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Caricature and Character: Perfoming Personhood on Reality TV

  • Professor Beverley Skeggs, Goldsmiths, University of London
  • 7 November 2013, 4.00-6.00pm, W/222
  • Chair: Rebecca Viney, SPS student

Interview with Professor Beverley Skeggs

Seminar recording

Seminar synopsis

In this talk I will revisit my longitudinal ethnographic work on how a group of women produced their subjectivity through investments in respectability (it was published as Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable in 1997). I return to this work because of the many parallels with the current political conjuncture were revealed through a recent research project on reality television, Reacting to Reality TV: Audience, Performance, Value, 2012, almost in a first time tragedy, second time farce mode. Some forms of reality television arrive on our screens as a farcical morality plays, as cartoon versions of ladies etiquette manuals and pseudo-social work: people are caricatured (usually working class women) and the experts (usually middle class) dish out inappropriate advice which has very little bearing on the television participant's circumstances. In these modern morality farces, people are invited to perform their (lack of) value. However this is not a straightforward case of symbolic violence, but a spectacular revealing of the complex workings of ideology. Our research participants’ responses to this genre were remarkably similar to that of the Formations ethnographic participants’ responses. Their desire for value, investment in gender and perplexity towards authority mark a very particular form of class politics. This talk will explore the nuances of this politics as it unpacks how investments in person value and resistance to authority produce entanglements and antagonisms of class and gender writ large on our TV screens.

Professor Beverley Skeggs

Beverley Skeggs worked at the Universities of Keele, York, Lancaster and Manchester before joining the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, London. She has worked in the areas of Women’s Studies and Cultural Studies as well as Sociology. Her main publications include The Media (1992), Feminist Cultural Theory (1995), Formations of Class and Gender (1997), Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism (2000); Class, Self, Culture (2004), Sexuality and the Politics of Violence and Safety (2004) (with Les Moran, Paul Tyrer and Karen Corteen) and Feminism After Bourdieu (with Lisa Adkins). She is a series editor of the Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism book series (with Routledge). Her ESRC funded project (with Helen Wood) on Making Class and Self through Televised Ethical Scenarios, which is to be published as Reacting to Reality Television: Audience, Performance,Value (2012) and Reality TV and Class (2011). She is now an ESRC Professorial Fellow undertaking a project on a sociology of value and values.