Scourging the abject body: the television make-over show and the reconstruction of femininity under neoliberalism

Tincknell, Estella

Abstract

The television makeover show has become an important site for the discursive re-inscription of femininity as a fluid condition requiring continuous work and self-modification in order that it can be 'held together', and in which social idenity, the body and gendered subjectivity are complexly bound up. This essay examines the C4 programme, Ten Years Younger, and argues that its deployment of a powerful discourse of bodily mortification works to suggest that the 'self' can be remade as a matter of consumer choice but that this also involves punitive self-regulation.

• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2010
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Book Title: New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Identity
• Keywords: postfeminism, neoliberalism, makeover, television
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/982528