640553

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ECS0010.1177/1367549416640553European Journal of Cultural StudiesHearn

european journal of
Article

European Journal of Cultural Studies

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Witches and bitches: Reality © The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1367549416640553
and the new hidden abode ecs.sagepub.com

of production

Alison Hearn
University of Western Ontario, Canada

Abstract
The governance of affect by capital has seen its ideological legitimation and
emblematic site of production in the mainstream television industry, specifically
reality television programs, as they provide templates for affective self-presentation
to the public at large. As even a cursory glance at most reality television production
demonstrates, it is most often women’s bodies and self-concepts that bear the
burden of signifying and legitimating the message of this new economic formation:
‘conform to our template, be seen, and build a reputation!’ This article will focus
on the Real Housewives franchise, which along with its network Bravo is credited
with saving the fortunes of NBC, as the paradigmatic example of these new
narrative trends and business models. It will interrogate the historical resonances
and discontinuities between the economy of affective visibility now apparent on
reality television and its modes of production and the origins of the ‘real’ housewife
in early capitalism. At this time, women’s skills, bodies and reproductive capacities
were violently restructured; forbidden from earning a wage or having money,
women’s work inside and outside the home was simultaneously appropriated and
concealed. As reality television inaugurates new kinds of labor and value creation
in the 21st century, it does so in ways that are deeply gendered or ‘housewifized’;
reality television’s forms of hidden, precarious, and unregulated labour recall the
appropriation and denigration of the value of women’s work by systems of capitalist
expansion in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Keywords
Branding, gender, housewifization, labor, reality television, reputation

Corresponding author:
Alison Hearn, Faculty of Information & Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, North
Campus 240, 1151 Richmond St, London, ON N6A 5B7, Canada.
Email: ahearn2@uwo.ca

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2 European Journal of Cultural Studies 

In Caliban and the Witch (Federici, 2004), Silvia Federici provides a compelling descrip-
tion of the diaspora of ‘heretics escaping persecution, discharged soldiers, journeymen
and other humble folk in search of employment, … foreign artisans, evicted peasants,
prostitutes, hucksters, petty thieves, [and] professional beggars’ (p. 82) roaming the
roads of Europe during the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the 16th and 17th
centuries. Cast adrift from their homes as a result of war, disease, food shortages, pro-
cesses of land privatization and the radical restructuring of forms of work, the most
vulnerable of these vagabonds were young, unmarried and elderly women. Many were
forced into prostitution and subject to brutal punishment, or persecuted for being witches
and burned, providing potent illustration of the fact that, during times of political and
economic crisis, it is most often women who are on the front lines, suffering the very
worst of the privation, discipline and repression at hand.
To be sure, it is a very far cry from the rutted roads of 16th-century Europe teeming
with vagabondage to the affluent gated communities of the Botoxed, entitled and shop-
ping-obsessed women populating the Real Housewives reality television franchise.
Indeed, at first glance, it might appear ridiculous even to make this kind of connection.
And yet, in this article, I will argue that the ways in which women were disciplined and
produced as ‘real’ housewives during the brutal transition from feudalism to capitalism
have much to offer our understanding of Real Housewives and reality television produc-
tion practices in general today. Then, as now, ‘housewives’ were made, not born; their
work was deeply necessary but was also structurally pushed aside, rendered invisible and
appropriated by others. As reality television inaugurates new kinds of labor and value
creation in the 21st century, I contend it does so in ways that are deeply gendered and that
recall the appropriation and denigration of the value of women’s work inside and outside
of the home by systems of capitalist expansion in the 16th and 17th centuries. Feminist
critic Maria Mies (2007) terms these contemporary processes of ‘invisible, unregulated
and unprotected labour’ ‘housewifisation’ (p. 270).
There can be no doubt that women are bearing the brunt of the current political and
economic crisis. A recent report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in
2012 found that women’s participation in standard forms of employment is decreasing
and that they are overrepresented in non-standard precarious work around the globe by
wide margins (ILO, 2012: viii–ix). Women’s salaries compared to men’s for the same
jobs remain at around 80 percent and as low as 40 percent in some cases (ILO, 2011b:
19). In the developing world, growing numbers of women are subject to increasing
exploitation and degradation; contractions across vast sectors of waged work depress
wages across the board and push women back into the informal economy, such as
street vending and domestic or sex work, where they become even more vulnerable.
Data from 2011 show that one in three workers around the globe is unemployed or
poor, including well over 300 million indigenous people and 81 million young people.
Totally, 829 million people living in poverty in the world are women, compared to
522 million men (ILO, 2011a: 7–9).
Against the backdrop of these heavily gendered levels of poverty, the success of
reality television programming continues, fueling profits for transnational media cor-
porations and television networks in developed countries, specifically the United
States. CBS, home to reality television pioneer Survivor, in its 29th cycle at the time

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Hearn 3

of writing, posted an 8 percent increase in advertising sales in the first quarter of 2012
(James, 2012), while MTV’s hit Jersey Shore drove VIACOM’s profits up by 33 per-
cent in 2011 (Chozick, 2011). Bravo’s popular Real Housewives docusoap franchise
is valued at half a billion dollars (Hollywood Reporter, 2012), has eight different ver-
sions in North America, has been sold to over 178 territories (Becker, 2008) and has
licensed franchises from France to Athens to Australia (Clark and Haskett, 2 April
2013, personal communication). Bravo is credited for the financial resurrection of its
parent company NBC-Universal, whose earnings rose by over 38 percent in 2010
(Friedman, 2011).
In light of these impressive figures, there can be no doubt that reality television has
become a powerful site of ideological and material production in recent years. Indeed,
reality television stands at the forefront of new modes of capitalist value-generation. It
has created novel production and business models, which require flexible workers to put
in long hours for little pay or benefits, intensified the role of advertisers in the creation of
‘branded’ television content and developed entertainment formats exchanged on media
markets around the globe. Its production models have also initiated new ways to mone-
tize online user-generated content, including ‘reality advertising’ (Shaw, 2010), and have
pioneered the development of numerous ‘brand extensions’ – in which goods and ser-
vices, such as live events, DVDs, music, books and fashion lines, developed in and
through the shows generate lucrative profits (Hearn, 2014).
Most importantly, reality television has inaugurated the means for individuals to pur-
sue a form of reputational capital by agreeing to become participants and subjecting
themselves and their identities to the shows’ structuring logics and demands. Reality
television not only produces branded content, formats and goods and services, then; it
also produces branded selves. Lured by the seductive promise of temporary celebrity,
participants offer themselves up to the television cameras for little remuneration, work to
model attention-getting forms of subjectivity for viewers and, with any luck, produce
public personae that might be traded for cash down the line. This ‘monetization of being’
(Hearn, 2013: 27) is best characterized by reality television personae such as Adrienne
Maloof from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills or Bethenny Frankel from The Real
Housewives of New York, who have capitalized on their generated fame and come away
with handsome profits (Galloway, 2011). As I will outline below, reality television’s
texts and modes of production are bound together; they work to narrate, embody and
advance the broader logics of contemporary capitalist production, predicated as they
now are on an overt kind of ‘affective visibility’. These logics rely heavily, as they
always have, on the exploitation of women’s bodies, work and reputations.

The housewifization of labor

In 1867, Marx first argued that ‘labour power’ was the only commodity capable of pro-
ducing more than it costs to make. In order to understand how capital is generated or
profit is made, then, we cannot be distracted by the processes of market exchange, but
must instead ‘take leave of this noisy sphere’ and follow the worker and the capitalist into
the ‘hidden abode of production’ (Marx, 1976: 279). Here, beyond the apparently freely
entered into contract of the employment/wage relation, Marx argues, we can finally see

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4 European Journal of Cultural Studies 

the exploitation of workers’ time and energy by the capitalist, as well as the fundamental
antagonisms that result in the production of profit or monetary value.
After 150 years, clearly, the mode of capitalist production is profoundly changed.
Post-Fordist capitalism, now dominant albeit crisis-ridden, is characterized by what
David Harvey has called processes of ‘flexible accumulation’ (Harvey, 1990), which
include subcontracting, just-in-time decentralized production, extensive communication
networks and an emphasis on the production of knowledge and symbolic products –
including image design, branding and marketing – over concrete material goods
(Goldman and Papson, 2006; Harvey, 1990). These developments, in turn, have resulted
in a bifurcated labor market in which well-paid, stable long-term jobs with secure bene-
fits and wages, often protected by unions, are undergirded by a growing informal sector
of precarious employment (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005), characterized by short-term
contracts and part-time work, ‘low wages, (the) absence of any job security and high
“flexibility”’ (Mies, 1998: 16). The paradigm for this kind of informal labor, of course,
is the (traditionally female) domestic worker or housewife, but the sector now also
includes interns, sex workers, garment workers and retail and service workers. While this
type of labor historically has been located within the home in industrialized nations and
within the ‘underdeveloped’ colonies of capitalism throughout the world, in recent years,
due to drastic cuts in social safety nets and the rise of free-market neoliberal ideology,
‘the conditions which are prevailing for the vast majority of people in the underdevel-
oped world are returning to the centres of capitalism’ (Mies, 1998: 17).
Not only have we seen an increase in contract work or precarious employment in the
last several decades in the West, we have seen a qualitative shift in the nature of many jobs
as well. As computerization and new technologies have made over the world of work, and
knowledge and symbolic production have become central sites for the accumulation of
wealth, forms of ‘immaterial labor’ – analytic, symbolic and linguistic tasks – and affec-
tive labor, which ‘produces and manipulates affects, such as a feeling of ease, well-being,
satisfaction, excitement or passion’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 108), are now widespread.
Increasingly workers are asked to put their own life experience, communicative compe-
tency and sense of self into their jobs in order to produce a feeling of well-being, ease or
satisfaction in the consumer. Indeed, the management and public presentation of self have
become immanent to the capitalist mode of production (Read, 2003).
In light of the growing predominance of precarious, insecure forms of affective labor,
critics argue that current capitalist production processes now extend outside traditional
workplaces into all areas of life and actively produce new forms of human sociality and
subjectivity (see Hardt and Negri, 2000; Lazzarato, 1996; Neilsen and Rossiter, 2005).
This kind of biopolitical production constitutes, in the words of Frederic Jameson (1998),
the ‘becoming cultural of the economic and the becoming economic of the cultural’
(p. 60). These widespread shifts in the nature of capitalist production and the housewifi-
zation and socialization of labor upon which they depend render the processes behind the
making of profit even more obscure and difficult to trace. Given that reality television
production represents the apotheosis of these new labor practices, predicated as it is on
the extremely cheap labor of its production workers and participants and the disciplining
of participants’ reputations in the service of profit-producing ‘entertainment’, it only
makes sense to critically examine its ‘new’ hidden abode of production – the mechanisms

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Hearn 5

through which it creates profit – in detail and with reference to the construction of the
housewife in early capitalism.

Reality television’s ‘housewifized’ production models

It is no small coincidence that the Real Housewives (and most other reality television
productions) stand as exemplars of a new form of first world housewifization. These
shows are made on the cheap, with an average cost per episode of US$300,000, as opposed
to budgets in the millions of dollars per episode for scripted dramas (Carter, 2010). Very
little of these costs go to workers or participants, however. It has been estimated that cast-
ing budgets can be as low as US$10,000 an episode (Galloway, 2011); on-air participants
are paid a minimal ‘appearance fee’ (Podlas, 2007: 147), usually in the hundreds of dol-
lars, and are often expected to cover their own costs of travel and accommodation, while
fees to executive producers, on the other hand, can reach as high as US$200,000 per epi-
sode. In addition to the poor pay, contestants on shows such as The Bachelor or Hell’s
Kitchen are often cut off from the outside world, deprived of sleep and encouraged to
drink alcohol in order to fire up their personal vulnerabilities and produce more dramatic
footage. As participants are not considered actors, they are not governed by union rules
concerning work or break times; contestants on Project Runway have reported being
awakened at 6:00 a.m. in the morning and forced to work 18-hour days (Wyatt, 2009c).
While the participants on The Real Housewives of Vancouver, for example, do not have
such intensive shooting schedules, usually working 4 days a week for a shooting period of
22 weeks (Clark and Haskett, 2 April 2013, personal communication), they do not earn
much money. Participants on The Real Housewives of Beverley Hills reportedly made
US$135,000 each for the entire second season of 24 episodes (Galloway, 2011).
As networks and cable broadcasters demand compelling, cheap and quick-to-
produce shows, production companies regularly undercut each other on production
costs. While reality television producers insist that the shows are unscripted and do
not involve writers, in fact, they rely on editors to build the story in the editing bay
and simply rename writers ‘segment or field producers’ (Elisberg, 2008; Writers
Guild of America, West (WGAW), 2007). Workers, such as production assistants,
drivers, segment producers, assistant editors and loggers, are often asked to work
18-hour days, 7 days a week, and to go without lunch and dinner breaks, healthcare
benefits, pensions or overtime pay (Elisberg, 2008; Laist, 2008; WGAW, 2007).
These exploitative conditions threaten the safety of all involved in the productions.
For example, the non-union drivers often work 18-hour days and do not receive alco-
hol or drug testing (Elisberg, 2008). These workers are also forced to accept precari-
ous short-term contracts, which easily can be terminated without cause. A former
American Idol production assistant reports that his hourly wage, when averaged over
the hours he worked, amounted to US$4.50. He goes on to state that ‘when I even
mentioned the possibility of getting a raise I was threatened with losing my job, told
that I was replaceable, and that I’d be blacklisted from working on any other show if
I spoke out’ (WGA, 2008).
In effect, the production practices of reality TV function to destabilize the labor rela-
tions of the television industry as a whole by producing a new bottom tier of workers

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6 European Journal of Cultural Studies 

who see the industry as glamorous and are willing to put up with the abuse to get a foot
in the door. As a result of strict non-disclosure agreements (which prohibit all workers
from talking about their jobs), the lack of any traditional job protections and a very infor-
mal economy of job distribution based on word-of-mouth, executive producers are able
to pressure these primarily young people into silence and simultaneously demand that
they do ‘whatever it takes to get the job done’ (WGA, 2008). The phrase ‘reality televi-
sion’, then, simply names inexpensive, just-in-time production practices, which compro-
mise working conditions and silence workers while extracting as much unregulated labor
as possible (Hearn, 2014).
The types of precariously employed and exploited workers and participants involved
in reality television production are like ‘housewives’; they work, but their labor tends to
be discounted or invisible, and as such can become a ‘source for unchecked, unlimited
exploitation’ (Mies, 1998: 16). As Mies argues, this ‘housewifisation of labour’ has rarely
been recognized or counted in economic terms. Even Marx failed to consider women’s
work in the home as directly productive for capital because it was not seen to generate
commodities and therefore exchange value; it was considered valuable only insofar as it
reproduced labor power. As Mies (2007) notes, this kind of reproductive or affective
labor is the ‘optimal labour for capitalism because it is structurally free of costs’; tends
to be invisible, unregulated and unprotected; and is considered to be a ‘free or naturally
occurring good’ (p. 269).
Indeed, a two-tiered economy marked by visible and invisible workers has been a
central feature of capitalist processes of accumulation right from the beginning. As Silvia
Federici argues, capitalism was not built ‘exclusively or primarily on contractual rela-
tions … the wage relation hides the unpaid, slave-like nature of so much of the work
upon which accumulation is premised’ (Federici, 2004: 7). Reproductive labor in the
home – the position of the housewife – is, of course, the most prominent example of this.
Federici goes on to trace the ways in which the subject position of the housewife was
actively constructed, its contours brutally forged, during the imposition of capitalist rela-
tions in the transition from feudalism.

The constitution of ‘real’ housewives in the transition to

capitalism
The years 1450–1650 were bloody and violent, as Europe began to colonize around
the globe and to privatize what previously had been common land. The changes that
took place at this time not only involved the severing of European workers from their
means of subsistence, the configuration of men as ‘free’ wage earners rather than
indentured serfs and the enslavement of people overseas but also required a wholesale
transformation in social relations. As Federici (2004) argues, this period of primitive
accumulation involved ‘an accumulation of differences and divisions within the
working class, whereby hierarchies based upon gender, as well as race and age,
became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat’ (p. 64).
As feminist historians Martha Howell and Anna Clark argue, gender roles and market
relations have always been mutually constitutive and, therefore, should always be
read together (Clark, 1995; Howell, 1986).

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Hearn 7

A series of historical events and conditions combined to produce our view of the
‘housewife’ as some sort of naturally occurring subject position. Land privatization and
the hedging of the commons resulted in the destruction of rural villages and widespread
displacement of the lower classes. The webs of social cooperation that ran through feudal
villages were torn, leaving women, specifically older women with no husbands, particu-
larly disadvantaged. Elderly women were the first to be pauperized; unable to pay rent,
they were often accused of theft and trespassing, thus stoking the kinds of petty resent-
ments that would form the backdrop for the witch hunts (Mendelson and Crawford,
1998: 292–293).
The loss of common land for subsistence also brought about changes in the sys-
tems of work, specifically family-based putting-out systems (whereby a central agent
would subcontract work to be completed off-site, often in homes or small workshops)
and cottage industries. Once the means of subsistence slipped away, more and more
workers were rendered vulnerable and dependent on external wage sources. This led,
in turn, to increased competition for jobs, wage reductions and a longer working day.
These developments resulted in concerted efforts to push women out of artisanal
and textile workshops by their male counterparts (Clark, 1995: 139). In addition, in
England a ‘married man was legally entitled to his wife’s earnings’ (Mendelson and
Crawford, 1998: 285), and women who worked outside the home had to have their
husbands or fathers collect their wages. As a result of these developments, women
became subject to what Federici calls the ‘patriarchy of the wage’ (p. 97); exiled from
their traditional places of work, forbidden from having money of their own and forced
into the home, women’s work at this time was simultaneously appropriated and
concealed.
As working-class populations began to decline due to famine and disease, we see
the beginning of a biopolitics in which the exercise of power was increasingly con-
cerned with the management and production of a robust workforce for the purposes of
wealth generation. To this end, the state began to criminalize many of the impover-
ished working classes, bringing in brutal laws against vagabondage, prostitution,
property crimes and collective gatherings, pushing social life and social reproduction
from ‘the open field to the home, from the community to the family, from the public
space to the private’ (Federici, 2004: 84). In addition, ‘severe penalties (were) intro-
duced in the legal codes of Europe to punish women guilty of reproductive crimes’
(Federici, 2004: 87). Women were forced to register their pregnancies with the authori-
ties; midwives in France were required to report any woman who had an abortion or
engaged in infanticide; and even housing an unwed mother was subject to criminal
charges in Britain (Mendelson and Crawford, 1998: 250). As Federici notes, these
policies turned women’s bodies, specifically their wombs, into ‘public territory con-
trolled by men and the state … and procreation was placed directly at the service of
capitalist accumulation’ (p. 89).
Control over women’s bodies by the state, the religious Reformation’s insistence on
the sanctity of motherhood and the systematic devaluation of women’s work outside
the home by craft guilds, tradesmen and urban authorities resulted in a new sexual
contract, one which worked to naturalize all women’s inferiority and subjection
(Sommerville, 1995: 23). This new sexual contract explicitly positioned working-class

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8 European Journal of Cultural Studies 

women’s bodies and labor as commonly held resource; ‘in the new organization of
work’, Federici writes,

every woman (other than those privatized by bourgeois men) becomes a communal good, for
once women’s activities are defined as non-work, women’s labour begins to appear as a natural
resource, available to all, no less than the air we breathe or the water we drink. (p. 97; emphasis
added)

Crucially for our purposes, the structural devaluation of women’s work and social
status was deeply connected to processes of social and cultural degradation and the
deployment of representations in popular literature of women as harridans, shrews and
scolds, obsessed with wresting men’s authority away from them. As D.E. Underdown
(1985) argues, writers at this time were ‘uncommonly preoccupied by themes of female
independence and revolt’ (p. 117), a product of anxiety about the mounting economic and
social crises which threatened the patriarchal order, including ‘excessive population
growth, inflation, land shortage, poverty and vagrancy’ (p. 116). Other forms of social
degradation included women’s legal infantilization; women lost the right to make con-
tracts or represent themselves in court and had their access to public spaces restricted.
Perhaps the most notable and violent examples of the vilification of women during this
period were the witch hunts, which worked to define women as demonic beings and
subject them to all manner of hideous punishments (Federici, 2004: 165). Those in posi-
tions of power most often based these accusations and indictments of witchcraft solely
on circulating rumor and ‘reputation’ (Underdown, 1985: 120).
The constitution of the housewife in the 16th and 17th centuries, then, involved
twinned processes: the appropriation by men of the value of women’s work and its simul-
taneous concealment, degradation and mystification. Women’s lesser social status was
naturalized and disciplined into being in and through popular cultural texts, the circula-
tion of rumor and the attribution of demonic reputations. With this in mind, I would like
to turn back to reality television, the Real Housewives, and the new forms of labor on the
self that it both models and produces.

Real housewives, reputation and the production of the

self-brand
As deregulation and reality television business models have broken down barriers
between networks, producers, and corporate sponsors and advertisers, we have seen the
rise of ‘branded content’: shows explicitly designed to market a specific product or ser-
vice. Often sponsors and marketers are on board with program development from the
very beginning, devising concepts, sitting in the writers’ room and developing marketing
opportunities along with the storylines. In addition, we are seeing more and more ‘adver-
tiser-produced content’ – reality shows, short videos and films developed and produced
directly by corporate brands to showcase products and services. One of the first of these
was a reality show entitled Escape Routes built around the Ford ‘Escape’ car (Buss,
2012). For the last decade at least, the emphasis in reality production has not been on the

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Hearn 9

content of the show per se, but rather on how that content can function as a clearing-
house, or ‘brand portal’, for products and services and as a source of diverse revenue
streams beyond the shows themselves. NBC’s The Biggest Loser, for example, earned
US$100 million in 2009 from its brand franchises, including cookbooks, fitness videos,
diet drinks and gym equipment (Sauer, 2009; Wyatt, 2009a, 2009b). But perhaps the
most lucrative revenue stream generated in and through reality television production
comes in the form of the shows’ branded people/participants.
As reality television becomes a brand-marketing vehicle par excellence, the stories it
tells re-inscribe and celebrate those same processes of marketing and selling, specifically
in relation to its participants. No matter what the content of the show might be – real
estate hunting, pawn shop owners or rich ladies sparring in some up-scale restaurant –
reality television shows work to promote the cultural value of personal visibility and
fame. While shows like The Voice or American Idol explicitly narrate the hard work
involved in becoming a celebrity brand and makeover shows tell stories about the con-
struction of a ‘successful’ body according to the dictates of the television industry and its
celebrity culture, shows like Bravo’s Real Housewives are portraits of a life free of work;
rich and privileged, the stars of these shows effectively model what it is like to ‘live on
TV’ and make money doing so by becoming a brand. Of course, this is not to discount
the many fruitful ways we might read the specific texts of the Housewives shows – as
promoting women as vapid, superficial and voracious consumers, for example, or per-
petuating stereotypes of women as vain, catty, bullying and emotionally unstable, or
creating a kind of campy vilification of the numbskulled uber-rich for the delectation of
audiences suffering through an economic recession (see Cox and Profitt, 2012; Lee and
Marcowitz, 2013). Rather, it is to underline the co-implication of the reality television
texts with their specific mode of production and value-generation; the texts work in the
service of an overarching meta-narrative line that celebrates the carefully crafted display
of certain kinds of affect, the legitimating power of the television camera’s gaze and the
financial gain it promises (Hearn, 2014).
Reality television doesn’t just tell stories about processes of lucrative self-production,
however; it materially enacts those same processes. The women featured on Real
Housewives are simultaneously ‘people’ and ‘actors’, or hybrid ‘person-characters’
(Bellafante, 2009). As they work and live in front of the cameras, their work/lives are,
apparently, one seamless flow of value-generation. Here, ‘being’ is labor and seems to
produce value for the individual person-characters, their producers and the Bravo net-
work. By appearing on reality television, contestants can become salable image com-
modities – or branded selves.
In his book A Grammar of the Multitude (Virno, 2004), Paolo Virno argues that,
these days, all working people are required to be ‘virtuosos’ in some form or other. As
mentioned above, employees are expected to put their personalities to work, embody
their employer’s brand, socialize and build relationships with customers, contribute
their thoughts and insights to the workplace and build social networks with other work-
ers; increasingly, we must perform an employer-approved version of ourselves in order
to succeed. Given this, Virno argues, ‘productive labour, in its totality, appropriates the
special characteristics of the performing artist’ (Virno, 2004: 54–55), and as a result, the
culture industries, including reality television, become centrally important, providing

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10 European Journal of Cultural Studies 

the templates for forms of profit-generating self-performance in all sectors of the econ-
omy. Self-branding is a form of affective, immaterial labor that is purposefully under-
taken by individuals in order to garner attention, reputation and, potentially, profit. It is
a function of an image economy, where attention is monetized and notoriety, or fame, is
capital (Hearn, 2008). Reality television is ground zero for the production of lucrative
branded selves.
Many reality shows have provided previously unknown people with monetizable self-
brands, which they parlay into lucrative endorsement deals and other branded goods and
services. The Kardashian family, as one example, recently signed a US$100 million deal
with E! to renew their series for 4 years (McRady, 2015) and are estimated to have made
US$65 million in 2010 as a result of their paid endorsements, appearance fees and
branded products (Newman and Bruce, 2011). Almost every member of the Real
Housewives casts has some form of personal brand extension and can now demand
appearance fees in the tens of thousands of dollars (Galloway, 2011). Show participants
have produced at least 12 different books; some have developed perfumes; others have
built brand-based businesses, such as Bethenny Frankel, who parlayed her Skinny Girl
brand into a lucrative spirits business, which she recently sold for US$120 million
(Hollywood Reporter, 2012), and has gone on to host a daytime talk show. Jill Zarin, one
of the original cast members of The Real Housewives of New York City, argued that she
should get a cut of anything developed by fellow former cast-mate Bethenny Frankel
because she helped bring Frankel to the show and, thereby, aided in the development of
her self-brand (Bruce, 2012).
It is crucial to remember, however, that most of reality television’s image entrepre-
neurs do not fully control the construction or distribution of their self-brand (Hearn,
2014). Often producers actively work to cultivate mini-celebrities ‘in house’ and lock
down a percentage of participants’ future money-making potential via endorsements
and brand extensions by way of 360° deals (Galloway, 2011). The cable channel E!, for
example, has increased its advertising revenue 50 percent since 2004 by creating ‘an
alternative universe of reality-based celebrities’ (Hampp, 2010). At Bravo, these home-
grown celebrities are called ‘Bravo-lebrities’ (Littleton, 2010). A significant portion of
the half a billion dollars in profits generated by MTV in 2010, for example, came from
the Jersey Shores stars’ brand extensions (Bruce, 2010).
The potential profit that a reality television participant is able to make from their new
branded self is seriously constrained by the contracts they sign with the production com-
panies and networks. While reality television contracts are notoriously difficult to track
down due to the imposition of strict non-disclosure agreements, those that have surfaced
over the years reveal tight employer control over the participants’ public personae; par-
ticipants are often required to sign away control of their voices, images and life stories.
A section of an American Idol contract reads, ‘other parties … may reveal and/or relate
information about me of a personal, private, intimate, surprising, defamatory, disparag-
ing, embarrassing or unfavorable nature, that may be factual and/or fictional’ (Olsen,
2002; emphasis added). A leaked MTV Real World contract stipulates that participation
in the program ‘carries with it the potential for death, serious physical injury, extreme
emotional distress, mental or physical illness or property loss’ (Dodero, 2011). It grants
the show producers access to the participant’s credit history, school records or any

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Hearn 11

government forms and requires that the participant agree to be humiliated or ‘portrayed
in a false light’ during the program (Hearn, 2014). Ultimately, a reality television partici-
pant’s public persona, or ‘right to publicity’, is considered a form of property under the
law and, as such, is fully alienable and appropriable by others (Madow, 1993). As these
contractual requirements show, and as entertainment labor lawyer Jonathan Handel (7
May 2010, personal communication) describes, ‘the producer has all the leverage and the
participant has none’.
Barry King argues that, given reality television’s conditions of production, ‘the exer-
cise of “personality” is closer to the fulfillment of a task specification than a process of
expression’ (King, 2007: 320). Real Housewives of Orange County participant Peggy
Tanous quit the show because she ‘started getting anxiety thinking about all the forced
drama that does happen on occasion’ (Hollywood Reporter, 2012). And Audrina, from
The Hills, has stated, ‘because it’s for TV, you push yourself to do things that you nor-
mally wouldn’t’ (Gay, 2008: 46). A reality television editor insists that, insofar as ‘the act
of observation influences the result, … [the participants] become the persona the show
creates for them’ (Anonymous, 2008, personal communication). Reality participants learn
to ‘perform to a format’; any emotion or personality on display arrives already highly
delineated and controlled, anticipating and reflecting the demands and expectations of its
producers and audience (Hearn, 2014). No matter how rich a reality participant might get
from her self-brand, then, that brand will be strictly controlled by the disciplinary pres-
ence of the camera, by the editing room, where personae and storylines are constructed,
and by binding contracts, which effectively strip the participant of any legal control over
their person-character for a period of several years. In this way, reality television partici-
pants’ performances constitute a clear form of housewifized, affective labor. The outcome
of this work (the TV show itself) is then deployed in order to confirm the desirability and
‘naturalness’ of these highly disciplined forms of affective visibility.
It is also crucial to remember that, as the housewives offer their lives up week after
week to the cameras, working to become profitable self-brands and modeling how effec-
tive self-branding might be done, assistant editors and loggers are often locked in rooms
for over 12 hours at a time, reviewing and logging the thousands of hours of tape of Lisa
Vanderpump or Bethenny Frankel. Reality television’s branded selves and its precari-
ously employed production workers are inextricably tied together in a hidden abode of
capitalist production that actively extracts value wherever it can, in whatever ways pos-
sible (Hearn, 2014).

Conclusion
In recent years, with the rise of social media, the processes of self-branding and self-
promotion entrenched and formalized by reality television have intensified as they have
spread across the population at large. Indeed, the popularity and ubiquity of social media
seem to confirm the centrality of socialized production, flexible, immaterial and affec-
tive labor and capitalism’s ‘new’ hidden abode of production. On sites such as Facebook,
Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube, individuals can craft a public presentation of self that is
ostensibly a reflection of their ‘reality’ – no need for television networks or brand spon-
sors – and can make money by cultivating large numbers of followers or subscribers. The

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12 European Journal of Cultural Studies 

amount of your Twitter and Tumblr followers, or Facebook and GooglePlus friends, also
can be tracked and aggregated and transformed into a digital reputation, such as a ‘Klout’
score, by social media intelligence experts. Your online ‘Klout’ can then be traded for
free stuff and maybe, eventually, a paycheck.1 In a world marked by increasing economic
and social insecurity, it is easy to see how the opportunity to develop and invest in a
potentially lucrative self-brand could appear appealing to many people (Hearn, 2013).
But the ‘real’ chances of an individual actually achieving fame and fortune remain
very slim. And while there may be proliferating sites and opportunities for us to com-
municate, play, create, rate, rank and entertain ourselves, we must take leave of this
particular ‘noisy sphere’ and remember that the forms of profit-making we have traced
in the hidden abode of reality TV production also obtain here. What is produced in the
form of a reputation inevitably exceeds the grasp of those individuals who generate it or
the individual who must ‘carry’ it. As we have seen with reality television production,
while we might labor to build and stoke our ‘reputations’, we are also ‘subjected to’ them
via externally imposed formats, commercial constraints, editing and other mechanisms
of measurement and control.
In the end, we can argue that the kinds of labor involved in the production of reality
shows like the Real Housewives are ‘housewifized’ not simply because they are precari-
ous and easily exploited but also because, for the participants at least, they require the
manipulation of emotion and the carrying of a ‘reputation’ not entirely one’s own in the
service of capitalist accumulation. Like the women in the brutal transition to capitalism,
whose labor was exploited and rendered invisible and who suffered processes of social
and cultural degradation (in some cases actual branding and burning), the bodies of the
television housewives also work to signify and legitimate the message of a new, eco-
nomic formation fixated on self-promotion: ‘conform to our template, be seen, and build
a reputation!’ The ‘real housewives’ may be living in fabulous gated communities, but
their constitution as reality stars resonates far beyond those gates, out into the general
population, where messages about self-branding seem to offer potential escape from
precarious work and economic hardship. Of course, in the end, the dreamy promise of a
lucrative self-brand only serves to mystify what feminist critics have worked for years to
bring to light: capitalism extracts value from all kinds of material activity, waged and
unwaged, but those who have historically occupied the position of the unwaged are dou-
bly subjugated. As women well know, having borne the weight of what Linda Williams
(1989) has called ‘an excess of signification’ for centuries, having a reputation feels like
a burden because something is being carried on the body and in the heart – the alienating
weight of cultural and economic commands being silently imposed.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Note
1. See details at http://klout.com/home?next=/nux/3

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Hearn 13

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Biographical note
Alison Hearn is an associate professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the
University of Western Ontario, where she teaches cultural theory and media studies.

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