Sluts that Choose Vs Doormat Gypsies

Abstract

The UK primetime series My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (Channel 4, 2010, 2011, 2012) offered audiences the opportunity to be armchair matrimonial ethnographers, to reveal the courtship curiosities of “one of the most secretive communities in the UK.” In spite of claims to social realist documentary, however, we argue that this programme has clearer resonances with “sexposé” reality television, producing and circulating a moral, visual economy premised upon the cultural figuration of “the gypsy bride.” The gypsy girl and gypsy bride are marked as victims of male gypsy oppression, of “backwards” and repressive cultural practices, of age-inappropriate sexualisation and “excessive” consumerism, and is thus defined by her failure to be a good aspirational postfeminist subject. In this paper, we explore the intersecting discourses around gender, sexuality, class, and race operative within Gypsy Wedding and analyse online forums responding to the programme. We use psychosocial methodologies and theories of affect to argue that the gypsy bride becomes a figure of abjection, desired and despised, and that the (readily accepted) invitation to be appalled by her “oppression” reveals the strategic potency of postfeminist notions of empowerment and the racist, sexist, and classist agendas it can serve.

Keywords::

• reality television
• Travellers
• social class
• whiteness
• sexualisation
• femininity
• psychosocial methodology
• online discussion forums

Notes

^1. We have paid close attention in our sampling to Mumsnet precisely because of their significance as a stakeholder in recent sexualisation debates.

^2. In terms of representation, the hen night has been a staple theme across much “sexposé” reality programming, which we argue has significant resonance, symbolically and narratively, with Gypsy Wedding (see for example Ibiza Uncovered [LWT 1998] and Club Reps [ITV 2002–2004]).

^3. And, of course, moments where they overlap: video stills from Josie's gypsy hen night in Episode One were reproduced across much news coverage of the programme as supportive evidence for appalled commentary.

^4. And again, these classed rhetorics were exhaustively rehearsed and echoed in a special one-off episode, My Big Fat Royal Gypsy Wedding which was broadcast in the same week as Prince William and Kate Middleton's 2011 royal nuptials.

^5. See for an example this “parentdish” discussion board headline: “Children's campaigners hit out at Channel Four last night after a six-year-old girl was shown getting a spray tan in the documentary My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding” (see http://www.parentdish.co.uk/2011/01/26/six-year-old-gets-fake-tan-on-tv/).

^6. For a thorough critique of the postfeminist culture of UK schooling which has tended to celebrate girls' exam success as ultimate evidence of gender equality, at the expense of interrogating sexism at school and beyond, please see Ringrose (2013).

^7. The binary being carved out here assumes that the white, middle-class woman is empowered to choose to be a genuine slut and unambiguously seize her sexual liberation. These dynamics and dilemmas of feminine sexuality were debated at length in relation to the recent international Slutwalks, which sought to reclaim slut against the very real threats of sexual violence in contemporary Western contexts that many argue legitimate an accepted “rape culture” (Ringrose & Renold 2012b).

^8.Belle de Jour was the pseudonym for the writer of the racy diaries The Intimate Adventures of a London Call-Girl, an award-winning weblog which was later published (2005) and turned into a television series and which gave an account of a “high-class hooker” life of pleasure.

^9. These are not the only classed/gendered/raced anxieties that circulate within and beyond the programme, and we could have examined the complex figurations around gypsy men and boys as predatory and criminal. In this article, we focus more on girls and women than boys and men, since as subjects they are more intensively regulated by the current political “sexualisation” panics (Egan & Hawkes 2010).

^10. Since the time of writing, the second series of Gypsy Wedding has been broadcast: as part of its publicity, a series of billboard posters were commissioned, bearing stills of the season with the accompanying text “Bigger. Fatter. Gypsier.” This prompted a large number of complaints to both the regulation body OFCOM and the broadcaster Channel 4, and street vigils at poster sites with some protesters making more direct responses to the provocations of the publicity, with graffiti that said “more racist,” for instance. These contestations compellingly demonstrate the complex affective struggles of belonging and exclusion which are mobilised by media texts such as these, and the impossibility of any singular cultural meaning. It is our hope that these moments of protest continue on their viral journeys (we encountered this image through social media) and re-ignite the issues of class, race, sexual, material, symbolic, and economic realities which are so wilfully obscured in the original programme.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tracey Jensen

Tracey Jensen is Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Newcastle University. Her research examines the politics of representation, with specific interest around the intersections of class and gender in the production of symbolic and cultural value. She is interested in television cultures and landscapes, and previous research has examined parenting television culture and parenting policy. E-mail: [email protected]

Jessica Ringrose

Jessica Ringrose is Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Gender and Education at the Institute of Education. Her current research is about young people's digitised sexual identities, and she has explored and troubled ideas around child “sexualisation” and “pornification,” recently advising on the Home Office Report, The Sexualization of Young People (Papadopoulous 2010). E-mail: [email protected]