programs such as Toddlers & Tiaras transforming young girls into pint-sized versions of sexualized women. In this article I use various methods of analysis to better decode the visual images of the children appearing on the sensational series. Understanding the program makes clearer how gender and identity are constructed for the girls profiled in each episode. Findings reveal that youngsters' identity is approved of during beauty pageants only when they are hyper-gendered, follow heteronormative gender conventions, and undergo careful scrutiny of appearance by experts, yet exude original personality.

Book Review: The Media Studies Reader, by Laurie Ouellette

The Media Studies Reader. Laurie Ouellette, ed. New York: Routledge, 2013. 606 pp. $59.95 pbk. $220 hbk.A treasure trove for courses in cultural studies, film, gender issues, media, popular culture, and sociology, The Media Studies Reader includes historically established and avant-garde essays. Taken together-and coupled with audiovisual material-the essays will challenge and entertain undergraduates.Enhanced by the number of women and/or people of color who contributed their insights, the collection of more than forty readings includes seven sections, of which features class, ethnicity, gender, geopolitics, race, and sexuality. Laurie Ouellette, the editor of the collection, introduces multiple critical perspectives and highlights them effectively.Although the publisher promotes The Media Studies Reader as a collection appro- priate for introductory media courses, it would be a welcome addition to lower- and upper-division classes in disciplines as far ranging as film studies, journalism, gender studies, history, media studies, and sociology. The editor introduces section with a short summary and ideas for class discussions about audience, citizen- ship, culture, identity, representation, technology, and other compelling topics, making The Media Studies Reader an interdisciplinary success.An associate professor of communication studies at the University of Minnesota- Twin Cities, Ouellette organized the collection into sections that include media and culture, media and technology, media and representation, media and industry, media and identity, media and audience, and media and citizenship. Well-known scholars include Theodor Adorno, John Berger, Susan J. Douglas, Stuart Hall, George Lipsitz, and Tania Modleski. Provocative titles include Eyes Wide Shut: Capitalism, Class, and the Promise of Black Media, What's Your Flava: Race and Postfeminism in Media Culture, Oh, Behave! Austin Powers and the Drag Kings, and Makeover Television, Governmentality and the Good Citizen. Advertising, black media, fan- dom, Japanese media, labor issues, popular culture, mobile phones, music and copy- right issues, and women's media are well represented.The introduction, Mapping Media Studies, first introduces Marshall McLuhan as one of those who advocates for critical understanding of media. What follows is a romp through a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives and what the editor acknowledges to be a dizzying range of media objects in industries as diverse as advertising, computers, digital games, film, the Internet, print, music, and television.One of the strengths of the collection is that it does pretend to be all things to all people. Ouellette acknowledges that the collection is not inclusive (nor could it pos- sibly be) and that it is not a progress narrative where each new-and-improved the- ory overcomes the limits of earlier approaches. Instead, The Media Reader establishes distinct (but overlapping) 'stages' of media, broadly characterized as mass, niche and interactive. The interactive media stage, for example, includes studies about 500 channels, flexible viewing platforms and recording devices, online blogs, social net- working sites and reality TV shows soliciting the participation of ordinary people, writes Ouellette. Contributors analyze American media texts within the cultures and economies in which they took root. In an attempt at slicing what has become a quite voluminous body of literature, Ouellette introduces two approaches that are organi- zational and thematic.As noted earlier, instead of isolating racial, ethnic, international, and gender differ- ence, Ouellette includes representative essays about these subjects in every section. …

Media as nexus of practice: remaking identities in What Not to Wear

In this conceptual piece, we examine media as a nexus of a traditional schooling pedagogy and performance pedagogy to make visible how their overlapping elements produce media's pervasive educative force but also to gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of using media in educational contexts. Nexus analysis examines a fashion makeover television program – What Not to Wear (WNTW) – as an embodied lesson that produces identity revision but also disjunctures and slippages that enable critical responses and productive remakings. WNTW is a dramatization of remediation of one woman's (portrayed) lived practices and clothing choices which are read on her body as personal expression of fashion trends. These globalized lessons with body texts require new ways of reading and responding that allow learners/viewers to see the power relations that construct particular identity performances as errors and cultural practices and ethnicities as unacceptable.

Makeover television and the beauty myth

The media have an important role in communicating cultural values and ideas, but they also affect the outlining and defining the concepts of beauty. Therefore, the media representation processes are key to forming cultural 'norms' of a beautiful female body, while consumption oriented society finds esthetic surgery a simpler and faster way of democratizing and achieving this ideal. As a mixture of the mentioned motives, the makeover television is an example of media content whose analysis can uncover the meanings and affirmation mechanisms of the contemporary beauty myth - an idea suggested by Naomi Wolf. These TV shows can be viewed as particular media rituals, initiating into the myth and legitimizing its social role. Reality makeover TV show Moje novo ja, aired on Prva television, is analyzed to uncover the key moments of media representation of current idea(l)s of a desired woman's beauty, the consequences of such ideas and the social power relations which the myth itself portrays.

Belligerent broadcasting and makeover television: Professional incivility in Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares

This article looks at the significance of the practices of ‘belligerent broadcasting’ in the popular ‘trouble-shooting’ business television programme Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, USA. Belligerent broadcasting is a broadcast style that offers as spectacle expressions of anger or impatience, or the exercise of intimidation, against an on-screen interlocutor. Focusing on the performances of Gordon Ramsay, the article analyses the management of on-screen confrontation between participants occupying asymmetrical positions of power and perceived expertise. The article looks at how the face-threatening component of belligerent talk is ameliorated by strategies of authenticity and its representation as a productive force within the narrative of the programme. Finally, we assess the relevance of arguments that this broadcasting style might be seen as part of a ‘new incivility’ across media discourses.

Extreme Human Makeovers: Supernanny, the Unruly Child, and Adulthood in Crisis

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Karen Corteen and Phil Scraton argue that the notion of childhood is inherently flawed: “No issue reveals the contradictions within the politics of childhood as starkly as that of sexuality, its definition and regulation. As ‘non-adults,’ children are assumed to be asexual. While they are socialized into gender-appropriate roles from birth, a universal feature of patriarchal societies, they are expected to retain a sexual naivety. Yet the images which surround them, implicit and explicit, of hegemonic/dominant masculinity and emphasized/subordinate femininity are all pervasive and all persuasive. The daily experiences of children and young people are contextualized by constructions of masculinity and femininity which are both gendered and sexualized” (76). Because of the large number of episodes broadcast, we examine only seasons one and two of Supernanny (both the UK and U.S. versions). These seasons were chosen largely for their availability: US seasons one and two are available on DVD. The UK episodes were purchased directly from Ricochet. Please note: the episodes contained on the DVDs may differ from those broadcast on television. Here we draw upon Ron Becker's observation that “regardless of the family, all problems are rooted in incompetent parenting” (184). The U.S. version utilizes split screens so that the viewers are able to see the parents' reactions as they watch the footage. Deery argues that the participants of makeover television “capitulate … to the rule of the expert and the power of the camera.” We will discuss the latter when we turn to the shifts in point of view that underpin the learning journey of Supernanny. See Hoyles, Postman, and Jenks. See Zelizer, Hays, and Stearns. Additional informationNotes on contributorsCatherine FowlerCatherine Fowler is a Senior Lecturer in Film at Otago University, New Zealand. She is editor of The European Cinema Reader, co-editor of Representing the Rural: Space, Place and Identity in Films about the Land, and author of a monograph on the British filmmaker Sally Potter.Rebecca KambutaRebecca Kambuta is a Ph.D. student in the Media, Film, and Communications Department at Otago University, New Zealand. Her doctoral dissertation traces the figure of the unruly child through film, news media, and reality television. She has also written on the makeover genre in her MA thesis, “Televising Transformation: A Close Analysis of Extreme Makeover and The Swan.”