The Humanitarian Makeover

Abstract

We examine how the makeover paradigm is mobilized in contemporary humanitarian communications—a practice we call “humanitarian makeover.” We demonstrate its operation in the Finnish television programme Arman and the Children of Cameroon and Plan's 2013 International Day of the Girl event. The analysis shows how helping distant others is configured within a makeover and self-transformation narrative, providing a stage for performance of an “ethical self.” We argue that while the humanitarian impetus is to disturb and redress global inequality and injustice, which includes exposing and interrupting the failures of neoliberalism, the makeover paradigm is intimately connected to and reinforces individualized “moral citizenship,” which conforms to and reinforces neoliberal values.

Keywords:

• Makeover
• Humanitarian Communication
• Self-transformation
• NGOs
• television

Notes

[1] Feona Attwood and Ruth Deller, “Introduction: Transforming the Makeover,” International Journal of Cultural Studies. Online first 16 January 2014: 1–5.

[2] Tania Lewis, “‘There Grows the Neighbourhood’: Green Citizenship, Creativity and Life Politics on Eco-TV,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 15, issue 3 (2012): 315–26; Ruth Deller, “Religion as Makeover: Reality, Lifestyle and Spiritual Transformation,” International Journal of Cultural Studies. Online first 16 January 2014: 1–13.

[3] Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, issue 2 (2007): 147–66.

[4] www.oxfam.org/en/grow/countries/bahati-muriga-jacob-female-food-hero-2014 (accessed April 9, 2015).

[5] www.actionaid.org.uk/bollocks-to-poverty (accessed April 9, 2015).

[6] Plan's work belongs to what Barnett calls the “alchemical” branch of humanitarianism. See Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (New York: Cornell University Press, 2011).

[7] Lilie Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013); Shani Orgad, “Visualizers of Solidarity: Organizational Politics in Humanitarian and International Development NGOs,” Visual Communication 12, issue 3 (2013): 295–314; Lisa Ann Richey and Stefano Ponte, Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Anne Vestergaard, “Branding the Humanitarian: The case of Amnesty International,” Journal of Language and Politics 7, issue 3 (2008): 200–216.

[8] Helen Wood and Beverly Skeggs, “Notes on Ethical Scenarios of Self on British Reality TV,” Feminist Media Studies 4, issue 2 (2004): 205–8.

[9] Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture.”

[10] Attwood and Deller, “Introduction.”

[11] Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences (London, UK: Sage, 2002).

[12] Brenda Weber, Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship and Celebrity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

[13] Beverly Skeggs and Helen Wood, “The Labour of Transformation and Circuits of Value ‘around’ Reality Television,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 22, issue 4 (2008): 559–72.

[14] Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture”; Helen Wood and Beverly Skeggs, “Spectacular Morality: Reality Television, Individualisation and the Re-making of the Working Class,” in The Media and Social Theory, eds. David Hesmondhalgh and Jason Toynbee (London, UK: Routledge, 2008), 177–93.

[15] Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture,” 156.

[16] Beverly Skeggs, “The Value of Relationships: Affective Scenes and Emotional Performances,” Feminist Legal Studies, issue 18 (2010): 29–51.

[17] Weber, Makeover TV.

[18] Mike Featherstone, “Body, Image and Affect in Consumer Culture,” Body & Society 16, issue 1 (2010): 193–221; Alison Hearn, “Brand me ‘activist,’” in Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, eds. Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 23–38; Meredith Jones, “Media-Bodies and Screen-Births: Cosmetic Surgery Reality Television,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 22, issue 4 (2008): 515–24; Tania Lewis,” ‘He Needs to Face His Fears with These Five Queers!’ Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Makeover TV, and the Lifestyle Expert,” Television & New Media 8, issue 4 (2007): 285–311; Skeggs and Wood, “The Labour of Transformation.”

[19] Deller, “Religion as Makeover”; Lewis, “There Grows the Neighbourhood.”

[20] Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette, Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Laurie Ouellette, “Citizen Brand: ABC and the Do Good Turn in US Television,” in Commodity Activism, eds. Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser (New York: New York University Press), 57–75; Kate Douglas and Pamela Graham, “Go Back To Where You Came From: Stunt Documentary, Conversion Narrative, and the Limits of Testimony on Australian Television,” Biography 36, issue 1 (2013): 124–47; Kaarina Nikunen, “Real Suffering: Affective Economy in the Humanitarian Reality Television Show,” European Journal of Cultural Studies (2015, forthcoming); Emma Price, “Empathy or Entitlement? Humanizing and Othering Discourses in Go Back To Where You Came From,” Journal of Popular Television 2, issue 1 (2014): 97–110.

[21] Skeggs and Wood, “The Labour of Transformation.”

[22] Gay Hawkins, “The Ethics of Television,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 4, issue 4 (2001): 432–26; Deller, “Religion as Makeover.”

[23] Tania Lewis, Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise (Oxford, UK: Peter Lang; 2008), Lewis, “There Grows the Neighbourhood.”

[24] John Caldwell, “Convergence Television: Aggregating Form and Repurposing Content in Culture of Conglomeration” in Television after TV, eds. Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 41–74; Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Sonia Livingstone, “The Challenge of Changing Audiences: Or, What is the Audience Researcher to Do in the Age of the Internet?,” European Journal of Communication 19, issue 1 (2004): 75–86.

[25] Lewis, “There Grows the Neighbourhood”; Olivier Driessens, Stijn Joye and Daniel Biltereyst, “The X-Factor of Charity: A Critical Analysis of Celebrities’ Involvement in the 2010 Flemish and Dutch Haiti Relief Shows,” Media, Culture & Society 34, issue 6 (2012): 709–25.

[26] These transformations include intensified competition among aid organizations, public criticism of and disillusion with humanitarian aid, growing questioning of NGOs’ efficacy, legitimacy and use of donated money, declining resources and consequent increased dependence on the corporate sector and on “playing the media's game” for their income,, the rapidly changing global and commercialized media environment in which humanitarian messages are produced, disseminated and received, and the growing commodification and commercialization of humanitarian communication. See: Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator; Simon Cottle and David Nolan, “Global Humanitarianism and the Changing Aid Field: ‘Everyone was dying for footage’’,’ Journalism Studies 8, issue 6 (2007): 862–78; Orgad, “Visualizers of Solidarity”; Shani Orgad and Bruna Seu, “‘Intimacy at a Distance’ in Humanitarian Communication,” Media, Culture and Society 36, issue 7 (2014): 916–34.

[27] Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator.

[28] Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator.

[29] Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator; Andrew F. Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy (Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm, 2008); Driessens et al., “The X-Factor”; Hearn, “Brand Me ‘Activist’”; Jo Littler, ‘’‘I Feel Your Pain’: Cosmopolitan Charity and the Public Fashioning of the Celebrity Soul,” Social Semiotics 18, issue 2 (2008): 237–51; Neil Narine, “Global Trauma and the Cinematic Network Society,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 27, issue 3 (2010): 209–34; Kate Nash, “Global Citizenship as Show Business: The Cultural Politics of Make Poverty History,” Media, Culture & Society 30, issue 2 (2008): 167–81; Richey and Ponte, Brand Aid.

[30] Frank Johansson (ed.) Hyvän tekeminen ja valta[Doing Good and Power] (Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2014); Marianna Laiho, Sankarina matkalla [Travelling Hero] (Kumppani 7–8/2014), 44–45.

[31] Ulla Vuorela, “Colonial Complicity: the ‘Postcolonial’ in a Nordic Context,” in Complying with Colonialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region, eds. Suvi Keskinen, Salla Tuori, Sari Irni, and Diana Mulinari (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 21.

[32] Orgad, “Visualizers of Solidarity.”

[33] Suvi Keskinen et al. Complying with Colonialism. See also Vuorela, “Colonial Complicity.”

[34] Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Lilie Chouliaraki, “Discourse and Mediation,” in Rethinking Communication: Keywords in Communication Research, ed. Stuart Allan (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2010): 95–108.

[35] Weber, Makeover TV.

[36] Kaplana Wilson, “‘Race,’ Gender and Neoliberalism: Changing Visual Representations in Development,” Third World Quarterly 32, issue 2 (2011): 315–31.

[37] Weber, Makeover TV, 30.

[38] Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator; Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy; Littler,“I Feel Your Pain.”

[39] Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator.

[40] Andrew Darnton with Martin Kirk, “Finding Frames: New Ways to Engage the UK Public in Global Poverty,” 2011. from http://findingframes.org/report.htm (accessed April 9, 2015).

[41] Laura Grindstaff, The Money Shot: Trash, Class, and the Making of Television Talk Shows (Chicago. IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

[42] Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 2012).

[43] Weber, Makeover TV, 30.

[44] Weber, Makeover TV, 30.

[45] Weber, Makeover TV, 31.

[46] Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, Better Living Through Reality TV: Television and Post-welfare Citizenship (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2008).

[47] Skeggs and Wood, “The Labour of Transformation.”

[48] Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator.

[49] Boltanski, Distant Suffering, 12.

[50] Skeggs, “The Value of Relationships.”

[51] Skeggs, “The Value of Relationships,” 76.

[52] Ofra Koffman and Rosalind Gill, “‘The Revolution Will be Led by a 12 Year Old Girl’: Girl Power and Global Biopolitics,” Feminist Review 105, issue 1 (2013): 83–102; Wilson, “‘Race,’ Gender and Neoliberalism.”

[53] Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London/California: Sage, 2009).

[54] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po3X0eUlX1M (accessed April 9, 2015).

[55] Skeggs, “The Value of Relationships.”

[56] Boltanski, Distant Suffering, 12.

[57] Maryn Wilkinson, “The Makeover and the Malleable Body in 1980s American Teen Film, International Journal of Cultural Studies. Published online 16 January 2014: 1–7.

[58] Skeggs, “The Value of Relationships,” 69.

[59] Wood and Skeggs, “Notes on Ethical Scenarios.”

[60] Deborah Philips, “Transformation Scenes: The Television Interior Makeover,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 8, issue 2 (2005): 213–29.

[61] Skeggs, “The Value of Relationships.”

[62] Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator.

[63] Darnton with Kirk, “Finding Frames.”

[64] Orgad and Seu, “‘Intimacy at a Distance.’”

[65] Nick Couldry, Why Voice Matters? Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism (London, UK: Sage, 2010).

[66] Weber, Makeover TV.

[67] Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator.

[68] Weber, Makeover TV, 255, 261.

[69] Weber, Makeover TV, 254.

[70] Weber, Makeover TV, 256.

[71] Weber, Makeover TV, 257–8.

[72] Couldry, Why Voice Matters.

[73] Deller, “Religion as Makeover,” 4.