RIDICULE AS A STRATEGY FOR THE RECONTEXTUALIZATION OF THE WORKING CLASS

Abstract

This paper discusses the role of reality television in the ongoing transformation of Swedish working-class discourse. This transformation is linked to a neoliberal political project and concerns a shifting relationship between discourses of exclusion and inclusion. The key argument is that working-class people are now portrayed through ‘a moral underclass discourse’ in which the working class is devalued and delegitimized, and given moral blame for their own structural situation. This discussion is based on a multimodal critical discourse analysis of participants who appear to be ‘ordinary’ working-class people in Ullared, a docu-soap that follows the goings-on at, and in the vicinity of a popular, rural low-cost outlet (called Gekås). Hence it puts participants' consumption and consumer behaviour in the foreground, and these activities are ridiculed through a mode of production best described as the ‘middle-class gaze’. Ordinary participants are presented as flawed or pathological consumers and become signifiers of a morally flawed lifestyle.

KEYWORDS:

• consumption
• critical discourse analysis
• consumer society
• exclusion/inclusion
• multimodal
• neoliberalism
• ordinary people
• reality television
• recontextualization
• working class

Acknowledgements

I thank David Machin for valuable and encouraging comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1 I use the latter concept to stress that viewers can of course resist the programme's gaze (cf. Skeggs & Wood, 2012); they can ‘re-inscribe, re-work and challenge the normative assumptions of the middle-class gaze’ (Lyle, 2008, p. 321).

2 The Social Democrats formed government from 1946 to 1976.

3 According to an OECD-report published in May 2013 the income poverty rate in 2010 (9%) was more than twice what it was in 1995 (4%). Between 2007 and 2010 the average income for poorer families' incomes increased less than it did for people with average incomes.

Additional information

Göran Eriksson is a Professor of Media and Communication Studies, Örebro University, Sweden. He writes in the areas of politics and media, and is also involved in projects concerned with television history. His research is published in journals such as Text & Talk, Journalism, Journal of Pragmatics, International Journal of Press/Politics and Media, Culture and Society.