From bingeing booze bird to gilded cage: teaching girls gender and class on Ladette to Lady

Abstract

One genre of reality television constructs working-class youth as the dysfunctional antithesis of the aspirational middle-class consumer who normally features in lifestyle media. Sent to boot camps, unruly youths undergo makeover by education into ways of living deemed to accrue superior cultural capital. This article analyses how one lifestyle show, Ladette to Lady (UK), pathologises binge-drinking, working-class girls who are didactically instructed how to improve by adopting conservative upper middle-class modes of femininity. Examining intersections of class, gender and youth, we argue that Ladette reproduces a broader logic through which young people are symbolically marked out as successes or failures in neoliberal performance evaluation culture. This includes Britain's framework of national school tests and the management of youths through techniques of intervention that discipline anti-social behaviour (such as ASBOs). We conclude that the symbolic violence in the show legitimates class and gender inequality in the name of meritocracy.

Keywords:

• binge drinking
• class
• gender
• lifestyle
• makeover
• neoliberalism
• reality television
• youth

Notes

1. Despite this development the show remains a British production and British as a cultural text. Australian audiences have an appreciation of its class codes, pseudo-Victorian moralism and ironic humour through colonial ties and imported television. They are also exposed to similar media debates about binge drinking in Australia. This puts Ladette in the category of lifestyle television that Bonner (2005) identifies as being embedded in local culture while having some international export appeal. The shift to Australian women can be seen as an attempt to maximise both markets and refresh a format that would likely flag more quickly with five series of British women. Although we do not have space to expand, we would argue that in the metropolitan British discourse that subtends the show Australian identity is constructed as inherently déclassé and is an easy substitute for the ‘uncouth’ British working classes.

2. As with Wife Swap and other shows that juxtapose people and cultures to generate a clash of values, the commitment to real transformation is nominal. While it is clear that upper-class dispositions are better than working-class ones in the show, we would argue that the central lesson is not that we should all ape the upper classes. Rather, the contrast in social space is extreme and unbridgeable, highlighting the abjection of working-class dispositions. This generates an intertextual contrast between the ladettes and other more successful participants in the makeover genre, who are shown to convert their aspirations into improved lifestyle literacies such that their cultural self-transformation can signify middle-classness through the medium of consumer culture. The unfeasibility of the transformation task in Ladette reinforces the ridicule of working-class positions by suggesting those who inhabit them are incapable of any other way of being, unlike those who exemplify middle-class ideals of self-fashioning in the genre