Domesticating Citizenship: The Kairotopics of America's Post-9/11 Home Makeover

Abstract

This essay analyzes how Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is making over democratic citizenship in post-9/11 America. Seeking to counter a temporal bias that displaces attention to the spatial in communication scholarship, I conduct a kairotopic, or temporal-spatial, analysis of this program to illustrate how it mediates citizenship through a particular material space-time: the contemporary American home. Overall, I argue that this show operates to domesticate political practices by relocating social responsibility from public institutions to private corporations and redirecting political agency into familiar (nuclear) familial space-times. In so doing, the program paradoxically combines the economic and governmental imperatives of neoliberalism with the moral and social norms of neoconservativism to build a new national home that is both post-dissident and postfeminist.

Keywords:

• domestic
• citizenship
• makeover television
• space
• time
• kairotope

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Michelle Rodino-Colocino and Rosa A. Eberly for substantive responses to National Communication Association convention papers that contained portions of this essay's argument and analysis, and Karen Bovenmyer, Marilyn DeLaure, and Heidi Hamilton as well as the editors and reviewers for this special issue for assistance and guidance during the revision process.

Notes

1. A decade ago, Raymie McKerrow (1999) called for attention to both space and time in rhetorical analysis of political culture and Richard Cavell (1999) argued that Marshal McLuhan's work provides a spatial theory of communication. Later, media scholar Raka Shome (2003) argued that “space matters” for any study of communication, politics and power relations. A tradition of material analysis of space and place is well established in the field of communication studies, particularly with regard to the role of monuments and museums in national memory. Notable authors contributing studies to this literature include Carole Blair (Blair et al., 1991; Blair, 1999; Blair & Michel, 1999), Greg Dickinson (Dickinson, 1997; Dickinson et al., 2006), and Victoria Gallagher (1995, 1999).

2. The order of terms here, kairos before topos in “kairotope” and the reverse order in “space-time” is an effort to recognize contradictory biases that I hope to productively counterpose: communication studies' privileging of the temporal and cultural geography's privileging of the spatial.

3. Brief references to Doreen Massey have appeared in rhetorical essays (Jack, 2007; Pezzullo, 2007; St. Antoine, 2007) and in articles by media scholars (Cavell, 1999; Johnson-Yale, 2008; Rowe & Lindsey, 2003; Shome, 2006; Smith, 2005).

4. According to Massey, even Foucault's late renunciation of previous inattention to space is performed by means of a distinction between the ordering of time and “a notion of space as instantaneous connections between things at one moment” that indicates a failure to recognize the impossibility of conceptualizing either time or space as the “absence of the other” (1994, p. 264). In Massey's view, Derrida is unique in moving beyond this legacy of post-structuralism, but his careful attention to particular properties of spatiality and his tendency to think space and time together is not generally shared by deconstructionists, whose conceptual approach tends to visualize a textual “horizon” that flattens and deprives space of its temporal dimensions. For a discussion of Derrida and space-time, see the chapter entitled “The Horizontalities of Deconstruction” in For Space (Massey, 2005, pp. 49-54).

5. For the full elaboration of this argument, see the essay “A Global Sense of Place” in Space, Place, and Gender (Massey, 1994, pp. 146-156). However, Massey is here addressing a general argument in literature on globalization, rather than engaging a specific text authored by Virilio.

6. Massey (1998, p. 224) has noted that Foucault's concept of heterotopia reads places rather than relations, failing to specify for whom certain spaces will have a heterotopic character. It is precisely this kind of inattention to the relational and dynamic character of space in Foucault Elizabeth Grosz (1994)-a theorist of both temporal and spatial aspects of (gendered) bodies-notes when she challenges his treatment of the body as a “field” and “on which power operates and through which it functions” (p. 146), “a blank, passive page, neutral 'medium' or signifier for the inscription of a text” (p. 156). Grosz' charge that Foucault's rendering of the body in passive, receptive, and sexually-undifferentiated terms poses serious problems for feminist scholars attempting to use his concepts and methods resonates with Massey's (1998) claim that his treatment of space fails to attend to its multiplicity and relational character, as well as the prominent role of gender in structuring the relations that constitute it.

7. For an example of kairos and topos being used for an geographical analysis of spatial-temporal political relations, see Ruth Panelli's article about activism in Australian agriculture (2007).