Makeover television, governmentality and the good citizen

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Mark Andrejevic, Gareth Palmer, Anna McCarthy and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on some of the arguments developed in this essay.

Notes

 1. For the history of social work in the United States see Ehrenreich (1985); for a study of professional expertise as a related technology of governing see Ehrenreich and English (1978).

 2. For the role of magazines in demonstrating self and lifestyle pedagogies within the cultural economy of consumerism see Ohmann (1998) and Lears (1983). For early US television's engagement in self and lifestyle instruction see Leibman (1995), Watts (2006) and Cassidy (2005).

 3. See Osbourne and Gaebler's influential Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector (1992) for the changing rationalities of governing that we are describing here. President Bill Clinton endorsed the book, claiming it ‘should be read by every elected official in America. Those of us who want to revitalize government … have to reinvent it. This book gives us a blueprint.’

 4. We elaborate in more detail how this term is useful for thinking about contemporary television in Better Living through Reality TV (2008).

 5. For a useful summary of the move to make social services (as a dimension of the public sector) accountable to an entrepreneurial ethic see Rom (1999). Several critics have also observed reality television's parallel encouragement of a self-governing culture of entrepreneurialism. Gareth Palmer (2004), for example, has noted similarities between makeover television and the ‘personal development movement’, showing how both resonate with notions of entrepreneurial citizenship.

 6. Our use of the term ‘civic laboratories’ is indebted to Tony Bennett's (2005) use of the term to describe the civic training provided by museum culture.

 7. Rose (1998, 1999) has traced the dispersion of technologies of governance in a number of important studies. For an influential discussion of the role of culture in governing see also Bennett (1998).

 8. Foucault discusses the relation between ‘welfare states’, governmentality, and the biopolitical in ‘Security, Territory, Population’ (1997b, 67–71). He discusses the relation between liberalism and neoliberalism in ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’ (1997a, 72–9). Foucault analyses early programmes for ‘social health’ in ‘The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century’ (2000b, 90–105). He discusses the state's role in administering ‘social medicine’ in ‘The Birth of Social Medicine’ (2000a, 134–56). The ‘right to health’ in contemporary France is discussed in ‘The Risks of Security’ (2000c, 365–81).

 9. The ‘genealogy’ of welfare dependency as a regime of truth, and the gendering of the dependent welfare citizen, is charted in Fraser and Gordon (1997). The racialization of the female welfare subject is charted in Gilens (2000).

10. For an excellent analysis of the changing ‘state of welfare’ see also Clarke (2004).

11. We draw from material found on the ‘Healthy US’ website, the remarks of George Bush at his Fitness Challenge, the President's Challenge website ‘You're It, Get Fit’, and the website for the President's Council on Physical Fitness, with links to the Department of Health and Human Services.

12. Our discussion of Honey We're Killing the Kids is elaborated in Better Living through Reality TV.

13. For more on interactivity as viewer labour see Andrejevic (2004).