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Well-being domesticities: mediating 21st-century femininity through physical, mental, and emotional lifestyles

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Well-being domesticities: mediating 21st-century femininity through physical, mental, and emotional lifestyles

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Well-being Domesticities: Mediating 21
st
-Century Femininity Through Physical, Mental, and
Emotional Lifestyles

by

Lara L. Bradshaw

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CRITICAL STUDIES)

August 2015

Copyright 2015 Lara L. Bradshaw
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Well-Being and Clutter in the Post-
Recession Era
Introduction notes

Chapter 1: Showtime’s “Female Problem”:
Cancer, Quality and Motherhood
Chap. 1 notes

Chapter 2: Cluttering Mental Illness: Televisual
Hoarding, Pathology, and Disaster Capitalism
Chap. 2 notes

Chapter 3: How to be Pinteresting: Maternal
Scrapbooking and Emotional Well-being in the
21
st
-Century
Chap.3 notes

Conclusion: Well-Being, Collections, and Love
Conclusion notes

Bibliography

iii

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ii
Acknowledgements

“Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean
up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived. Clutter is a wonderfully
fertile ground—you can still discover new treasures under all those piles, clean
things up, edit things out, fix things, get a grip” (Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird, 28-
29).

I think messes or messy thinking offers a way to critically engage with the world. Messiness

allows
you
to
put
everything
out
in
the
open
and
look
at
things
in
unstructured
and
often

unsanctioned
ways.
I
have always been functionally cluttered in my life. I remember a
particular instance of my messiness as a child and my grandmother half jokingly asking about
my tornado job in the kitchen. Flour was spilled everywhere. I sat on the counter top mixing a
concoction in the sink. “What are you doing?” my Grandmother asked. Without missing a beat, I
told her I was “making a mess.” I have especially found that writing a dissertation on clutter and
wellness has helped me to think of my own relationship to material and immaterial objects, and
the process of writing itself as a web of ideas and directions that somehow become formulated
into complete sentences and thoughts (and other times just a fragmented mess).

This dissertation began with Dr. Aniko Imre and my independent study with her during
my first semester as a PhD student at USC. Much of the inspiration and research for this
dissertation evolved out of a seminar paper, which later turned into both my first chapter and
publication on the “female problem” and the motherhood antiheroine trope. I have gained a lot of
wisdom on writing from Dr. Imre who worked tirelessly with me on every stage of the
dissertation (sentence by sentence at times). I owe much of my success to her and her willingness
to never give up and to help me see the many small victories along the way.
I also received invaluable support, feedback, and mentorship from Dr. Ellen Seiter who
has read multiple chapter drafts. Ellen’s generous advice and work on consumer culture has
iii
greatly impacted my thinking on social media and television. I am thankful for her support and
friendship which has also equally expanded my thinking on the project. Dr. Seiter is an
incredible mentor and her wealth of knowledge has significantly influenced my own research
and approach to both teaching and my scholarship. I had an opportunity to take a Feminist Media
studies class with Dr. Sarah Banet-Weiser during my first year as a PhD student. Dr. Banet-
Weiser has truly been a wonderful ally, and has helped guide my thinking on consumer culture
and postfeminism. She has always pushed me to consider the stakes in a media studies project. I
have had the privilege of taking classes with Dr. Kara Keeling who has also seen my work
evolve over a five-year period. Dr. Keeling’s advice and guidance throughout my graduate career
has helped me to think about temporality and feminism in a way that has opened my own
thinking and approach as a scholar to my work. The Socratic method works wonders!
I also dedicate my path towards a career in research and writing to Dr. Laura Isabel Serna
and her course on historiography. Dr. Serna’s class and feedback pushed me to think about
clarity and voice in a way that has significantly influenced my success as a graduate student. I
have benefited greatly from participating in Dr. Serna’s dissertation writing group and the
generous feedback from colleagues in critical studies, communication, English, and American
studies who are brilliant readers and thinkers. My deepest thanks to Luci Marzola, Alison
Kozberg, Elena Bonomo, Nadine Chan, Kevin Driscoll, Lana Swartz, Roxanne Samer, Umayyah
Cable, Samantha Carrick, Joshua Mitchell, Feng-Mei Heberer, and Kate Page- Lippsmeyer.
My Critical Studies colleagues have provided additional advice and generous feedback
along the way. I would like to thank Kate Fortmueller for her friendship and thoughtful reading
of multiple drafts, wine parties, cat sitting, and walks. I would also like to thank Patty Ahn,
Shawna Kidman, Leah Aldridge, Ghia Godfree, Michael Dillon, Brett Service, Courtney White,
iv
Heather Blackmore, Katie Madden, Lorien Hunter, Alex Chase, Oriana Nudo, Xima Avalos,
Stephanie Wooten, Taylor Nygaard, Elizabeth Affuso, and Alex Bush for their support.
I am indebted in the Critical Studies department for their generosity and care throughout
both my Masters and PhD. I also received a number of important critical insights beginning in
my Masters program with Dr. Akira Lippit, Dr. Priya Jaikumar, and Dr. David James. The
Critical Studies Office staff and administrative support has been an incredible resource. I am
thankful for Bill Whittington, Christine Acham, and Alicia Cornish’s guidance throughout the
years.
I thank my undergraduate alma matter UC Santa Barbara and the Film and Media Studies
Department for expanding my mind and influencing me to pursue a degree in media studies. I am
particularly thankful for Dr. Bhaskar Sarkar and his mentorship over the years. The generosity of
the faculty at UCSB continues to amaze me, and I am so grateful for their model of care that
encourages critical scholars.
My parents and my brother Luke helped immensely with making it through to the end.
This is a difficult life and project to pursue alone, and I am lucky to have a family who supported
me throughout. I dedicate this project to my parents, Cherie and Hal Bradshaw, and this living
archive of family emblems and stories that have shaped so much of my interest in the arts and a
love of learning. Thank you for allowing me to play and to make messes along the way.

v

Introduction:
Well-Being and Clutter in the Post-Recession Era

I remember the day I learned that my grandmother was the designated family heirloom
collector. She had an immaculate home that hid pieces of Americana in the seams. When we
were children, my grandmother would reveal objects of family history, usually by chance, and
offer a narrative of their significance to both my brother and me, who couldn’t quite grasp the
value of woven rugs and a Revolutionary era tea pot with a crack down the middle. I recall her
showing my brother and me shadow puppets of President Lincoln. She had remembered them
from her childhood with her grandfather, who had moved out West to start a farm. After my
grandmother passed away and the eventual unpacking of her belongings took place amongst
family members, the narrative I had of her as a collector of sorts took on a new life.
Before moving to California to begin my graduate program, my father gave me a box
with “miscellaneous” scrawled on the front. I didn’t think much of it. He told me it was more of
grandma’s stuff and wanted me to make an executive decision about what to do with it. A few
months passed before I opened it and examined the box’s contents. Stuffed to brim with
European travel brochures from the late 1960s and neatly folded pieces of toilet paper, I thought
it was some sort of mistake that my father had given me such a strange and seemingly worthless
assortment of objects. However, after a long phone call and an explanation about the toilet paper,
my father relayed the significance of my grandparent’s first and only European trip. The toilet
paper collection was popular at the time, and each neatly folded piece of paper provided a map to
each place my grandma and grandpa had stayed. Rather than throwing it out, my grandmother
had kept the collection, in a box and out of sight, but with her as a reminder of some sort. As I
began to unfold each piece of toilet paper, I placed the TWA brochures and photographs from
the trip alongside each other. All of the pieces opened up a material memory—a trace of her
1

travelogue. Suddenly, the image of my grandfather laughing in the Vatican, surrounded by a
flock of pigeons, and the image of my grandmother, uneasy in an Italian boat, became clearer to
me as an observer almost 40 years later. They were documenting the moment. But these tangible
objects also captured her intangible sense of humor. And her love to save everything.
In a certain way, my project on well-being developed out of a fascination with things and
a preoccupation with stuff that has become central to 21
st
-century life, especially in the United
States and other advanced capitalist nations. I recall always being surrounded by stuff. The
basement oftentimes felt like more of museum of heirlooms and my parents’ past lives before
they merged into a family. My father’s collection of sailing magazines occupied a sub-section
surrounded by my parents’ books and grandma’s leftover furniture. According to a recent UCLA
study, the proliferation of objects that occupy the middle-class home also reveal certain family
histories that fill out a larger narrative of clutter.
1
The middle-class home, in particular, becomes
a place in which the family’s acquisition of goods and objects transforms the space into a
oversized storage unit.
My own experiences inform my interest in the relationship between stuff and memory,
and how accumulated objects reveal an everyday experience of middle-class living in American
popular culture. In general, this connection between objects and their sentiment figures heavily
into a middle-class lifestyle of inherited heirlooms. Even though Grandma’s collection of toilet
paper ultimately got thrown out, I recall having a crisis about whether to keep it or not,
especially since it was one of the few material things I had of her. This fear of letting go or
holding onto objects figures heavily into my project on accumulation and excess and as it speaks
to how a narrative about clutter overlaps with a narrative of family collections and storage.
Living in a 450-square-foot studio apartment, I realized trying to keep Grandma’s collection of
2

toilet paper amidst my own out-of-control collection of books would elevate my stress levels
even higher than those of the average graduate student. In fact, this project has compounded my
fears about clutter: while researching and writing, I have frequently experienced intense levels of
guilt over anything deemed in excess of my confined space. My own personal investment in
examining clutter is shaped by a major middle-class dilemma within the United States
surrounding objects. As I will explore throughout this dissertation, this middle-class narrative of
clutter formulates much of how well-being is determined by a clutter-free style of self-
management and control of one’s domestic space.
This project is televisual in scope; however, I expand my focus on television to consider
well-being in the digital realm and how digital spaces engage with a feminine cultural
experience. I look at critical reviews, think pieces, interviews, magazines, news articles, and
advertisements. I turn to the objects themselves (television shows and digital pins) and consider
especially how the makeover genre on reality TV has shifted in the post-recession era to
accommodate new forms of labor to handle the amassing of objects. Rather than a scientific
sample of objects and shows that mark the occurrence of how many times subjects are depicted
with mental health problems or professionals reference wellness advice, I provide the beginning
of a sample of what I consider well-being to look like in the 21
st
-century.
My dissertation explores the recession era, roughly beginning in 2007-2008 through the
contemporary moment, and the global market collapse that has defined much of the housing
crisis, general job loss, and gendered narratives of domesticity during the period. I examine well-
being as part of a self-help narrative featuring clutter as a central 21
st
-century pathology in
managing both material and immaterial excesses of daily life. The crisis of how to manage the
home and the domestic space becomes a thematic motif that defines this era. Doing a basic
3

Google search for “clutter” reveals a massive amount of information ranging from personal blogs
to Oprah’s recommendations for ridding oneself of clutter. Clutter is literally and metaphorically
everywhere. Purported by self-help gurus and psychological experts, it is a common sense term,
which traverses television genres like the talk show, the reality makeover format, fictional
programming, and various news segments.
2
If well-being is all about life balance (or the fantasy
of achieving it), then clutter is the obstacle to the narrative of American wellness.
3

Well-Being and the 20
th
- and 21
st
-Century American Ethos
The well-being narrative that I seek to explore is historically situated in 20
th
-century
consumer history that focuses on constructions of the self as an agent of change. I frame my
research by using Historian T.J. Jackson-Lears’ notion of “therapeutic ethos.” The period
between 1880 and 1920 in American consumer culture marked a new understanding of how
advertisers, religious leaders, and health and business professionals worked to create a
commodity culture that focused on the authentic self as a source of improvement.
4
Lears
concludes that targeting women during this period became deeply tied to liberation and the
construction of selfhood through consumerism. The ongoing relationship between various
therapy movements and the language of the self that becomes deployed across formats and
genres moves between both formal and informal channels of information. As sociologist Eva
Illouz writes, the “therapeutic discourse” is “also an anonymous, authorless, and pervasive
worldview, scattered in a dazzling array of social and cultural locations.”
5

The 20
th
-century construction of the self was brought about by psychoanalytical and
management tools to help individuals manage emotions within the workspace. In her book
Emotional Capitalism, Illouz makes this point by examining emotion as a commodified and
4

institutionalized concept of the self.
6
Especially with the institutional growth of psychology and
therapy as a way to address livelihood, the fully realized self became central to living a healthy,
normative, and disease-free life.
7

The rise of the “therapeutic ethos” was also a reactionary stance against the “rationalization
of culture.”
8
In opposition to the 19
th
-century Victorian era and the more communal and
religious-centered views of culture and life, the 20
th
-century opened up anxiety and renewed
focus on the self as an agent of well-being and change.
9
The advertising industry influenced
modern American 20
th
-century life and reflected the “reality of a cultural dilemma.”
10
In other
words, the advice-related products that advertisers manufactured to sell to consumers functioned
both as a way to produce cultural anxieties and to ease the complexities of modern life.
11
As
Roland Marchand explains, this fear of being “lost in the crowd” especially shaped the rise of the
advertising industry in the 1920s as “many Americans pursued their search for a secure
identity.”
12
The historical aftermath of WWI and the speed of technological changes and
urbanization all contributed to a larger social anxiety of the era. Advertisers used this social
anxiety to reach consumers on a more personal level.
13

American advertising during the 1920s and 1930s also reflected the cultural anxieties of
the physical body and the theme of efficiency that marked the new era.
14
The focus on losing
unwanted weight and detoxifying the body from various ailments became central to consumer
life in the 20
th
-century. Moreover, advertisers’ attention on consumers having clean bowel
movements or not experiencing pain during child birth was aimed at maintaining and regulating
the body into an ideal state of machine line efficiency.
15

Decluttering or anti-clutter narratives are central to this 20
th
-century history of American
consumer culture and wellness. Public intellectuals’ and cultural critics’ concerns with the
5

morality of the American public, specifically the middle-class, became particularly pronounced
during this era. As Kathryn Dethier writes, reformers during the early 20
th
century “advocated
modernizing and simplifying the middle-class dwelling.”
16
One of the many reformers for the
“simple life” was Edward Bok, the editor for Ladies Home Journal. For Bok, the “simple life”
consisted of a new effort to embrace the “natural” with homes full of useful objects rather than
the mindless collection of “bric-a-brac and accumulations of cheap stuff.”
17
In particular,
domestic spaces like the drawing room and parlor were viewed as outdated, and the move to
make the home rid of darkness and dust became associated with the modern home of the era.
18

The early 20
th
-century home became a central space for democratic and well-being agendas that
supported a model of ideal citizenship.
Even though I examine well-being as a rooted in the 20
th
century, this dissertation
primarily engages with the economic and social turn toward privatization that has defined the
late capitalist era, from the latter half of the 20
th
-century through the beginning of the 21
st-

century. As David Harvey argues in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, “We can, therefore,
interpret neoliberalization either as a utopian project to realize a theoretical design for the
reorganization of international capitalism or a political project to re-establish the conditions for
capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites.”
19
The turn to privatization of
labor and care and the politics of individualism have defined various social relations over the
past thirty years.
The media and entertainment industry has participated in this movement toward
privatization both through the restructuring of the industry and at the level of content. Since the
1980s, the development of cable television and networks specifically aimed at consumer markets
has contributed to a proliferation of lifestyle brands and programming, including reality
6

television. Through a complex negotiation between financial, public, private, and cultural
determinants, reality television has dominated programming in the post-network era. Television
scholars have situated this rise of reality television within a context of television’s deregulation
and privatization in the 1970s and 1980s. Focusing on the political economy of the industry,
these scholars have illustrated how the format’s low production costs and labor history—
including two major labor strikes—as major motivating factors in the rise of reality
programming as an alternative to narrative content.
20
Oftentimes using non-professional actors
(or desperate celebrities), the reality format features programs that link entertainment aspects of
celebrity culture with newsworthy information, producing a list of sub-genres rooted in
docudrama, docusoap, and surveillance traditions and technologies. Since the 1980s, a
fundamental restructuring of television as a product, market, and technology has further
complicated notions of how to define television and especially “reality TV” as distinct objects of
analysis. Part of this shifting definition of the reality format also reflects emerging technologies
and media platforms that offer additional ways to rethink the format’s structure beyond the show
itself.
21

Throughout the 1980s, the talk show genre and reality TV format engaged with how
individuals performed self-care in order to participate in civic life.
22
The talk show, more
specifically, situates and gives context to many of the self-help modes of representation that have
emerged and shaped care within the post-1980s environment. Jane Shattuc, considering the
political economy of the talk show genre in the United States, offers insight into the construction
of female audiences and the proliferation of commodities that reached women in their domestic
environments.
21
The rise of reality TV formats and the more contemporary focus on the self in
the makeover and other bodily and home improvement programs has also contributed to role of
7

television as a tool for cultivating responsible citizens. As Laurie Oullette and James Hay claim,
“When citizenship becomes privatized, television’s instrumentality as a cultural technology is to
link practices of self-cultivation and self-fashioning to the lessons and test of citizenship.”
22
As I
will outline in my chapters, the role of the self via television and especially the popularity of the
self-help and makeover formats of reality TV are instrumental to constructing well-being in the
21
st
-century as an increasingly privatized endeavor.
Contemporary notions of well-being are closely aligned with nationalism and personal
responsibility. According to Barbara Ehrenreich’s work Bright-Sided, the social and institutional
framework for happiness is rooted in a distinctly American experience. As Ehrenreich claims, “A
central tenet of American nationalism has been the belief that the United States is ‘the greatest
nation on earth.’”
23
By considering the construction of the self as tied to a market-based logic,
Ehrenreich continues to link American nationalism with a consumer experience: “The flip side of
positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility: if your business fails or your job is
eliminated, it must because you didn’t try hard enough.”
24
This logic also centers upon a
particular economic crisis point in the United States. With the 2008 global market crash and
ensuing recession in the form of job loss, a housing crisis, and wage stagnation, the rise of
positive thinking reinforces the self as central to shaping one’s economic and social future, even
if that logic does not address structural inequalities.
In 2014, media mogul Arianna Huffington launched the wellness campaign “The Third
Metric,” in which various health and news media companies addressed the increasing levels of
anxiety and stress that define 21
st
-century life: “More and more people are realizing that they
don’t have to put their humanity on hold when they leave for work, that they’re more than their
résumés and that a sense of well-being and success doesn’t have to come at the cost of
8

burnout.”
25
The announcement of the movement also coincided with a sponsored conference and
wellness content featured on the Huffington Post website and Internet broadcast channel. The
conference presented workshops with a variety of Huffington Post’s partner organizations, from
health insurance companies (Aetna introduced yoga as part of an employee benefits package) to
grocery stores (Whole Foods discussed abstract concepts like love). Huffington Post’s focus on
the notion of well-being—how consumers and producers activate discourses on physical, mental,
and emotional health—reveals the complexities of an interconnected and balanced life. I use this
movement as an example to highlight the evolving trend regarding the various relationships
between corporations, individuals, philanthropic organizations, insurance companies, and the
entertainment industry in monetizing and defining wellness as a narrative strategy. Ultimately,
the idea of well-being bridges the institutional framework of medical, consumer, and media
discourses as a way to make sense of how subjects must navigate, search, and produce health and
community within the United States in an era of economic instability.

Well-Being in the Recession Era
I also use Arianna Huffington’s wellness campaign to highlight major shifts that
construct well-being as part of a corporate project on individual health in the 21
st
-century post-
recession era. Institutions’ attempts to capitalize on projects about “consumer activism” illustrate
how producers and consumers work to address philanthropic and community-based initiatives in
producing healthy citizens.
26
At the same time, Huffington’s promotion of one’s work-life
balance speaks to a class-based conception of access, education, and financial means to achieve
well-being. The loss of middle income jobs and the recent focus on poverty-wage level
employers like Wal-Mart puts into focus the limits of individuals in achieving health when
9

facing a stressed economic situation and limited access to health care.
27
Much of the political,
economic, and social commentary that has emerged on the recession era in the United States
features narratives of unruly banking practices and subprime mortgages, job loss, and increasing
income inequality. At the same time, the contemporary concept of well-being addresses
individual anxieties over an unstable job market and culture of busyness that also defines the
current American work environment. This shift in well-being from a 20
th
- to a 21
st
-century
perspective revolves around a crisis moment that peaked in 2008 and the invested interest by
different industries, including television networks, health care, psychology, the housing market,
and forms of labor in promoting wellness as central to individual happiness and prosperity.
Interrogating the role of gender and specifically how women have been affected during
this era reveals the complexities of downward economic market and larger media narrative
centered on female empowerment and adaptability. More generally, the 2007 recession in the
United States has significantly affected single mothers and young women and impeded their
economic recovery. As a 2011 Institute for Women’s Policy Report found, “almost every
measure of insecurity and hardship in the survey reveals the Great Recession has visited more
hardship on women than it has on men.”
28
In particular, the study found single women, single
working mothers, and black and Hispanic women had a more difficult time saving for two
month’s worth of support after an unintended job loss and for covering basic monthly bills.
29

As Diane Negra and Yvone Tasker explore in Gendering the Recession, the
“commodification of domestic femininities” has constructed women across television and reality
TV formats as domestically resourceful during an economic downturn.
30
The anxieties associated
with the feminization of labor abound in this era, as more and more narratives on women’s work
fixate on replacing the role of the heteronormative male breadwinner. My case studies explore
10

these anxieties of the domestic sphere, and demonstrate how well-being becomes closely tied to
the female figure and her mastery of the home, the body, and the mind as a way to visualize the
self as accountable and technologically savvy. Well-being pushes back against an over-
consuming culture, but also reinforces certain neoliberal principles that keep the self at the center
of life achievement and economic prosperity as key to living a fulfilled life.
Sarah Ahmed’s cultural studies framework is another helpful model to think about how
happiness has been articulated since 2008. Happiness and well-being share similar rhetorical
strategies. For example, nations measure happiness to indicate what Ahmed calls the “social
well-being” agenda.
31
The turn toward happiness, and by extension, well-being, is exemplified in
the way happiness and positive thinking influence and construct how societies determine an
economically positive and successful population (largely centered on the middle-class).
32

At the same time, a term like well-being also evokes the complex relationship individuals
have with care in the United States. The search and attainment of the “good life” informs how
well-being as a concept flourishes during the contemporary crisis moment. Lauren Berlant’s
work on Cruel Optimism looks at “attrition of fantasy” as part of how “fantasy has become more
fantastic, with less and less relation to how people can live—as the blueprint has faded.”
33
A
subject’s ability to be a good consumer, a good mother, and a good model of health and wellness
also depends on how much the subject must forcefully hold onto the “better life.” As my case
studies will illuminate, the well-being subject of the 21
st
-century is captured in a continuum of
performing wellness while also falling apart. If the subject does fall apart, the process of
recovery reinforces a project of self-management and care that returns the subject to a worse-off
or ill-thought-out state.
34

11

A Feminist Account within a Postfeminist World
Since the 1980s, the postfeminist lifestyle account has provided a backdrop to the
construction of women as models of well-being who achieve perfection through consumerism. I
trace the rise of empowerment discourses that are central to the postfeminist figure. The focus on
makeover and body modification also grounds postfeminism’s placement within a highly
commercial environment in which women must be in control of all aspects of their bodies and
minds. Additionally, the development of numerous philanthropic and corporate interests, such as
the women’s breast cancer groups Komen and Pink Ribbon, provide contemporary examples of
private organizations that utilize a language of female empowerment. In the name of cancer and
disease-related research targeted at women, these organizations conceive of active participation
as the purchasing of consumer products.
Motherhood as a lifestyle discussion also informs how the figure circulates in popular
culture as an enforcer of popular self-help remedies and model of wellness. The postfeminist
discourse on perfect motherhood as well as the “retreatist” turn in popular media—in which the
career woman leaves the corporate world behind for the countryside—has proliferated over the
past twenty years.
35
Perfect motherhood becomes a project that centers upon the child.
36
The rise
of celebrity narratives of ideal and consumer-centered motherhood paint a picture of this role as
tied to an impossible body standard and image of happiness and fulfillment. Despite its
unattainability, this narrative informs the larger public on how to perform and embody
motherhood. At the same time, and as my case studies will explore, the more current
manifestation of the mother figure, especially since 2008, has adapted to the complexities and
anxieties of an unstable economy. The realities of motherhood and its representation across
12

media formats paint an image of the role that must adapt, while also challenging and even
rejecting earlier iterations of “having-it-all.”
A discussion of motherhood and its attention and anxiety within a larger media sphere
largely reflects a privileged position and how well-being becomes performed and managed
regarding one’s self and children. As Jennifer A. Reich explores in “Neoliberal Mothering and
Vaccine Refusal: Imagined Gated Communities and the Privilege of Choice,” the performance of
motherhood is tied to a raced and classed investment in one’s children. The refusal to vaccinate
aligns with mothers who are upper-middle class and white, who largely view their roles as
mothers as a model of education and health in determining what is best for one’s child.
37
This
representation of choice as integral to motherhood also points to the development of motherhood
as a style. The increasing economic disparities that separate lower, middle, and upper-middle
class have contributed to the performance of motherhood as part of a neoliberal framework that
rewards mothers who are economically more secure in providing for their children.

Collecting to the Point of Excess
Both my second and third chapters engage with discourses on collecting and how the
collector becomes commodified and pathologized during the 21
st
-century. As I outlined in the
beginning of this introduction, the relationship between clutter and well-being reveals the
anxieties of American accumulation and the emerging self-help narrative of clutter-free living
indicative of the good life. As an extension of the clutter narrative, the collection is similarly tied
to an individual’s perceived self worth and ability to live an aspirational life. The narrative of
excess that defines the 21
st
century connects to the production of cheap goods and the institutions
that sell these cheap goods, like Wal-Mart. As the middle-class has began to shift in the recession
13

era due to job loss and wage stagnation, the consumer culture that once defined American
productivity and exceptionalism has also become pathologized by cultural critics.
38

The value of certain collections over others informs a discourse of value and anxieties
concerning the parameters of accumulating too many objects. The collection is about boundaries
and series. As Susan Stewart writes, “The collection does not displace attention to the past;
rather, the past is at the service of the collection…The collection seeks a form of self-enclosure
which is possible because of its ahistoricism.”
39
For Stewart, the collection becomes the ultimate
way for individuals to organize and to construct categories of meaning that are inscribed by the
collector or institution. In other words, the collection is about serials. At the same time, Stewart’s
vision of the collection as an ultimate ahistorical entity determined by the subject faces problems
when considering the social and cultural dimensions of the collection and what types of objects
and collectors are deemed more valuable than others. Naomi Schor makes this point when
considering Stewart’s position; she contends that the collection “wipes out both labour and
history.”
40
However, Schor acknowledges the significance of the collection as being tied to the
cultural sphere, especially when considering postcard collecting as part of a distinct feminine
activity and production during the turn of the 20
th
-century in Paris.
The collection and the collector also share a relationship to the behavior taken to its
extreme: the hoarder. As Stewart suggests via William James, “hoarders have an uncontrollable
impulse to take and keep.”
41
Stewart distinguishes between the collector’s sense of
“differentiation” and the hoarder’s inability or refusal to do so. The case studies in the 2
nd
and 3
rd

chapters further unpack Stewart’s distinction between the hoarder and the collector. The
hoarder’s relationship to the disease and its diagnosis engages with a neoliberal logic: the subject
must be made aware of their behavior as too much and outside the norm of accumulation and
14

clutter. These popular narratives juxtapose the collection with the hoarder’s stockpile,
necessitating that hoarder understand the piles as pathological, disorderly, and valueless. This
distinction between the hoarder and the collector, especially when considering the collection as a
reflection of taste and aspiration in relation to digital platforms like Pinterest, reveals the tensions
regarding issues of class and “proper” forms of consumerism.
42

At the same time, the notion of what proper collecting is also connects to a post-2008
climate. As Diane Negra and Yvone Tasker illustrate, the rise of shows featuring characters that
stockpile as part of an economic necessity reveals a “mixed discourse of praise and
pathologization” that accompanies depictions of female labor as an extension of proper forms of
collecting.
43
Discourses on collecting and feminine culture are integral to 19
th
- and 20
th
-century
histories of consumerism and tensions between the public and private spheres. The scrapbook
form, in particular, offered a way for women to perform and master domesticated craft skills as
part of their own self-expression. Additionally, critical analyses of this form illustrate how
collecting functioned to perform a particular class position that demonstrated material wealth.
44

During the 21
st
century, the commodification of collecting discourses and the development of
social media technologies in influencing and promoting the collection as an extension of how
individuals relay and count information is central to communication. Jose Van Dijck identifies
the social media company Facebook’s use of “friendship” as a structuring logic to the way the
platform performs bonds and connections: “the notion of ‘friending’ relates to bonds that may
exist in real life, but equally refers to weak ties and latent ties.”
45
The emergence of social media
technologies and the commodification of information and human interaction is part of how
individuals curate and customize their lives.
15

As I argue in the final chapter, the emergence of the digital media platform Pinterest
illustrates the commodification of collecting culture as part of a 21
st
-century environment for
identity formation, content sharing, and emotional health and well-being. The rhetorical use of
“sharing” by Facebook and other social media companies also reveals how these platforms build
ways to connect to users that reframe notions of privacy within a grander interconnected
project.
46
Additionally, this turn toward commodifying social experiences and relationships also
emerges from the ways platforms like Facebook create quantifiable aspects—for example, the
“Like” button or amassing numerous friendships—as part of how one curates his or her life.
47

Well-Being Methodologies and Chapter Outlines
I use a variety of sources to compile a contemporary discourse on well-being. I contend
that well-being proliferates across multiple formats and technologies in constructing the 21
st
-
century self. Well-being is a visual project that relies upon a rich tradition of advertising and
consumer culture, providing a way to consider how images associated with the “good life” are
consumed and integrated into everyday depictions of middle-class life. Much of the sociological
and anthropological work done on therapy culture examines its linguistic roots, especially how
talk and language have shaped communication and construction of the self in the 20
th
-century.
Television’s role as a therapy object is well documented and explored.
48
The case studies I have
selected expand upon the existing literature on reality TV and the talk show (which largely focus
on lifestyle and health discussions) to look at well-being as a discourse that proliferates across
fiction and non-fiction programming and across platforms. It is a messy and multifaceted
endeavor that brings together different types of evidence to consider the complex dimension of
wellness as a mediated worldview.
16

In my three case studies, I investigate three modes of well-being: physical, mental, and
emotional health. I demonstrate how these forms of health overlap and intersect in increasingly
complex ways that play out across media formats and new media technologies. In doing so, I
demonstrate how the intersections between these modes are used as a model of better living. As I
am particularly interested in the construction and development of well-being as an economy, I
use the term “well-being domesticities” to illustrate the most recent trend of health, self-
actualization, social awareness, and media discourses that dominates how narratives of health as
both intimate and feminine are produced, experienced, and historicized within the contemporary
post-2008 moment. The relationship between the home and the female body becomes a key
historical framework that continues to shape how health and wellness are visualized and
internalized across media formats. I turn to newer online platforms like Pinterest, Twitter, and
Facebook and their relationship with television to examine how wellness and notions of well-
being are increasingly at the center of what constitutes a “livable” life. I approach well-being
through a critical and cultural studies investment in examining representations across media
formats and genres, but also by examining the economic and industrial stakes that shape wellness
as an institutional force within the United States.
In Chapter One, “The Female Problem: Quality, Wellness, Motherhood,” I examine the
first two seasons of the recent premium cable show The Big C (Showtime, 2010-13). I propose
that the trend of anti-heroine figures and their pathological problems (mental and physical) are a
cultural metaphor for the failures of “perfect” motherhood and the contemporary social anxieties
around American consumerism. This chapter explores the relationship between the high cultural
value of quality television programming and how pathology informs discourses on quality and
female representations.
17

The role of quality television as a masculine-oriented aesthetic illustrates a way to
critically think about how the more recent female-centered programming both challenges and
reinforces notions of what is considered valuable. However, Showtime’s engagement with the
antihero mother figure also highlights a deeper pathology with regards to postracial identities,
disease, and postfeminism. As I discuss, Showtime’s pathological relationship with female
bodies and the physicality of disease also reveal how race is intertwined in a postfeminist project
of the self. I draw on the “female problem” that is used in trade and magazine reviews as both a
theoretical tool and an object of study to investigate Showtime’s programming and marketing
trends that feature female mental and physical illness and its relevance to a broader postfeminist
experience. The term embraces a broader trend with Showtime’s branding around the antihero
mother figure. A key concern for this chapter is understanding how the postfeminist woman must
negotiate various life-stages and rituals associated with aging as part of the negotiation of cancer.
Chapter Two, “Cluttering Mental Illness: Televisual Hoarding, Pathology, and Disaster
Capitalism,” examines the rise of hoarding as part of a reality TV programming turn. Beginning
in 2009, the basic cable channel A&E (Arts and Entertainment) rolled out their reality show
Hoarders as part of the channel’s existing pathology TV. Seen as an instant success, the show
quickly garnered ratings that were comparable to the network’s central show on pathology and
addiction, Intervention. TLC (The Learning Channel) soon followed suit with its version
Hoarding: Buried Alive (2010-). Before this point, a number of reality series featuring
decluttering and home improvement narratives have cemented branding strategies for niche cable
channels, including Bravo! Discovery, TLC, and A&E. I interrogate the rise of hoarding
narratives since the global market collapse of 2008, and trace the cultural metaphors of thrift and
excess that accompany the media figure of the hoarder. In 2013, the fifth edition of Diagnostic
18

and Statistics Manual (DSM) produced by the American Psychological Association officially
separated hoarding from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder as its own pathology with specific
treatments.
49
Much of the popularity surrounding hoarding has arisen out of therapeutic
treatment of the disease and the spectacle of the home and family in disarray as integral to the
reality TV format. The rise of hoarding and its representation on reality TV also coincides with
its medicalized treatment over the past five years and establishing legitimacy and classification
as part of a larger therapeutic industry. This chapter explores the complicated ways in which
hoarding has arisen out of a larger decluttering narrative and how mental health and well-being
have become a brand within a larger disaster narrative. The figure of the hoarder has emerged
out of this neoliberal self-help history in which the language of trauma defines diseased and
healthy populations.
In Chapter Three, “How to be Pinteresting: Maternal Scrapbooking and Emotional Well-
being in the 21
st
Century,” I grapple with the newer online platform of Pinterest and the
performance of motherhood as tied to emotional well-being. This chapter has two aims: first, to
look at the development of Pinterest (2010) as a social platform for sharing and collecting
images; and second, to examine how the architecture of the platform engages and updates the
historical format of the scrapbook as part of how users perform emotional health.
I explore how Pinterest cultivates a particular female following and its resultant relationship
with a female demographic between the ages of 18-34. Much of Pinterest’s popularity amongst
women is rooted in the visual creation of shareable pin boards that highlight particular consumer
products. A key concern stems from articles written about Pinterest and the role the platform
plays in capturing the social anxieties of mothers. The way motherhood manifests as a lifestyle
within this online environment the costs of this lifestyle are at the center of why particular
19

subjects feel like they constantly fail to measure up to social standards of good or ideal,
heteronormative motherhood.
I consider the types of relationships users have with their image boards and to think about
why particular objects are invested with happiness and positivity. I look at particular clusters of
objects and how they become repinned over and over again as part of the search for and display
of community and currency across the platform. The performance of motherhood on the site
involves a complex negotiation between types of pinners that play with both the sentimental and
ironic forms of cultural displays. This chapter unpacks the types of users who create content on
the platform and comments critically about a motherhood project that engages with kitsch in the
form of national sentiment like Ann Romney’s presidential account. I next examine popular
designer Joy Cho’s account featuring her own sentimental lifestyle branding of motherhood.
Lastly, I turn to pinner Tiffany Beveridge’s ironic musings of toddler fashion and her parody
board, “My Imaginary Toddler Daughter.” These three forms of engagement speak to a
motherhood project and the affective politics that circulate on the platform in the performance of
emotional well-being.
Ultimately, the exploration of three modes of well-being allows for a broader
understanding of how media formats and representations of health have shifted from a pre-crisis
moment to a post-recession era that centers on the individual’s search for care across a mediated
spectrum. The move by digital platforms and technologies to adapt human interaction and care
into their design logic demonstrate how the commodification of care and self-help continues to
be at the center of how individuals negotiate health in the 21
st
-century. The conclusion offers an
extended glimpse at the commodification and visually dominant landscape of online dating
through the phone application Tinder. Rather than utilizing an advanced algorithm and text that
20

defined the online dating world of websites like Match.com and OkCupid, Tinder utilizes a
visual profile and the process of collecting as integral to the mating process. I end with Tinder as
a way to further expand and think about how well-being has become so dispersed through
various technologies and rituals of human interactivity. As the ritual of dating and courtship in
the 21
st
-century becomes another visual collection of social codes, the act of collecting moves
into other aspects of social interaction and communication that define relationships and behavior.
A number of recent think pieces focus on the anxieties of dating and the casualness that the app
seems to support regarding sex and marriage. On the other hand, cultural critics celebrate the
apparent choice and freedom the platform provides, especially for women to meet heterosexual
partners. As technology has developed in the post-recession era since 2012, I begin considering
the gendered dimensions of the platform as part of an upper-middle class entrepreneurial search
for partnership in the current economic environment. At the same time, I examine how the notion
of collecting reveals a commodified dating and looking experience. I focus on the platform’s
encouragement of matching and swiping left or right depending upon if one likes a particular
profile. To match with someone is more or less derived from predominately visual information
that emulates what a person would do if in a social setting like a bar or on a public street.
50

The concept of well-being is mobile and adaptable, while also carrying certain elements
of privilege that grant access to individuals who have the means to model their lives within the
parameters of wellness. Clutter serves as a way to think through both the material and immaterial
flows of information that construct individual lives and the increasing difficulty in managing the
details of one’s life. This project begins the process of interrogating the more general set of
assumptions that inform well-being and its emergence, especially since 2008. In an era of social
anxiety and middle-class dissent, television and digital media continue to reflect the complicated
21

ways in which technology and the construction of the self must navigate a consumer market that
mixes together different forms of labor, care, and services as part of everyday life.

22

NOTES

1
Jeanne E. Arnold et al., Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century (Los Angeles: The Cotsen Institute of
Archaeology Press, 2012), 14.
2
For more references and examples on clutter as part of a late 20
th
and early 21
st
century crisis, please
review some of the following popular articles from The New York Times: Olson, Elizabeth. "Moving to a
Smaller Home, and Decluttering a Lifetime of Belongings." New York Times, Aug 23, 2014, Late
Edition (East Coast), Conlin, Jennifer. "Defending their Worldly Possessions." New York Times, Aug 03,
2014, Late Edition (East Coast), Kaufman, Leslie. "Oversize Mudrooms Tame the Clutter at the Door."
New York Times, Mar 22, 2007, Late Edition (East Coast), Belkin, Lisa. "Waiting for the Organizing
Fairy to Wave Away the Office Clutter." New York Times, Jun 20, 2001, Late Edition (East Coast). See
the recent Wall Street Journal Review of the decluttering book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,
http://www.wsj.com/articles/marie-kondo-and-the-tidying-up-trend-1424970535. My second chapter on
Hoarding goes into more detail regarding decluttering as a concept.
3
A key decluttering narrative central to the collection of things identifies those who collect family
heirlooms/children’s art as being overly attached to sentimental objects.
4
TJ Jackson-Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the
Consumer Culture, 1880-1930.” In The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History,
1880-1980, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Learns (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 3-
38.
5
Eva Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 10. For Illouz, the
relationship between the formal and informal ways that a therapeutic language is dispersed across cultural
formats is fundamental to the construction of the modern self.
6
Illouz looks at the rise of the 2
nd
wave feminist movement alongside psychology as areas that worked
together to commodify and orientate individuals to construct a language about the self which utilized an
emotional framework.
7
Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 46.
8
Jackson-Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization,” 16.
9
Ibid., 4.
10
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985),
xxi.
11
Ibid., 12.
12
Ibid., 12-13.
13
Ibid., 18. Marchand examines three significant ad campaigns in the 1920s that changed how advertisers
reached consumers on more of a personal level. The campaigns of Kotex, Listerine, and Fleischmann
were significant to how advertisers constructed renewed medically focused uses for products aimed at an
anxiety-ridden public. In particular, the Fleischamnn yeast campaign featured quasi-doctor testimonials as
part of the ploy in legitimizing yeast as an essential product (and remedy) for the American public.
14
See T.J Jackson-Lears’ Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New
York: Basic Books), 1994.
15
Jackson-Lears’ examines the manufactured advertising term “autointoxication” as part of a major turn
of the century ailment used as part of a larger social turn in defining normative and non-normative bodies.
“The obsession with expelling ‘alien filth’ caught the connection between bodily and national
purification: the eugenic dream of perfecting Anglo-Saxton racial dominance in the United Sates through
immigration restriction” T.J Jackson-Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in
America, 166.
23

16
Kathryn Dethier, "The Spirit of Progressive Reform: The" Ladies' Home Journal" House Plans, 1900-
1902," Journal of Design History 6, no. 4(1993): 249,
http://www.jstor.org.libproxy2.usc.edu/stable/1316091.
17
T.J. Jackson-Lears, “The Modernization of Thrift,” in Yates, Joshua, and James Davison Hunter, eds.
Thrift and thriving in America: Capitalism and moral order from the Puritans to the present (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 219.
18
Dethier, 249.
19
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 19.
20
Chad Raphael, “The Political Economic Origins of Reali-TV,” in Reality TV: Remaking Television
Culture, edited by Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette, 123-140 (New York: New York University Press,
2009).
21
Amanda Lotz, ed. Beyond Prime Time: Television Programming in the Post-Network Era (New York:
Routledge, 2009), 3-7.
22
Joy V. Fuqua, Prescription TV: Therapeutic Discourse in the Hospital and At Home (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2012), 13. Fuqua looks at how patient-consumers must negotiate their own well-being
and health through self-care. Television’s relationship to health as a format and space (in this case, the
clinical space of the hospital) also deals with the movement of the institutional space of care to the home:
“Just as television helped to deinstutionalize hospitals, it contributed to the medicalization of the modern
home and the maintenance of the self.”
21
Jane Shattuc, The Talking Cure: TV talks shows and Women (New York: Routledge, 1997), 51.
22
Laurie Ouellette and James Hay. Better Living Through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare
Citizenship (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 16.
23
Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined
America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 6.
24
Ehrenreich, 8.
25
See Arianna Huffington’s autobiographical/scientific study entitled Thrive that outlines her own
journey with relaxation techniques to combat a busy schedule and work-life balance.
26
Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser, eds., Commodity Activism (New York: New York
University Press), 2012. One of the main claims the anthology explores is the complex forms of display
regarding activism and how this activity is commodified in a 21
st
century environment.
27
Wal-Mart has been featured recently for the company’s poverty-level wages. In a 2014 Slate article, the
company is featured as one of the most profitable in the U.S. but also with the most workers on food
stamps due to the company’s fight to maintain low consumer costs. Krissy Clark, “Save Money. Live
Better,” Slate, April 2, 2014,
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/04/walmart_employees_on_food_stamps_their_w
ages_aren_t_enough_to_get_by.2.html.
28
Jeff Hayes and Heidi Hartmann, Women and Men Living on the Edge: Economic Insecurity After the
Great Recession (Washington D.C.: Institute of Women’s Policy Research, 2011), VII.
29
The report highlights that men on average had more savings with 61% having enough to cover two
months worth of expenses. Women on the other hand measured at 43%. The report also found 80% of
mothers (both married and single) to have cut back on household spending.
30
Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, eds., Gendering the Recession (Durham: Duke University Press,
2014), 7.
31
Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 3.
32
According to TIME magazine, a 2010 Princeton study found that Americans perceived $75,000 to be
the prime amount of money to earn in order to be happy. The study nuances this number a bit more by
looking at how people making more than this weren’t exactly “happier,” but rather, that the amount
reflected a threshold of acceptance. For more information, see:
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2019628,00.html
24

33
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 11.
34
Anna McCarthy, “Neoliberal Theater of Suffering,” Social Text 25, no. 4 93 (Winter 2007): 17-42.
doi:10.1215/01642472-2007-010.
for a detailed analysis of reality TV’s capturing of diseased subjects. McCarthy makes the point via
Lauren Berlant that reality TV subjects perform a certain kind of affective display of pain and trauma as
part of a civic discourse.
35
See Negra, Diane. What a Girl Wants: Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism. New
York: Routledge, 2009.
36
See Susan Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels. The Idealization of Motherhood and How it has
Undermined All Women: The Mommy Myth. New York: Free Press, 2004.
37
Jennifer A. Reich, "Neoliberal Mothering and Vaccine Refusal Imagined Gated Communities and the
Privilege of Choice." Gender & Society (2014): 1-26, doi: 10.1177/0891243214532711.
38
Thomas Hines, I Want That! How We All Became Shoppers (New York: Perennial, 2002), 16. Hines in
his cultural history on shopping notes that Wal-Mart as an institution reflects “modern production and
distribution methods have made them inexpensive, unexciting, and universal.”
39
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 151.
40
Naomi Schor, “Collecting Paris,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal
(London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 256.
41
Stewart, 154.
42
Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger
Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 22. Jean Baudrillard writes about collections as “an
orientation to the cultural” (22). For Baudrillard, the collection and collector is primarily about a system
of value, which is culturally inscribed. Baudrillard also distinguishes between the collector and hoarder.
For Baudrillard, the idea of accumulation—“the piling up of old papers, the stockpiling of items of
food—is an inferior stage of collecting, and lies midway between oral introjection and anal retention.”
Rather, the collection is about discernment and taste, and the collector’s ability to showcase discernment
and value in acquiring the types of objects he or she gathers for display.
43
Diane Negra and Yvone Tasker, Gendering the Recession. 7
44
Susan Tucker et al., The Scrapbook in American Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 2006.
45
Jose Van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 51.
46
Van Dijck, 45-46.
47
Van Dijck, 13. Van Dijck uses the “popularity principle” to think about how social media companies
like Facebook navigate the human connection and the one manufactured by the company. Part of the
move by social media companies in how they construct the social aspects of the platform rely upon “the
more contacts you have and make, the more valuable you become, because more people think you are
popular and hence want to connect with you.” This ability to collect social relationships in the forms of
likes, friends, tweets, pins, matches defines the 21
st
century in terms of how companies and users alike
perform collecting behaviors as central to human interactions.
48
Mimi White, Tele-Advising: Therapeutic Discourse in American Television. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1992.
49
Ferris Jabr, “The Newest Edition of Psychiatry’s “Bible,” the DSM- 5, is Complete,” Scientific
American, January 28, 2013, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dsm-5-update/.
50
Anne Helen Petersen, “How I Rebuilt Tinder and Discovered the Shameful Secret of Attraction,”
Buzzfeed, September 11, 2014, http://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/we-are-all-
classists#.as0w6yD14L.
25

Chapter 1.
Showtime’s “Female Problem”: Cancer, Quality and Motherhood

“The world always looks brighter from behind a smile,” Cathy Jamison says in an ironic
tone while addressing the audience. In the second season promotional advertisement for U.S.
premium cable channel Showtime and their show The Big C, actress Laura Linney plays a
midlife woman who faces a stage-four cancer diagnosis. The promo highlights the show’s
premise of cancer comedy and the cultural “tyranny” of happiness that often accompanies a
cancer diagnosis.
1
The “tyranny” of happiness refers to the larger cultural implications and
attitudes toward cancer as part of an empowerment discourse that stresses positive thinking and
support as a central component to survival. The rest of the promo features Cathy in a series of
scenes that embrace the cable channel Showtime’s slogan “brace yourself”: she says “no” to her
doctor; receives a pink “bitch” t-shirt, demands sex from her husband, and wields a paint gun. At
the same time, the compilation addresses Cathy’s multiple roles as a wife, mother, friend, and
cancer patient that make up an emerging and changing postfeminist figure.
Since the debut of Weeds in 2005, the cable network Showtime has developed a
reputation for programming content based on the anti-heroine mother protagonist. This
programming trend – which also includes The United States of Tara, Nurse Jackie, Weeds and,
most recently, The Big C—demonstrates the network’s investment in the quirky postfeminist
figure. In this way, Showtime pushes against the dominant trends of “quality television’s”
preference for male-centered programs (The Sopranos, The Wire, etc.) by featuring middle-aged
female-centered narratives and the contemporary issues that these characters face as women and
mothers.
Showtime’s programming history has featured a mixture of adult content, boxing,
26

movies, and original programming. Beginning in the 1990s, Showtime began advancing their
content boundaries by featuring gay and lesbian programming with shows like Queer as Folk
and The L Word. Showtime’s critical and popular success has long been positioned in second
place to its premium cable rival HBO. The current President of Entertainment David Nevins
explains Showtime’s success in terms of Emmy nominations and the inherent value that these
awards hold in creating a network image that translates into a growing consumer base.
2
The
critical response to The Big C’s first season reflected Showtime’s growing popularity and
success as a premium cable channel that has cultivated a network image around taking risks with
its programming content. The critical and popular success of Weeds measured in Emmy
nominations and awards drew attention to the network’s rising aura of originality centered on the
anti-heroine mother format. However, more than a few reviewers point to Showtime’s overused
premise as a major critique of the show’s potential success and overall originality. Critic Brian
Lowry from the trade journal Variety comments on Showtime’s programming trend featuring
mothers with problems and Showtime’s cultivation of over-the-top female characters:
The Big C too frequently falls into what has become a kind of Showtime trap that
might be called 'Weeds' syndrome. Where beyond the [show’s] attention-getting
premise (pot-peddling mom, multiple-personality mom, pill-popping nurse mom,
now cancer mom), there's a surplus of quirkiness for its own sake.
3

Referring to Showtime’s original female-centric programming, the review calls attention to the
network’s overused branding around the bad mother figure as part of a pathology within the
programming that has become central to Showtime’s image. In a similar vein, New Yorker critic
Nancy Franklin discusses the Showtime program as part of a larger “Showtime” problem that
involves the network’s freedom as a premium cable channel: “Plots take offbeat turns that lead
into increasingly dull or absurd circles, or tonal shifts go much too far—or series last for a season
27

or two longer than they should.”
4

Using The Big C as a case study, I propose that the show’s depiction of cancer is a larger
cultural metaphor for the failures of a “perfect” motherhood and anxieties around consumerism.
However, Showtime’s reflection of postfeminist themes which include the antihero mother figure
also highlight a deeper pathology with regards to postracial identities, disease, and postfeminism.
As I will discuss, Showtime’s pathological relationship with female bodies also suggests a
female experience regarding race that is invoked while also being depoliticized. I draw on my
own critically coined term “female problem” that is reflected in trade and magazine reviews as
both a theoretical tool and an object of study to investigate Showtime’s programming and
marketing trends that feature female mental and physical illness and its relevance to a broader
postfeminist experience. The term reflects my own and a larger critical engagement with
Showtime’s branding around the antihero mother figure. “Female problem” plays off various
trade and magazine reviews that invoke this term by using similar expressions like “ladies with
problems” shows and “Weeds syndrome.”
5

The ‘Female Problem’ and Quality TV
The historical scope of feminist criticism and television as a “legitimate” object of study
began with the reevaluation of the soap opera genre beginning in the 1970s.
6
The study of soap
opera opened up new discourses regarding gender, aesthetics, pleasure, and female spectatorship
as part of an emerging television criticism that had not previously focused on gender as a critical
discourse. In a recent article, television scholar Michael Kackman identifies the shortcomings of
recent scholarship on quality television and the resurgence of formalist techniques that ignore a
larger gendered history of television studies.
7
Quality television debates in the U.S. have
28

generally centered on premium cable channels and the their aesthetic similarities to art cinema.
Kackman warns against the type of scholarship and discussion that is produced around quality
television debates that reinforce television’s alliance with masculine-dominated tropes for
legitimacy and evaluation at the cost of the medium’s roots in feminist media studies.
The “female problem” genre is marketed as part of Showtime’s quality television
programming. Critical and academic responses to quality television programming have centered
on terms like “value,” “high art,” “complex narrative structure,” star characters, and certain
formal and aesthetic considerations to define “good” programming.
8
More often than not, the
term “quality” carries a certain set of power structures and hierarchies of taste that raise
questions concerning who and what are the determiners of cultural taste.
9

Quality Disease TV: The Showtime Pathology
The Showtime website promotes The Big C’s success as part of a larger industry
legitimization of Showtime’s quality television and award-worthy programming. In competition
with HBO, Showtime also constructs a network around cultivating and defining cultural taste. In
the case of HBO, the network’s programming has often been praised by critics and theorists for
its art-like status.
10
HBO’s “quality” brand is connected to the network’s status as a pay-cable
channel. This status signals Showtime’s comparative level of freedom from broadcast
television’s content restrictions as a premium cable channel and Showtime’s ability to show
graphic sex, violence and use of profanity as part of the network’s cultivation of edgy content
and cultural taste.
11
Showtime’s formation of a network identity and departure from HBO is
exemplified in the reconfiguration of the sitcom and drama into the half-hour dramedy format,
29

the ability to attract “brand-name leads,” and to market its product beyond the boundaries of
acceptable network television content.
12

Showtime’s 2011 network slogan illustrates its successful brand format by focusing on
the keywords “bold, brilliant and brave.” Literally, Showtime demands that its viewers brace
themselves, which is displayed in their network slogan and promotional commercial featuring
various Showtime “brand actors” (Laura Linney, William H. Macy, David Duchovny), who
cannot keep their balance and continuously fall over in slow motion. Showtime markets its male
and female anti-heroes as part of a collective network image. Much of Showtime’s success is
attributed to the network’s former president of entertainment Robert Greenblatt. Greenblatt’s
background at HBO and work on the critically acclaimed series Six Feet Under has drawn
attention to his move to Showtime by reinforcing his relationship to his past work on a premium
cable channel and his own reinvention of HBO’s quality television strategy for the Showtime
network.
13

Time Anxiety and the ‘Female Problem’

The Big C does not overtly attempt to be a “postfeminist” text; however, it engages with
elements of postfeminism and ambiguities of female empowerment, disease, and consumerism.
For a number of critics and scholars, postfeminism is more closely aligned with neoliberalism
and free market ideology than with an activist feminist politics.
14
These scholars position
postfeminism as part of a larger post-Civil Rights pop cultural, economic and social, discourse in
which feminist politics are simultaneously acknowledged and silenced.
15
The cultural
manifestations of postfeminism feature a complicated mix of feminist influences alongside
repackaged images of patriarchy and sexism that are recoded into mainstream culture as silly,
ironic, and antifeminist.
16
Theorist Angela McRobbie’s notion of “feminism taken into
30

accountness” offers an additional framework to better understand an emerging and changing
postfeminist discourse that both acknowledges a feminist history and renders it redundant and
outdated.
17

The relationship between postfeminism and consumer culture plays an important role in
reflecting how certain elements of feminism have been taken into account in popular discourses.
Theorist Diane Negra addresses identifies of the major components of postfeminism when she
argues that the postfeminist woman must confront a “distinct preoccupation with the temporal.”
18

For Negra, postfeminist “time anxiety” is defined by how media manufactures images of women
that are represented by “life stages.”
19
What is crucial for Negra’s assessment of postfeminism’s
obsession with time-anxiety is the larger media preoccupation with the “feminization” of time as
a way to address problems with aging, the biological clock, dieting, and an investment in one’s
self.
20
Negra looks at a variety of media texts that depict privileged life cycle experiences and
feminine “rituals” such as bridal culture, cultural oppositions between the successful career
woman and the housewife, and the figure of the “good” woman who returns home to celebrate
her “choice” to be a good mother figure.
To understand Showtime’s relationship to postfeminism programming, I turn to the
critical cultivation of this term in the trade and popular press to better understand how
postfeminism operates as part of a collective lifestyle narrative, but also how this term activates a
discussion on gender and television. I use the term “female problem” as a way to critically
address trade journals’ and magazines’ responses to Showtime’s female-centered programming.
It is a contradictory term that not only conjures up stereotypical images and depictions of
Cosmo-girl culture and female empowerment (the “girlfriend experience”), but is also useful as a
31

tool with which to reflect on the industry’s way of framing Showtime’s female-centered
programming as part of a larger, collective postfeminist experience.
In her review of several recent Showtime series (United States of Tara and Weeds), critic
Emily Nussbaum articulates the network’s “borderline personalities” in relation to the female
problem premise.
21
The article emphasizes a pathology inherent in Showtime’s original
programming format, which compares Showtime to its premium cable competitor HBO. The
comparison between Showtime and HBO focuses on quality TV characteristics and a gendered
framework that is attached to Showtime’s female programming:
When HBO series fail, it’s most often because they are too ambitious—
pretentious, arty, overreaching. For all the good writing and fabulous actresses, at
their worst, Showtime can make you feel like a sucker or a cynic, someone who
longed for the girlfriend experience and found instead a bag of practiced tricks.
22

HBO series fail due to a pretentious format. However, when Showtime fails as a format it is due
to an experiment in exploring female relationships and a premise based on over-used, cliché
narrative devices. Nussbaum describes the “girlfriend experience” by looking at Showtime’s
“fascination with femininity as a vaudeville act—a daffy exhibition of artificial selves.”
23

Nussbaum’s assessment of Showtime’s “mothers with problems” premise illustrates Judith
Butler’s notion of gender as a “stylized repetition of acts.”
24
In other words, the “girlfriend
experience” entails an inscribed performance of femininity, or as writer/creator Diablo Cody has
expressed: “It's about the ways a woman has to alter her personality.”
25
It is important to note
that Nussbaum’s assessment is of Toni Collette’s role in the Showtime program The United
States of Tara. This particular show features a woman with multiple-personality disorder and the
types of identities and subjects she occupies and constructs when she experiences an alter
character take-over (a male Vietnam War veteran named “Buck,” an animal child, a 1950s
housewife, etc.). I draw attention to Nussbaum’s assessment of Showtime and her use of the term
32

“girlfriend experience” as a way to further illustrate the critical discourse that centers on
Showtime’s engagement with women’s issues and constructions of femininities. Similar to
Lowry’s critique of The Big C and Showtime’s larger “Weed’s Syndrome,” Nussbaum’s
engagement with Showtime’s female-centered narratives invokes the larger “female problem”
discussion that emerges in classifying Showtime’s programming and the network’s potential for
failure with audiences and critics by applying an overused premise.
The larger umbrella term “female problem” invokes McRobbie’s discussion of
postfeminism’s “double entanglement,” in which these female-centered shows can and do invoke
a feminist experience and female empowerment while also dismantling feminism.
26
Showtime’s
use of the “female problem” formula as part of their branding as a premium cable channel speaks
to this entanglement with the network’s representation of strong female characters who
encompass conflicting definitions of femininity and feminism. The invocation of this term also
suggests a more complex analysis of the critical response to the show, the gendering of the
Showtime brand, and a larger history in which women and disease have been at the core of a
female television history.

The historical ‘female problem’
The pathological relationship between Showtime’s female protagonists and their
fragmented lives as women with problems also points to representations of mothers within a
feminist and prefeminist televisual historical discourse. Feminism’s relationship to television as
an object of study is invested in a long representational and critical history that formed central
questions around the legitimacy of gender and television studies. The soap opera, melodrama,
and sitcom genres have all been integral in featuring women’s roles as housewife figures, action
33

stars, and single women who at times reflect the progression of the feminist movement, and at
other times, embody the tension between mainstream media and second wave feminism. As part
of the prefeminist era, 1950s and 60s television shows like I Love Lucy (1951-57) helped provide
an alternative image to the traditional American housewife. Lucy engaged in a physical comedy
and more general rebellion of masculine authority that challenged traditional notions of 1950s
femininity. At the same time, critics point to similar housewife and family shows during this
period like Leave it to Beaver (1957-63) and Father Knows Best (1954-60), which transitioned
from the physically rebellious woman to the happy housewife figure as part of a cycle of female
containment.
27
Certain genres like the domestic sitcom integrated fantasy during the 60s and 70s
as another way to represent gender and familial roles for female characters. A show like
Bewitched (1964-72, ABC) often operated as a subversive text that engaged with supernatural
female figures—the magical housewife witch and mother-- within a 1960s cultural landscape.
28

The rebellious housewife and mother figure came into the broadcast sitcom world again with
Roseanne,
29
who pushed the intersections between class and the role of the mother in a working
class family.
Certainly Showtime’s “female problem” campaign illustrates a different set of issues
related to a postfeminist experience of fragmented lives, especially in representing the anti-
heroine mother and problems that go beyond the scope of the immediate domestic sphere. Much
of Showtime’s marketing for Weeds and The Big C and the more general “female problem”
formula indicate the network’s recognition and invocation of the historically rebellious TV
sitcom mother and housewife figure. Both Cathy and Nancy also challenge the postfeminist ideal
of perfect motherhood and other dominant representations of the midlife female. However, by
34

being non-normative and failed examples of postfeminist mothers, both characters also reflect
the tension between feminist and antifeminist discourses.
As postfeminist subjects, both women seem to question the “have it all” catchphrase that
has defined earlier definitions of postfeminism and women’s roles within the public and private
spheres as perfect embodiments of wives, mothers and representations of femininity. They are
involved in relationships (Cathy is married) and have children, and for the most part have enough
money and economic sense to afford a relatively affluent middle class lifestyle. The “bring it on”
slogan for the second season promo for The Big C and the 7
th
season of Weeds goes further to
illustrate a female empowerment theme at the center of Showtime’s postfeminist branding. The
slogan conjures up the title of a playful girlhood teen cheerleading film featuring Kristen Dunst.
Rather than invoking the past of white-picket-fence sitcom motherhood, the promo cuts together
different scenes of the two female characters in their respective worlds as mothers dealing with
problems. It features Nancy’s trip to New York, her trip to jail, and her family’s life in the
business of selling drugs. These scenes are juxtaposed with Cathy’s increasingly off-beat state as
a cancer patient, in which she demands more life and embraces it by receiving a “bitch” t-shirt
from another character. The promo features both women’s physicality and aggression in calling
out their children and husbands and breaking domestic objects. The children are literally juvenile
delinquents (as in the case of Weeds). The “female problem” premise illustrates a historically
marked pathological female who must face a set of contemporary problems and choices that
appear to naturalize and celebrate the genre and character’s anti-hero tendencies. In other words,
the “female problem” illustrates a larger spectrum of current female identity and lifestyle debates
that is part of a postfeminist discussion of “feminism taken into account.” In a certain sense these
mothers represent feminist strands as active protagonists who challenge the family institution;
35

however, as much as these women are the anti-June Cleavers of the world, the commodification
of this genre as “ironic” and “quirky” also brings into question the subversive elements of these
anti-heroines.
The “female-problem” marketing campaign is part of Showtime’s show-to-show
advertising. More specifically, we see this “female problem” marketing mapped onto Laura
Linney’s role on The Big C and Mary-Louise Parker’s role in Weeds. The female problem
premise and Showtime’s marketing campaign engage with a feminist ideal that appears to be
ironically invoked while also outdated. In the Big C’s first season promo, the relationship
between the two female characters exemplifies the “girlfriend experience” as part of a
postfeminist discourse. The two women and their shows are shown as interacting within a larger
Showtime universe. The promo features a banjo-themed musical score taken from the 1972 film
Deliverance. The two women are divided by a white picket fence: on one side is Laura Linney in
her representative suburban Midwest world of green grass and bright colors; on the other side is
Mary-Louise Parker in her short shorts and faded desert home. Meeting at the fence, both
characters recite a laundry list of problems to each other in an attempt to “outproblem” the other
woman. After stating their frustrations with their children, husbands and current lives, the two
women are made to understand their bond with each another. In unison, Laura Linney and Mary-
Louise Parker claim: “You get me.” The two women solidify their sisterhood and marketing
bond as mothers with problems. Both women are coded as heterosexually attractive and youthful
for the forty plus age demographic. The characters are different from their historical sitcom
mother antecedents such as June Cleaver, Lucy, Alice Kramden, or even Roseanne. The promo
visually references the 1950s American sitcom’s prefeminist housewife figure, who is
represented by the divided white picket fence; however, these Showtime mothers are not perfect
36

by any standard, and are presented as not having it all and having to make tough decisions and
choices for their families and lives.

Quality Disease TV
The obvious marketing relationship between the two shows is reiterated in a recent
Variety article, “Prognosis Good for Showtime Pair.” Besides playing upon the language of
health discourses, the article argues that both shows’ success is due to the female-centered
problem genre of the Showtime brand. The Big C’s more recent success is exemplified in not
only representing the brand formula, but also elevating the brand alongside the cultural currency
of the “cancer” experience. The article’s opening line claims, “Cancer has been a boon to
Showtime’s health.”
30
The article plays with Showtime’s risky and topical content by
highlighting cancer’s ability to generate a major success for the network and its signature female-
problem-centered format. In positioning the two shows in a back-to-back lineup, highlighting
“moms dealing with difficult personal issues,” the female problem genre’s success is measured
in viewership and profitability.
31
In both Showtime’s marketing and the viewer’s reception of the
network’s female-driven stories, the “health” of the Showtime network is entangled in depicting
disease as the ultimate postfeminist product.
In Samantha King’s Pink Ribbons, Inc, she explores the embedded relationship among
philanthropy, corporate interests, and models of citizenship that have come to define breast
cancer culture. The language describing the “cancer survivor” becomes an important
development in King’s linking of neoliberal consumption and subjecthood at the center of
reimagining the “empowered patient.”
32
As part of Showtime’s illness branding and cultivation
of value, the premise of the “cancer experience” reflects an embedded relationship between
37

consumerism and philanthropy interests that extend the network’s investment in building its
subscription base that reinforces Showtime’s cultural goodwill in embracing cancer survivorship
and viewer support. By participating in online and social networking fundraisers with cancer
organizations like the Skin Care Foundation and the American Cancer Society, as well as gaining
prestige and recognition in Hollywood via award ceremonies specifically targeting shows that
focus on social issues, Showtime further combines and encourages the viewer’s active role in
fighting cancer and bringing both the network and the disease more attention.
33
The show itself
departs from a stigmatized representation of cancer and therapeutic narratives that surround the
disease. The Big C narrative allows for Cathy to reject her support group and the more typically
represented institutions and images surrounding support group cancer culture. In interviews for
the show, executive producer Jenny Hicks has described the Big C as a show not about cancer
but “a show about mortality, about living and dying and the choices you make.”
34
However, as
part of The Big C’s cancer marketing promo, Showtime participated in a cancer fundraiser
specifically linked to the number of views that The Big C promo received. This promotional
stunt further reveals Showtime’s participation within a “consumer-citizen” rhetoric that
encourages private citizen interest in the representation of donations, while at the same time
using the cancer narrative as a way to gain network capital via viewers.
35
The discussion on
consumerism, citizenship and corporate sponsorship, and the marketing link between Showtime
and The American Cancer Society reveal a certain type of active citizen-viewer who, by
watching The Big C can create a “world with less cancer and more birthdays.”
36
The complex
affiliation between Showtime’s marketing, the representation of postfeminism and cancer within
in a larger cancer culture signals the deeper contradictions that arise between the marketing and
38

representation of cancer, and the cultural currency of the cancer narrative in legitimizing and
marking the Showtime brand as participatory in a larger collective cancer life.

Postfeminism and Cancer
“Is melanoma suddenly everywhere?” asks an online reviewer responding to a critic
preview of the Showtime show The Big C.
37
The reviewer opens up a larger question of disease
and the cultural currency of cancer across popular media formats. In a glossy billboard
advertisement for Showtime’s newest programming addition, The Big C, actress Laura Linney,
who plays Cathy Jamison, is shown lounging in high heels and a dress, trapped within an
hourglass. The caption next to the image reads, “Grabbing life by the balls…The Big C…a new
series about living….with cancer.” The image and the tagline suggest the show’s investment in
an empowered female cancer experience.
The show structures Cathy’s cancer narrative within a framework that highlights the
temporal anxiety of dying alongside her desperate attempts at enjoying life. According to
Negra’s “time-anxiety” trope, the dying mother narrative is a popular genre in both literature and
film that uses an extreme temporal crisis as a defining motif to construct the mother figure.
38

Cathy’s terminal cancer diagnosis becomes the main narrative focus of the show. Cathy is
“empowered” because she chooses to keep her diagnosis a secret from her friends and family,
which allows for her to explore an emotionally liberating experience of selfhood. She does not
openly address her cancer diagnosis with her family until the ninth episode. However, as much
as the narrative focuses on Cathy’s empowerment, this secrecy trope also allows for Cathy’s life,
including her marriage and role as a mother to unravel.
39

In Cathy’s search for selfhood, the show emphasizes a series of destructive or “bad”
behaviors (improper diet, extra-marital affair, smoking, drinking, speaking her mind) as part of
Cathy’s newly acquired lifestyle. A significant component to Cathy’s lifestyle change is the
larger paradox surrounding the physicality of the cancer experience and the preservation of
Cathy’s “ideal” body. Facing her own “time-anxiety” as a stage four-melanoma patient, Cathy
participates in consumer culture, whereby she eats desserts and liquor for dinner, while
maintaining her “ideal” figure and status of attraction to the male gaze. After the doctor’s
diagnosis, Cathy reveals her desire to forgo chemotherapy treatment. Playfully, she asserts that
she wants to keep her hair, but would gladly get rid of her current nose. While visiting with her
doctor, she activates a medical discourse on cancer bodies that fuses Cathy’s sick body with a
postfeminist beautiful and ageless body. Cathy playfully refers to her breasts as a “rack” and
insists upon the younger male doctor’s evaluation of her figure. The scene acknowledges a
history of doctor-patient relationships and the objectification of female bodies. At the same time,
the scene allows for Cathy to knowingly choose to be looked at by her male physician.
39
“You
can’t hurt my feelings,” Cathy quips while revealing her naked body and breasts to her doctor.
Cathy’s active participation in the revelation of her cancer patient and feminine body participates
in McRobbie’s notion of “feminism taken into account.”
40
Cathy uses “rack” in a way that
suggests a certain irony in her exploitation as a woman. Cathy can say "rack" to her younger
male doctor not only because she is in on the joke, but also because she has cancer which thereby
allows Cathy to do and say whatever she wants. Cathy is empowered by choosing to put her
body on display; however, a major part of her ironic empowerment involves a critical male gaze
that reaffirms Cathy as an idealized, ageless and heterosexually attractive object.
40

Cathy’s cancer experience reiterates her preoccupation with an ideal feminine and anti-
aging body that has become a prevalent postfeminist trope. Theorist Susan Bordo highlights this
manufacturing of the ideal female body when discussing the mass marketing of anti-aging trends
that are presented as empowering for women while part of a larger consumer discourse.
41
As
much as Cathy reveals and “accepts” her body as middle aged throughout the show, she also
constructs her femininity around anti-aging regimes.
42
There is a temporal impossibility in
Cathy’s body that is presented in a way that is “given” and perfectly preserved. She is thin, in
shape, and despite her “bad” newly acquired smoking and eating desserts habits, her body never
changes or gets tired beyond slight skin rashes due to her melanoma. In the second season, Cathy
begins her medical trials and the only visible physical effect the show focuses on is her brittle
fingernails. She is never allowed to unravel or to physically deteriorate. In fact, the show
reinforces her preservation a step further in season three by having her cancer go into remission.
Her body is presented as a “natural” and age-appropriate feminine body that is untouched by
cosmetic surgery and botox, but also a body that is still “above average” in its state of ideal
femininity.
Cathy’s search for selfhood and cancer empowerment are further emphasized in Cathy’s
physically fit body that structures the second season. Cathy’s impromptu decision in the second
season to run a marathon becomes a major obstacle and aspirational event that propels Cathy to
refocus her lifestyle priorities by racing for her dead friend Lee. Theorist Samantha King
discusses the role of “Cancer thons” as part of a major philanthropic, corporate, and self-help
event in raising awareness for cancer-related cures and survivorship while making the politics of
these intersecting interests and organizations more problematic.
43
The marathon serves the
storyline in the second season as more of a symbolic function in Cathy’s fight to stay alive. The
41

actual marathon highlights Cathy’s struggle to make it to the finish line--- she has never run a
marathon in her life, but she is still able to do it despite her doctor and family’s concerns. The
marathon plays into a lifestyle narrative that emphasizes Cathy’s postfeminist bootstrap
empowerment—she is a “tough bitch” just like her t-shirt says. The marathon reveals Cathy’s
own body awakening and ability to push herself to the extreme despite warnings and no proper
training.

The “Blind Side” Effect: Postracial Irony
The Big C’s “female problem” up until this point has focused more closely on the
dominant postfeminist framework for the white, upper-middle class female figure; however, a
crucial component to The Big C’s exploration of bodies and disease reflects a larger tension
between representations of race and irony and how irony works in a similar vein to create
distance between the political history and representations of black bodies. A major component to
Cathy’s cancer diagnosis is the relationship she forms with her overweight student Andrea,
played by African-American actress Gabourey Sidibe. As much as the show openly mocks and
rejects therapeutic narratives and support groups surrounding cancer culture while
simultaneously promoting a larger cancer marketing scheme, the show allows for Cathy’s
newfound freedom to take form in an individualized project of body “improvement” by helping
her student lose weight.
As part of the show’s “ironic” commentary on cancer and other identity-based politics,
The Big C engages in a postracial discourse that pokes fun at Cathy’s relationship with Andrea
while allowing for Cathy to grow as a character. Andrea becomes the wisecracking sidekick who
is framed by her body size, overt sexuality, and outspoken relationship with Cathy and her
42

cancer diagnosis. Media theorist Sarah Banet-Weiser discusses postracism in a similar vein to
McRobbie’s notion of postfeminism by turning to discourses on consumerism and
neoliberalism.
44
For Banet-Weiser, the “undoing of feminism” is in conversation with a
commodification of race and ethnicity that raises the specter of the United States’ racist historical
past that is seen as outdated.
45
In the first episode, Cathy critically calls attention to Andrea’s
“fat” body by sarcastically commenting upon Andrea’s “mean” pathological behavior as not a
“correct” correlation to her body size. Cathy states, “You cannot be fat and mean. Fat people are
jolly for a reason. Fat repels people…you can either be fat and jolly or a skinny bitch.” Later on
in the same episode, Cathy decides to help Andrea lose weight through monetary motivation
($100 for every one pound lost). By drawing attention to the show’s critique of self-help
narratives, which also include stereotypical projects by the white protagonist who saves the other
(in this case the African-American student), the show emphasizes its own critique of the “blind
side” fantasy. At one point, Andrea’s character knowingly remarks on Cathy’s attempts to help
her by invoking the recent Sandra Bullock film and larger historical narrative of the white
woman saving the African-American child. The second season of the Big C features a certain un-
ironic “blind side” narrative in which Andrea’s character moves in with Cathy’s family to finish
out her high school program. Andrea’s character operates within a larger postracial discourse that
celebrates African-American representation within a post-racist society; however, the show
never allows for a deeper exploration on issues of obesity and body size that are embedded into
problematic narratives of consumerism and the control of nonwhite bodies. Rather, this
ambivalence towards the “blind side” narrative brings up larger questions of irony and
“quirkiness” that define postfemenism’s entanglement in rending certain racial and sexual
histories obsolete.
43

A recent blog post entitled “The Big C: So This is Liberating?” by GlobalComment
feature writer Allison McCarthy similarly notes the show’s “body policing” project. McCarthy
notes that Andrea’s body is punished for falling outside of the postfeminist body standard of thin,
white femininity. Andrea’s body becomes a policed project, in which Andrea undergoes weekly
weigh-ins while being paid for her weight-loss progress.
46
The disciplining and surveillance of
Andrea’s body for being African-American and overweight connects to the show’s engagement
of disease and identity politics. Even though the show takes into account Andrea’s racialized
body, her relationship with Cathy is made visible by its non-normalcy and celebration of
difference that fits in with Cathy’s larger cancer narrative. Cancer is the featured narrative in The
Big C, and Andrea’s body size becomes a marked difference as a stigmatized, unhealthy and
non-feminine (non-white) body. Andrea is represented as both a “victim” to a capitalism system,
as well as a body that embodies and invokes representations that are lazy and consumer
“choices” associated with marked African American and over weight bodies. By examining
Andrea’s character through a postracial lens, her body is presented as a way that takes a larger
racialized history of marked African-American and female bodies into account to show the irony
of this history as no longer useful and outdated. Like Cathy’s cancer, Andrea’s character and
body size become a metaphor for the show to illustrate and explore non-normative and “quirky”
representations as part of a collective “outsider” experience. Andrea’s character (especially in the
second season) celebrates her larger body through a discourse on difference and identity politics
that ironically points to her own body as the literal and metaphorical “elephant in the room.” In
the second season Thanksgiving episode, Andrea draws attention to her body by connecting the
stigma associated with body size to that of Hugh Dancy’s gay and cancer-ridden character: “I’m
fat and you’re gay, so we’re supposed to get along.” The episode highlights a certain level of
44

identity politics—almost Glee-like in the show’s address of representations of difference within a
larger tolerance narrative. Andrea’s character draws attention to these differences while
participating in a postfeminist and postracial commentary that ironically points to her ethnicity,
gender, and weight as more in line with Showtime’s unruly postfeminism.

Cancer Mom
The Big C’s focus on cancer allows for Cathy to reassess her role as a mother figure. The
topic of motherhood in The Big C centers on a more general cultural discussion of what Susan
Douglas writes about postfeminism, motherhood and the rise of the “new momism.” For
Douglas, the “new momism” entails a media identity shift through news stories, celebrity, film
and television representations of mothers whose identity is tied to their children.
47
This “new
momism” also reflects The Big C and Showtime’s marketing trend in channeling the postfeminist
acronym MILF (“Mother I would like to Fuck”) while poking fun at this representation. The
MILF representation has taken shape as part of a broader postfeminist trope beginning with
iconic and historical figures like Mrs. Robinson from The Graduate (Nichols, 1967) to the
reemergence of the cougar—the older and more aggressive version of the MILF figure-- in
shows like Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives and Showtime’s Mary Louise-Parker’s
figure in Weeds.
48
As Showtime’s original “female problem” show, Weeds openly pokes fun at
the MILF figure while embracing Nancy’s “coolness” as a mother and pot-dealer. The MILF
figure within the Showtime universe represents a conflicting relationship to female
empowerment and child-rearing responsibilities that engages with a larger postfeminist trope of
women failing to achieve perfect motherhood.
45

Cathy’s character in The Big C exemplifies a certain imperfection to what Susan Douglas
has termed the “new momism.” She is not a perfect mother and reflects this ambiguous
representation in her relationship with her son; however, a major development in her search for
selfhood is to reconnect as a mother and role-model figure with her teenage son. The show
positions Cathy as an “enabler” in her son and husband’s bad habits. She identifies her problem
in raising two children-- her son and husband. As the “bad” mother figure, Cathy repeatedly
identifies her mistake in the motherhood project by not enforcing her son to clean up after
himself, and her unsuccessful attempts to teach her son about finances. Cathy at one point
claims, “Here I’ve been this coupon cutting saver, and I couldn’t even raise a son to get a
summer job.” Cathy resolves to return to a project of betterment by raising her son “right.” As
part of Cathy’s self improvement project, she engages with her son by picking on his habits of
not cleaning his room, his swearing, and developing sexuality as a “masculine” teenager.
Catching her son watching porn, Cathy attempts to engage with Adam by watching it with him
and giving her “real world” commentary and advice. As a mother figure, she reinserts the value
of a woman’s place as an object of male attention by telling her son that “women like attention.”
She relates the experience of womanhood through the ritual in remembering birthdays and
Valentine’s Days, and the ultimate sense of a women’s self worth through the feeling of being
“waited for” by a man. In her attempt to connect with her son, Cathy’s project in becoming a
better mother is constructed from a place of guilt that reaffirms her place as a central figure in
providing a model of femininity for her son.
The cancer narrative also reinforces Cathy’s motherhood project by turning to her role as
an empowered consumer. In the season finale, Cathy’s presence as a “good” mother is
symbolized through her son’s discovery of the gift storage space. After learning about his
46

mother’s diagnosis, Cathy’s son discovers a garage full of unopened boxes, a brand new car, and
not yet delivered hand-written notes celebrating his future birthdays, graduation, and other life
achievements. Cathy reasserts her consumer power by creating a storage bank of gifts-- a rain
check for when presumably she is no longer around and no longer able to assert her purchasing
power. The actual storage unit also highlights Cathy’s hyper spending habits and desire to be
“present” for future dates and missed celebrations. This collection reinforces Cathy’s move to be
a “good” mother figure, which also means a remembered mother figure.
The show’s focus on Cathy’s problematic and failed intersections between motherhood
and the cancer experience is reinforced after her son’s contraction of a sexually transmitted
disease. After sleeping with a local newspaper ad call girl, Adam contracts crabs and spreads the
infection to both of his parents. The episode features Cathy’s response to Adam’s lack of sexual
responsibility through her own failure as a parent to communicate and to guide him. Cathy
mistakenly understands the physical effects of the STI as positive side effects and reactions to
her new clinical trial treatments. However, the STI becomes a public health concern once the
entire school and swim team learn from Facebook about her family’s shared infection. According
to the Showtime writer’s blog, the writers’ acknowledge the crab scare as a larger metaphor for
Cathy’s disease (cancer) that has taken over her family’s lives.
49
The crab infection becomes
another way to question Cathy’s control and surveillance of her teenage son, and her lack of
control as both a parent and cancer patient. Even though Cathy does demonstrate her own
empowerment by confronting a group of angry parents regarding both her cancer and crabs, the
theme surrounding her state of infection reinforces her metaphorical relationship between her
role as a mother and diseased figure.

47

Conclusion
By briefly outlining the Showtime network’s branding around the “female problem”
genre, my aim has been to critically look at constructions of postfeminism in relation to
constructions of cancer, quality, and motherhood. There has been a move by the network to
embrace complex character portrayals as well as more difficult premises; however, the larger
concern comes back to discussions of not only quality television, but also the complexities
surrounding the depiction of diseased female empowerment. By turning to Showtime’s image
and reception as a diseased product, and Showtime’s recognition of their repeated “female
problem” premises as part of their “quality” success, the tensions between quality television’s
complexity, and the representation of women-centered programming become more nuanced
when looking at constructions of postfeminism and consumer-driven ideologies. As much as
Showtime navigates a complex series of female representations that challenge historical
depictions of the housewife figure, different sets of issues emerge in thinking about
postfeminism, race, and bodies that do not fit a white heterosexual model. The complexity of
women’s health and the larger relationship to government programs and current policies is also
reflected in America’s reproductive health legislation featuring women’s bodies and issues of
legitimacy, choice, and access. For example, the current political backlash surrounding
Republican representative Todd Akin and his comments on women’s “illegitimate rape” speak to
a much larger debate on women’s increasingly limited access to abortion services, but also an
ideological and policy discussion on the predominantly white male legislators and
representatives who define “rape” in relation to women’s agency and bodies. In a recent
Guardian article, feminist theorist Naomi Wolf examines the wave of current policy decisions
and conservative party attacks of organizations like Planned Parenthood and abortion rights by
48

thinking of systematic issues of control and surveillance at the center of this debate.
50
The
relationship between the premium cable cannel Showtime’s female-centered programming and
the larger cultural, political, and economic discourses surrounding women’s rights pivots around
an on-going conversation on female representations and pathology. In addition to women’s rights
issues, the larger neoliberal lifestyle narrative that has become featured in a number of
postfeminist texts also speaks to issues of health and disease and the complicated terrain of
surveillance and consumerism that surrounds the health industry. As much as the show depicts a
different cancer viewpoint by challenging a therapeutic rhetoric used by corporation and non-
profit groups in defining and visualizing cancer subjects and groups, Cathy’s “cancer
experience” is reflected in the show’s return to family values and Cathy’s punishment for being a
“bad” mother. Like “female problem,” the use of “cancer” and the “cancer experience” are
loaded terms when considering the metaphors and positions that the term assumes across various
racial and class backgrounds. There needs to be further exploration of the “female problem”
premise as part of a quality discourse that is “complex” and given in representing the midlife
woman and mother figure. As much as Showtime has reconfigured the housewife character to
encompass a series of problems both inside and outside the home, a show like The Big C also
reinforces postfeminist and postracial ideals that further reproduce pathologized femininities.

49

NOTES

1
Samantha King, Pink Ribbons, Inc. Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
2
Bill Carter, “Showtime Is Gaining On HBO,” New York Times, January 30, 2012.
3
Brian Lowry, “Showtime Stirs Laffs with Pain,” Variety, August 16, 2010, 17.
4
Nancy Franklin, “Old Mortality,” The New Yorker, August 16, 2010,
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/television/2010/08/16/100816crte_television_franklin?currentPage
=all.
5
See: Kevin Fallon, “Showtime: Television for Women For Everyone?,” The Atlantic, August 16, 2010,
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2010/08/showtime-television-for-women-for-
everyone/61535/; and Brian Lowry, “Showtime Sunday: Borgias, Nurse Jackie, Big C,” Variety, April 2,
2012, http://weblogs.variety.com/bltv/2012/04/showtime-sunday-nurse-jackie-big-c-
borgias.html#ixzz1vRlKXpuq (accessed 30 April 2012).
6
Charlotte Brunsdon, Julie D’Acci, and Lynn Spigel, eds, Feminist Television
Criticism: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
7
Michael Kackman, “Quality Television, Melodrama, and Cultural Complexity.”
Flowtv, March 5, 2010, Available at: http://flowtv.org/2010/03/flow-favorites-
quality-television-melodrama-and-cultural-complexity-michael-kackman-university-of-
texas-austin/.
8
Kim Akass and Janet McCabe, Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond (London:
I.B. Tauris, 2007).
9
Ibid., 2.
10
Christopher Anderson, “Producing an Aristocracy of Culture in American Television,” in The Essential
HBO Reader, eds. Gary Edgerton and Jeffery P. Jones (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky,
2008).
11
Kim Akass and J. McCabe, Quality TV.
12
Andrew Wallenstein, “The man who out-HBO'd HBO,” Hollywood Reporter, June 28, 2010, 2.
13
Ibid.
14
See: Susan Douglas, The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us from Girl Power to
Girls Gone Wild. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2010; Diane Negra, What a Girl Wants: Fantasizing
the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (New York: Routledge, 2009); and Angela McRobbie,
“Postfeminism and Popular Culture: Bridget Jones and the New Gender Regime” in Interrogating
Postfeminism, eds. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
15
See: Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, eds, Interrogating Postfeminism (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2007) and Angela McRobbie, “Postfeminism and Popular Culture: Bridget Jones and the New
Gender Regime.”
16
Susan Douglas, The Rise of Enlightened Sexism.
17
Angela McRobbie, “Postfeminism and Popular Culture,” 28.
18
Diane Negra, What a Girl Wants, 48.
19
Ibid., 47.
20
Ibid., 48.

21
Emily Nussbaum, “The Cultural Pages: TV: Women on the Verge: With the United
States of Tara, Showtime Has Cornered the Market on Outsider Heroines,” New York Magazine, February
9, 2009, 58-59.
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid.
24
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 191.
50

25
Amy Chozick, “Showtime’s Bad Girls Make Good,” The Wall Street Journal, March 19, 2010,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704743404575127472943944014.html.
26
Angela McRobbie, “Postfeminism and Popular Culture.”
27
Patricia Mellencamp, “Situation Comedy, Feminism, and Freud: Discourses of Gracie
and Lucy,” in Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader, eds. C. Brunsdon, Julie D’Acci, and Lynn Spigel
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
28
See: Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2001) and Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing up Female with the Mass
Media (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1994).
29
Kathleen K. Rowe, “Roseanne: Unruly Woman as Domestic Goddess,” in Brundson et. al. Feminist
Television Criticism: A Reader, 60-73.
30
“Prognosis Good for Showtime Pair,” Variety, September 21, 2010, 4.
31
“Leading Ladies’ Star turns Propel Showtime,” Variety, November 17, 2010, A1.
32
Samantha King, xxxii.
33
“TV Acad to Honor Issues,” Variety. March 8, 2011, 11.
34
Jim Halterman, Interview: The Big C Executive Producer Jenny Bicks, June 27, 2011,
http://thefutoncritic.com/interviews/2011/06/27/interview-the-big-c-executive-producer-jenny-bicks-
800300/20110627_bigc/#>.
35
Samantha King, 38.
36
Look to the Stars, “Showtime’s the Big C Aims to Help Cancer Charity [press release],” August 11,
2010, http://www.looktothestars.org/news/4887-showtimes-the-big-c-aims-to-help-cancer-charity.
37
Deborah Orr, “The Big C is Not the Cancer Comedy for Me,” The Guardian, February 3, 2011,
Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/03/cancer-comedy-the-big-c.
38
Diane Negra, What a Girl Wants, 47.
39
Angela McRobbie, “Postfeminism and Popular Culture,”32-33.
40
Ibid., 33.
41
Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993).
42
Diane Negra, What a Girl Wants.
43
Samantha King, 29-59.
44
Sarah Banet-Weiser, “What’s Your Flava? Race and Postfeminism in Media Culture,” in Tasker and
Negra, Interrogating Postfeminism, 201-226.
45
Ibid., 204.
46
Alison McCarthy, “The Big C: So This is Liberating?,” GlobalComment, September 20, 2010,
http://globalcomment.com/2010/the-big-c-so-this-is-liberating/.
47
Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing up Female with the Mass Media (New
York: Three Rivers Press, 1994).
48
EM and LO, “Of MILF and Men,” New York Magazine. April 22, 2007,
http://nymag.com/news/features/2007/sexandlove/30915/.
49
Hilly Hicks, “Behind the Big C,” The Big C’s Writer’s Blog, August 1, 2011,
http://thebigcwritersblog.tumblr.com/post/8367681487/hilly-hicks-jr-on-the-little-c.
50
Naomi Wolf, “What Really Lies behind the War on Women,” The Guardian, May 24, 2012,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/24/what-lies-behind-war-on-women-
naomi-wolf?commentpage=2#start-of-comments.

51

Chapter 2.
Cluttering Mental Illness: Televisual Hoarding, Pathology, and Disaster Capitalism

“Home, home, sweet home,” a middle-aged woman says to camera. “I use this to make
quiche.” The camera follows the woman, Michelle, from Tacoma, Washington, as she picks up a
corroded pan from the pile of debris in the remnants of a once-used kitchen. Michelle, like many
hoarders featured on the basic cable channel TLC’s Hoarding Buried Alive (2010– ), articulates a
fantasy of domestic productivity and bliss that does not align with current state of her home as
represented by the camera. From the beginning of the show, the camera offers viewers a hyper-
visual tour of the subject’s hoarding behavior. Traveling from room to room, Michelle narrates
her domestic space as the camera pans across a sea of unidentifiable objects. “This is my
kitchen…my favorite room of the house!” Michelle exclaims to the camera. Revealing her love
of cooking and hosting, she admits, “I would love to have a gourmet kitchen in the future…save
enough money in the future to buy it.” Yet, juxtaposed with shots of a room completely
overtaken by objects, counter-level piles of trash, and even rats, Michelle’s fantasy plays out like
a parody of the 1950s domestic housewife. As the episode progresses, a therapeutic expert, along
with cleaners, exterminators, and other forms of labor, help Michelle link her failed aspirations
of becoming a lawyer and maintaining a family to the home’s severe squalor. In a moment of
recognition, Michelle verbalizes why she is alone and how hoarding has affected her life: “My
hoarding has pushed my children away.” This moment stands out in particular for having its
subject recognize the severity of her mental illness. She utilizes a therapeutic framework to
understand her condition, while at the same time, as the episode plays out, this recognition
reaches a limit as Michelle becomes increasingly anxious and uncertain about her possessions.
52

In this chapter, I trace a genealogy of the hoarding narrative as part of a televisual post-
recession era crisis. First, I set up hoarding as a media spectacle by turning to New York Collyer
brothers and the media attention and language used to construct the pathology. Next, I switch
gears to unpack self-help narratives that emerged during the latter half of the 20
th
-century and
into the 21
st
as a way to address mental health and suffering subjectivities. The final section
examines the rise of hoarding labor as part of a disaster economy that utilizes a self-help
approach to care for subjects who suffer from the pathology. Two basic cable series have largely
been responsible for making the medical condition of hoarding visible in popular culture: A&E
(Arts and Entertainment) released Hoarders in 2009, and TLC (The Learning Channel) launched
its own version of the pathology in Hoarding: Buried Alive (2010-) in 2010. A&E’s hit show
Intervention which featured addiction and mental health-related interventions by family and
psychological experts led the way for Hoarder’s immediate success with viewers. In the
premiere episode, Hoarders reported 2.5 million viewers with high numbers in key
demographics, making it one of the most watched shows on the network of 2009.
1
TLC’s
Hoarding: Buried Alive similarly followed Hoarders’ success in 2010. Following TLC’s
popularity with makeover shows like Say Yes to the Dress, Hoarding: Buried Alive received an
average first season viewership of 1.5 million per episode.
2

Entertainment Weekly reporter Ken Tucker describes both Hoarders and
Intervention’s popularity in terms of “the anti–Celebrity Rehab: their subjects are ordinary
citizens, afflicted with disorders that the programs’ producers try to treat while filming the grim
process.”
3
Tucker’s emphasis on the hoarder’s role as a normal citizen and the show’s
performance of care opens up a discussion regarding how the hoarding narrative represents
treatment and the role of reality TV in healing diseased subjects. The format of the episodes
53

begins with more of a documentary-like observation of the hoarding subject’s condition. The
viewer is introduced to the hoarding figure as they navigate the home. Following this
introduction, a psychologist assesses the state of the home and of the hoarder, in which, various
other experts like the junk remover and professional organizer play key roles in the climatic
clean-out of the hoarder’s home. In reality, the process of cleaning out those whose homes have
reached a particular stage of clutter can take months. Both A&E and TLC’s shows on hoarding
refrain from the long-term depiction of the process. Rather, the shows feature the crisis point for
the hoarder within a short 2-3 day block of time in which the subject must address a rather
serious ultimatum as a result of the clutter (an eviction, loss of a spouse, children, pet).
In most episodes of Hoarders, key performances of therapy reinforce the hoarder’s
condition. In 60 minutes, the narrative features two hoarding figures. The labor of professional
organizers, psychotherapists, and bio-hazard/hauling specialists guide the hoarder through the
confession, the sorting of objects, the climatic cleanout, and the reintroduction to the domestic
space. Still, most episodes of Hoarders, especially before the 6
th
season, refrain from happy
endings in favor of revealing the harsher tensions of the actual cleanout of the domestic space. In
representing the decades’ of neglect and abuse that oftentimes accompany hoarding behavior,
Hoarders has become known as much for its horror-like spectacle as for its representation of
treatment.
Now into its seventh season with a renewed episode contract, Hoarders: Buried Alive
features a slightly different format that includes a voice-over narrator and home makeover,
situating the series within the network’s larger branding signature.
4
The show variably alternates
between featuring one and two subjects per episode. Similar to Hoarders, Hoarding: Buried
Alive utilizes a therapeutic approach to address the hoarder figure’s traumatic past (e.g., other
54

addictions, lost spouses, abuse, or neglect). Using professional organizers, psychiatrists, and junk
removers, the show also negotiates how to address the hoarding behavior within a short time
period or usually 1-2 day cleanouts. The quick clean out of the home is positioned as the climax
of the episode, in which the hoarder has a breakdown or breakthrough regarding the process of
removing and sorting through possessions. The last three minutes of the show features the
aftercare portion of the cleanout, in which the labor is removed to reveal the spectacular
transformation of the home as a clean, functional space. The spectacle of debris and dirt and the
horror-like conditions of the home become transformed into a fantasy of renewal in which the
hoarder is made to recognize the after-image of the home as part of their therapeutic recovery.
The roles of the therapist, cleaning specialist (licensed or not), and professional organizer
are features of the treatment process for the hoarder and the more general representation of the
hoarding narrative on reality TV. Accordingly, this chapter examines how popular anti-clutter
therapy and new forms of clutter labor emerge from crisis and disaster capitalism in treating
mental health. I want to be careful in recognizing that hoarding is not the same as cluttering (or
someone who clutters). While hoarding is a recognized illness with a specific set of treatments
and interventions, such as cognitive therapy, cluttering is largely marked as a bad habit of
middle-class accumulation that can be addressed through a variety of simple, self-help
techniques. At the same time, this chapter looks at the overlaps between the treatment of
hoarding and decluttering through particular therapy techniques and who performs them. The
way that hoarding and decluttering narratives merge in popular media illustrates how the
domestic interior of the home and its objects are pathologized. Moreover, I situate the
popularization of professional organizers and cleaning experts as part of a recession-era reaction
to the housing market and the more general trend of over consumption of cheap goods. As
55

middle class subjects have adapted to a changing and decreased standard of living, the popular
term “decluttering” has become increasingly prevalent in narratives of cleaning and domestic
improvement. I use the term “decluttering” as a way to frame the therapeutic approach to clutter
of the mind and body, and the techniques involved in ridding clutter as a narrative goal in
achieving domesticated well-being.
The hoarding phenomenon in popular media culture also offers a way to evaluate various
media and health industries in relation to each other, and to carefully consider the complexities
of how people consume, evaluate, treat, and educate themselves on heath-related issues. The
current popularity of hoarding on reality TV has been instrumental to the public discourse on the
disease. Hoarding presents the most severe image of accumulation and the problems of excess
represented in various forms of popular culture. I see the focus on clutter and its removal as an as
a prime example of how America encourages an industry of self-management (self-care and self-
help); clutter initiates a more general therapeutic discourse about how to deal with the causalities
and fallout of neoliberal policies. With this in mind, a term like “decluttering” has shaped recent
lifestyle and home improvement discourses that encourage cleanliness, organization, and
minimalism in the aesthetics of the home. To live a clutter-free life, according to the larger self-
help narrative, connects back to living a disease-free life.
The spectacle of excess objects and the current state of the overrun and decaying family
home is a major focus of decluttering and extreme hoarding narratives. By examining this
spectacle and how narratives of decluttering and hoarding intersect in a post-2008 context, I
illustrate a televisual shift from lifestyle concerns to the pathologization of the domestic space. I
use theorist Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker’s notion of recession era programming to think
about reality TV’s role in a post-2008 televisual landscape and the emergence and reformation of
56

intervention and lifestyle formats as part of how television continues to mediate its therapeutic
role within a neoliberal framework.
5
I situate the hoarding narrative by looking at the famous
mid-century New York Collyer brother’s case and the media narrative centered on visuality,
domestic space, and clutter. This historical media spectacle serves as a launching point to think
about the popular narratives that have since emerged regarding clutter and general
disorganization and how they become represented in a more contemporary environment.
Decluttering narratives promote self-help through the makeover and the labor of professional
organizers as clutter specialists to address the complicated evolution of the middle-class home
and fragmented family structure. The popularity of the reality TV format captures what Brenda
R. Weber notes as part of a rejuvenation process in which “the ‘better you’ can only be achieved
through the makeover.”
6
The ‘hoarding’ narrative that emerged post-2008 in the form of two
popular reality TV shows speaks to the format’s roots in spectacle while also using therapy as a
strategy to classify hoarding as a distinct pathology defined by various forms of professional
labor. At the same time, the recession era has also been a significant period for new forms of
labor to develop in reaction to the foreclosure and home ownership crisis. The rise of disaster
related labor practices in the form of professional cleaning companies and real estate flipping
teams is a featured form of labor in the hoarding narrative. I frame hoarding as an extension of
decluttering narratives that serves as a reaction to both a financial fallout of debt and consumer
culture and the culture of health and wellness that defines neoliberal subjectivities.
Within roughly the last five years (between 2009-2013), a programming turn in
recession-era television narratives has introduced a variety of reality formats that reflect issues of
gendered thrift that “celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit of common folk.”
7
For example, shows
like Pawn Stars (History Channel, 2009-), Storage Wars (A&E, 2010- ), and American Pickers
57

(History Channel, 2010-) feature issues of thrift and acquisition during a downturn market.
Doomsday Preppers (National Geographic Channel, 2011-), features figures who believe and
prepare for apocalyptic scenarios by using a variety of survivalist techniques like gorilla-style
gardening, expands the format to include fears of disaster and the apocalypse. As these shows
focus on masculine models of labor on the fringes of society—pawnbrokers, auctioneers, and
antique dealers— and situated within adventure-oriented narratives, they reinforce gender norms
associated with work in a post-2008 economy. The role of female-oriented ‘thrift’ can be seen in
shows like Extreme Couponing (TLC, 2012-) that feature the female subject as the main
breadwinner for the family. The female figure’s worthiness is highlighted in her ability to save
money (thousands of dollars) by using coupons while still carrying out domestic duties that
position her role as the primary consumer.
8
The gendered divide within this recession era
programming demonstrates how these featured forms of labor rearticulate models of citizenship
and survival and also reinforce strict gender norms.
The rise of thrift-related programming emerges from neoliberal models of self-help and a
language of therapy that structures much of the reality format and cable TV industry. The
concurrent popularization of health-related shows is also part of the logic in which subjects must
thrive in order to survive. Theorist Samantha King frames the increase of health discourses and
the production of physical fitness since the 1980s within neoliberal models that position “the
importance of health in everyday life.”
9
Neoliberalism in this context refers to the way
individuals have increasingly been at the center for promoting their own care as the ultimate
engagement with proper citizenship. More specifically, contemporary health discourses embrace
civic participation and citizenship building at the expense of public models of healthcare,
reinforcing privatized consumerism as the ideal way to attain optimal health. Subjects must
58

navigate a complex foray of information, risk factors, lifestyle management techniques in order
“to live healthily and stay in shape.”
10

Thinking about mental health as part of a neoliberal model is useful when considering
how mental and physical health share similar self-management techniques. Eva Illouz illustrates
the merging of capitalism and emotional models of health (which include mental health) in what
she calls “emotional capitalism”—“a culture in which emotional and economic discourses and
practices mutually shape each other.”
11
Self-help discourses suggest that subjects attain mental
health, one of many modes of well-being, by overcoming personal hardships. Likewise,
intervention and health-related reality TV propose, as Laurie Ouellette and James Hay argue, an
intervention framework, “focus[ing] on problems that materialize in the realm of family and
lifestyle.”
12
For Ouellette and Hay, the intervention sub genre acts as a way for individuals and
families to form and come to their own decisions on health and wellness at the larger cost of state
and governmental help.
13
Treating mental illness on reality TV involves a collection of
professionals and private donations and services on the part of the network or production
company involved. Hoarders and Hoarding: Buried Alive are important case studies that
exemplify the continued evolution of therapeutic treatment on reality TV, and how the
commodification of mental health is produced and combined through the development of
particular forms of labor that have mobilized during the recession era.
Reality TV’s engagement with the pathological is part of the format’s role as a
therapeutic medium. The attention paid by cultural critics and theorists to television’s capacity to
educate and promote health is at the center of the medium’s ability to enter the home as a source
of institutional and personal information. Sander Gilman’s notion of pathology illustrates how
the term has been so readily adopted and constructed as part of the reality format’s engagement
59

with therapy culture. For Gilman, “Order and control are the antithesis of ‘pathology.’ Pathology
is disorder and the loss of control, the giving over of the self to the forces that lie beyond the
self.”
14
The representation of mental health as a highly visible pathology is rooted in what
Sanders emphasizes as society’s visual construction in “seeing the insane.”
15
Clutter becomes a
particular resonate example as part of a larger decluttering narrative that strives to structure
subjects as drowning in junk, while at the same time, legitimizing certain middleclass consumer
practices. The focus on clutter for a reality TV show like Clean House, in particular, captures
this sense of blockage that ruins marriages, while also being about the remodel of the home as a
sanctuary for the domestic family. Thus the use of “clutter” to describe one’s home, office, or
mental framework becomes the force, according to self-help gurus, that blocks a subject’s desire
to live a well-balanced life.

Visualizing mental illness as an identifiable construct is part of the intervention logic
involved in reality television’s preoccupation with disease and health related formats. The rise of
self-help narratives since the 1980s, and more specifically, the television talk show format have
provided a way to treat, cure, and to talk about the pathological in the form of addiction, crisis
management, family, and health-related concerns.
16
In her book Tele-Advising, Mimi White
argues that television’s role as a therapeutic object functions in what she claims as the
“institutional production of meaning.”
17
For White, the discourse surrounding television as a
therapeutic medium connects to the way the language of confession allows for subjects to make
sense of the world. Part of this “production of meaning” regarding the therapeutic format and
how it relates to decluttering and hoarding shows has to do with the institutional way care
becomes deployed on the shows. For the reality TV hoarding narrative, the confession takes
60

place through the labor of psychologists, professional organizers, and junk removal experts who
coax the subject into a process of self analysis and eventual recognition. The language of
confession works in a way that the hoarding subject understands the crisis of his or her pathology
as an impediment to their living a healthy and clean life.
Much of reality TV’s therapy and intervention-related programming is also rooted in a
recession era discussion of crisis management. Feminist theorist Lauren Berlant writes about
crisis narratives through the “good life fantasy” as one of the primary ways subjects deal with the
desire to heal and strive, while also always being captured by the risks and tragedies that
structure much of how life is lived: “But, again, optimism is cruel when the object/scene that
ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation
for which a person or a people risks striving; and, doubly, it is cruel insofar as the very pleasures
of being inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation.”
18
The
crisis of hoarding and its visual representation on screen is played out in a way that cruelly
utilizes the mode of the cleanout as the ultimate climax in offering the subject a way to fully
realize the extent of his or her disorder. At the same time, the cleanout—which heavily features a
more invasive approach by experts—takes what is fundamental to the security that the hoard
provides and empties the clutter out to only be returned (by the hoarder) to its pre-removal state.
The hoarding narrative featured on reality TV often fails to navigate the larger financial and
social costs involved in the hoard, while opting for a quicker fix with privatized care.
Within the post-2008 economy, these crises of mental illness are visually charged with
foreclosure and home disaster imagery. More generally, disaster has been theorized in relation to
natural occurrences like Hurricane Katrina and human-made events like the Iraq war.
19
The
construction of disaster as it relates to a national crisis is well documented in events like 9/11 and
61

the aftermath in reiterating the entanglement between crisis and capitalism. Theorist Naomi
Klein writes about disaster capitalism by examining what she calls the “original disaster” and the
capitalization by private companies after the initial shock.
20
Klein’s discussion, which focuses on
post-9/11 and the development of corporate warfare as a specific case study for disaster
capitalism, is a useful framework to think about punctuated cultural events and how society
responds to the fallout. The representation of hoarding as a reality TV genre reflects the
unraveling of a 20
th
-century obsession and narrative of American enrichment with consumerism
that is manifested through the domestic space of the home. At the same time, the spectacle of
hoarding as a disaster narrative also reflects what theorist Kevin Fox Gotham writes in response
to a post-Katrina environment as “disaster-as-spectacle.” For Gotham, “the marketing of
disaster-as-spectacle becomes an overt and intentional avenue of capitalist accumulation with tie-
ins and the buying and selling of other products.”
21
In the case of the hoarding narrative, it is
useful to look at the rejection of traditional and aspirational modes of consumerism. That is, the
pathology of hoarding reflects a type of consumerism that does not follow a “good” or
“traditional” consumer logic. At the same time, by looking at hoarding as part of a therapeutic
model of interests that revolve around the classification and labor market that has helped to
solidify the pathology as legitimate by insurance, mental health, and housing professionals, the
hoarding narrative is marked by recession-era labor and capital that is deeply entrenched in
commodity culture.

Hoarding: A Narrative of Spectacle
One of the central ur-texts on hoarding as a phenomenon features the infamous Collyer
brothers, Homer and Langely, of New York during the mid-20th century. On March 27, 1947,
62

the cluttered home of the eccentric brothers made media headlines after authorities discovered
that the brothers had died from their hoarding behavior. One of the brothers died of starvation
while the other from being crushed under a tunnel of debris. Initially, the police went to the
home in response to a phone call about the possibility of one of the brothers being dead. While
the police investigated the missing brother, a series of New York Times articles featured new
details regarding authorities’ difficulty in gaining access to the cluttered and blocked home. In
the NYT article announcing the discovery of Langely’s body, the report highlights how the
brothers’ collection and physical obstruction of entry ways into the home impeded the
investigation: “Detective John Loughery climbed up the ladder to inspect the body while other
policeman started to tear down the front door with axes. The front hallway was completely
blocked by the neat newspaper packages and half-empty cardboard crates tied with strings.”
22

The brownstone became the focus of media inquiry due to the large amount of objects that
stuffed each room of the home: “As far as could be seen, it was the same on the upper floors.”
23

As detectives and police attempted to “break” into the locked and boxed-off home, the
juxtaposition between the inner and outer spectacle of the Collyer’s home manufactured a media
narrative of a domestic space left to the devices of decay. The photograph of a police officer
looking into a doorway stuffed with boxes and newspapers is coupled with the caption: “A police
sergeant looking at a barricade of boxes behind which [Collyer] had been smashed.”
24
In the
accompanying media spread, the story also features a news photo of the outside spectacle of fire
fighter ladders and curious crowds that construct much of the attention to the hoard as unruly and
requiring city resources. The image highlights the news articles’ colorful language and
journalist’s awe in capturing a wide-angle view of the brownstone home with a ladder stretching
up the sides. Various figures stand in the doorway, on the street, and within the fire trucks
63

signaling the spectacle of the crowd itself as part of the media event.
The discovery of the other brother’s body under a series of collapsed boxes and debris
became part of the overall tragedy and spectacle of the brother’s reclusive lifestyle; the home and
its belongings presented the viewing public with a rare glimpse into their otherwise sheltered and
hidden lives. The systematic emptying of the house became one of the most covered news items
of 1947. City officials spent weeks and weeks unloading the filled up rooms, laying the items out
in full public view to be scrutinized. Raised in a well-to-do home, the brothers appeared more of
an anomaly to the outside world looking in on their decades’ worth of clutter. Theorist Scott
Herring writes about the media sensation surrounding the actual language for the hoard and
objects on display: “These depictions, in turn, advanced an emergent narrative that objects of
former opulence had degenerated into an “incredibly dirty” mess.”
25
The objects in the Collyer’s
amassed collection were recalled in numerous media accounts as part of an overall narrative
contrasting the seemingly elite background of the brothers and their family origins with the trash
or collections of “oddities” and “curiosa.”
26
For example, in a New York Times article, “150
Collyer Items to be Sold Today,” the reporter highlights the “curious” masses of collectors and
mainly women attending the auction of the brother’s goods. The article proceeds to list the items,
ranging from linens to clocks. Herring makes an important argument regarding the media frenzy
and attention to the spectacle of the brother’s hoard as further connected to the social pathology
of collecting ‘junk’: “Every piece of supposed junk became a remarkable curiosity, and every
“dirty” item became a point of interest in this popularized discourse of spectacular debris.”
27

Much of the fascination with the Collyer brothers and their collection had as much to do with a
media narrative on collecting and accumulation as it had to do with displaying the home and its
contents as part of a public catalogue in determining value and taste.
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One of the long term effects of the Collyer brother’s hoard resonates with what fire
fighters around the country now unofficially call cluttered homes—“collyers’ mansions.”
28
In a
recent fire safety journal (NFPA), the origins of a contemporary hoarding narrative are centered
in the hoarding of the Collyer brothers and the cultural stigma surrounding a messy home. The
focus on stuff and hoarding reflects a larger safety concern for residents and fire fighters who
must navigate narrow pathways that block entries and access to the home.
29
The “stuff” of the
home has become part of a safety concern for agencies that come face to face with living
conditions that are now declared fire disasters. The language used by fire fighters and the larger
media to describe “collyer mansions” or “pack rat” conditions also invokes a continued
discussion on the visuality of disaster narratives. Much of the continued fascination with
hoarding also speaks to how other institutions have legalized and legitimized the problem with
having too much stuff. The visual signifiers of stacks of papers, books, and the pathological
connections that preoccupied the media surrounding the Collyer brothers also opens up how a
discussion with hoarding’s relationship to clutter and junk. These signifiers illustrate the
consumer therapy narrative and middle-class obsession with collecting and acquiring too many
toys, clothes, electronic gadgets, and photographs as detrimental to one’s mental well-being.

Pathologizing the home: Decluttering the Middle Class
“The houses we live in and the domestic objects we own—large, small, costly, inexpensive—
define who we are and reveal much about our social identities, family histories, aesthetic
preferences, behavioral patterns, affiliations, and economic standing”
30

The opening lines of a recent UCLA study from the Center of Everyday Life of Families
ties the domestic home and objects we buy as a major identity marker for US families.
Expanding the discussion of the home and middle-class clutter to 50 years after the Collyer
65

brothers case, the contemporary 21
st
-century middle-class home and family must confront a
massive amount of consumer products and inherited family heirlooms as part of how the space of
the home becomes navigated. In a 2011 New York Times article, author Jane Brody writes about
the amassing of objects as part of a crisis in American culture around habit-making formations:
“It often takes a crisis, major or minor, to prompt people to change bad habits, especially when
the change is time-consuming and anxiety-provoking.”
31
The article looks at cluttering more
broadly in terms of lifestyle adaptations (excessive accumulation) that many Americans have
made over the years to accommodate increasingly stressful and busy lives.
The UCLA study interviewed and photographed 32 Los Angeles based families to
determine how middle-class families lived within their homes. One of the more striking
observations made by researchers included the transformation of garage as the “new junk
drawer.”
32
The accompanying image features a garage piled high with various consumer
products, boxes, miscellaneous clothing, and filing cabinets. Three young children are almost
swallowed in the background as they rummage through the clutter. However, the focal point of
the image centers on a little boy who has perched himself on top of an unidentified yellow
object. The small amount of space that he physically takes up is almost crushed by the overflow
of objects that surrounds him. In an interview for the study, the researcher’s acknowledged that
only 25% of the garages in the study could be used for cars.
33
Additionally, the study also
discovered that the presence of clutter increased stress hormones in the mothers of the household
and the biological connections to cluttered living spaces.
34
The report reveals the larger
implications of clutter as a negative determiner of well-being and mental health, and also a more
distinct image of how the middle-class family manages domestic space.
Bourdieu’s notion of “cultural capital” offers a way to examine why subject’s place
66

value and create distinctions between types of education, life experiences that signify one’s
relationship to a set of evaluating criteria that separates high and low culture.
35
Even though
Bourdieu’s formulation is distinctly set within French culture, it is worthwhile to consider how a
term like ‘clutter’ signifies a middle-class relationship to objects that make-up and define the US
home and lifestyle in the 21
st
-century. Decluttering narratives operate at a level of perceived
middle-class consumption practices. That is, clutter as a more general term represents the effects
of long-term accumulation in the form of too many books, papers, childhood objects (art
projects), and personal hobbies that have made the home difficult to navigate and control. Clutter
also represents the more recent accumulation of cheap objects and bulk store items that have
come to define family lifestyle choices that reflect a two parent working household and activities
that center on enjoyment and upkeep of the child. It is perhaps no coincidence that the “types” of
clutter reflected in decluttering narratives revolve around a set of similar tropes and figures who
are recognizable to an American middle-class. For example Peter Walsh, a professional
organizer and media figure, writes about five types of clutterers that fit a psychological paradigm
in the article, “What’s your clutter style?” The featured Oprah.com piece highlights the “behind
closed-doors clutter,” “knowledge clutterer,” “the techie clutterer,” the “sentimental clutterer,”
and the “bargain shopper/coupon clutterer.” In evaluating these distinct types of clutterers, Walsh
pinpoints personality types and behaviors that range from ‘over-worked moms,’ to Apple
product collectors, to those who belong to bulk buying clubs, perfectionists, and a number of
other popularized middle-class terms for an affluent and stressed-out middle-class.
36

At the same time, when looking at clutter rhetoric and its relationship to the family more
generally, the value of decluttering activates a particular type of consumption that becomes
coded with more elitist aesthetic values. In other words, the language of decluttering signals a
67

classed position in a person’s ability to spend responsibly on objects that are perceived as
opening up space, flexibility, and possibility for the middle-class family to thrive. The value of
decluttering caries a certain anti-consumer logic that is centered in a cultural backlash to mega
stores like Walmart and the more general convenience of products that define much of American
life. At the same time, decluttering is a process of evaluation that requires a level of therapeutic
competency in being able to see how excess and cheap objects sets up obstacles in the home.
Magazines like Real Simple and Oprah consistently feature organizing and clutter-free tips as
part of an aesthetic and well-being campaign for the family.
37
Targeted toward the mother figure,
the decluttering narrative is about minimalism and reusing objects (like jars which can be
repurposed as vases, candle holders, old but ‘valuable’ pieces of furniture) while also promoting
consumerism in the form of Container store accessories, and the right children’s room décor as
part of the family space.
Magazines like Real Simple have become major fixtures in the advice and lifestyle
industries by focusing on well-being and clutter as sources of anxiety in most consumers’ daily
lives. Launching in 2000, the magazine has made a brand for itself by focusing on the ‘modern
woman’: “We inspire her to do something -- buy that new dress, paint those walls, organize that
closet, and have that party.”
38
With 8.3 million readers, the magazine boasts a median female
demographic making an approximate income of $97,000 per year.
39
The layout of the magazine
features a mixture of home organizing, fashion, and more general wellness tips to live an
aspirational life. Much of the actual content of the magazine places clutter at the center of living
a pathological life: consumption, in this particular magazine, is focused on “good” forms of
consumerism with a particular set of taste preferences for clean lines, color sets, and pieces of
furniture or fixtures.
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Clutter becomes a stand-in for what sociologist Eva Illouz identifies as a major
commodity trope within self-help narratives of suffering. Clutter is situated and connected to the
rise of the self-help industry since the 1980s. The contemporary manifestation of the term
‘decluttering’ operates on a level of common sense amongst audiences and consumers as part of
a lifestyle and wellness campaign. By “common sense,” I mean that the decluttering narrative
acts in line with general popular therapeutic narratives that are “tautological” in approach. The
decluttering framework is rooted within a psychological paradigm in which consumers must
confront the reasoning behind their collections and mess as part of a traumatic past event. People
who collect too much or who cannot organize their stuff become the central figures in labeling
what is pathological about the behavior involved in cluttering. This “narrative of the self” is
rooted within what Illouz has claimed as the “medicalization of social life.”
40
In general, the self-
help narrative is rooted in psychoanalysis and trauma literature in which a narrative of the past is
at the center of self discovery: “Narrative has become a key category to understand how selfhood
is constituted through culture, how the self communicates with others, and how one makes sense
of one’s place in a particular social environment.”
41
The self-help narrative in fact reproduces
particular goals and outcomes that help the reader better understand their past and inability to
achieve their goals. In this context, the decluttering narrative becomes another important scenario
that can be repeated within the culture industry.
42
Illouz makes this point when addressing
psychological narratives that take particular terms like “fear” or “intimacy” and change them out
in the reproduction of the next treatment narrative.
43
Clutter becomes a term that can be used in
any number of frameworks for individuals who clutter too much to the point of causing frictions
in relationships, to jeopardizing their own health and well-being.
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Understanding the rollout of an anti-clutter rhetoric and the treatment of the home by
professional organizers and stylists is rooted in reality intervention shows like Clean House
(2003-11) on the Style channel.
44
This show in particular stands out in its use of decluttering as a
mental and physical technique through the labor of a home decorator and professional organizer
as a way to cure the family from mental, physical, and emotional fallout due to the stress of
owning too much stuff. The show’s opening voice-over by host Niecy Nash explains the overall
function the makeover: “We rescue families from a cluttered home.” The episodes build upon a
similar language of therapy in assessing the meaning of objects. The human attachment to
various household items is made apparent in an episode featuring a retired police officer with a
collection of stuffed animals: “There’re my little guys” (says Sarge). The professional organizer
for the show is quick to point out Sarge’s misplaced feelings for the objects: “They don’t have
feelings. You have feelings.” (Season 4, episode 4). The entirety of the episode focuses on a
renewal and cleansing process, in which Sarge must measure up to his obligations as a potential
husband and get rid of his consuming past and child-like collection in order to reflect a more
masculine model of citizenship and care. Most episodes of Clean House feature this type of take-
away, in which the clutterer is made to realize by a team of non-psychological experts that his or
her clutter behavior is impeding on living a quality life.
The featured device of the yard sale facilitates a spectatorial relationship between the
show’s subjects, therapeutic experts, and viewing public who help with the redistribution of the
home’s outdated, broken, and aesthetically unappealing artifacts. A major tension that is
constructed as playfulness on the show is the collection of heirlooms, art pieces, and children’s
toys that have meaning for the subject, but are criticized by the team as unworthy of the subject’s
cluttered living space. For example, in Season 4, episode 7 the yard sale expert prompts the
70

episode’s featured subject to get rid of a cumbersome dresser being stored in her son’s room. “It
doesn’t look like a little boys room,” the expert states. “It isn’t about the stuff…whatever she is
to you, this isn’t it,” the yard sale expert says prompting a language of therapy in the form of
self-reflection. The dresser becomes part of the narrative in which the physical manifestation of
memories becomes attached to objects. The woman tearfully agrees to sell the dresser at the yard
sale in order to please both her son and be compliant with the show’s more general makeover
premise. In another episode, the yard sale expert similarly discusses with the show’s subject the
collection of furniture pieces in the girl’s bedroom. Prompting the woman to discuss her role as
the sole provider for her daughters before meeting her current husband, the woman discusses
both the emotional impact of wanting to treat her daughters like “princesses” and the value of the
vintage pieces in the bedroom. “I’m trying to make everyone happy,” the woman reveals to the
camera. Quickly, the yard sale expert appraises the furniture’s value as sellable item, “I think
probably 95$ in the yard sale…If we double that, I will get your money back.” The transaction of
the furniture into yard sale economics quickly takes over the importance of getting rid of the
objects and for the mother to “eat” the cost in order to have an improved life. The narrative of
middle-class clutter becomes a narrative in which a particular rhetoric of higher valued items
signified by terms like ‘vintage’ and ‘pieces’ represent the already workable and useable items
that occupy the space of the home as worthy of being sold. The right type of consumption
becomes the main theme of the decluttering narrative and its deployment as part of a makeover
trope. In this way, subjects learn to evaluate objects based on their functionality and value as part
of a family environment, in which the parent’s tastes and attempts to buy the “right” types of
furnishings for the child must in fact “fit” within a particular aesthetic sensibility.

71

Spectacle TV: Reality and the Makeover
An important piece to understanding how the decluttering narrative has been mediated
is to examine the rise of lifestyle reality TV formats and the branded cable networks within the
post-network era.
45
Reality programming in the recession era is marked by what reporter Matt
Zoller Seitz calls the “unnatural misery” that subjects are made to experience very publically.
46

Particular networks like TLC have come under recent fire for their “learning” brand that appears
more centered on child pageant stars (Honey Boo Boo) and families with 19 children than with
their NASA and science-based roots. The rise of basic cable channels and lifestyle branding
since the 1980s is also part of the story of reality TV. Particular channels like A&E, TLC,
Discovery, Lifetime, and OWN paint a broader picture regarding the proliferation of makeover
formats and various self-help shows have been at the center of how audiences connect with
various of therapy television. Networks like TLC have made a name for themselves by targeting
middle American audiences that feature shows with more of a family-centered component.
47

Most of the shows highlighted science and education-based content. In the later years, the basic
cable channel (which is also owned by Discovery) began to shed its earlier education roots in
favor of more reality and lifestyle programming that embraced various self-care and makeover
paradigms. TLC’s transition to a more “tabloid-friendly” and lifestyle slate of programming is
credited to Discovery Chief Eileen O’Neill who has shaped the network’s competitive rise in
women’s television programming.
48

The Rise of the Professional Organizer and the Recession-Era Declutterer: The Labor of
Being Neat

Media attention to the professional organizer can be seen in any number of make-
over genre shows like Clean House (Style, 2003-11), Clean Sweep (TLC, 2003-05), Neat (HGTV,
72

2004- ), Mission Organization (HGTV, 2003-09) and the Home and Garden TV channel with a
variety of home improvement techniques and commodity tie-ins. Magazines like Real Simple, O,
and Better Homes and Gardens regularly feature articles and advice columns by organizers as
featured experts who navigate and create functional space in otherwise cluttered homes. Much of
the narrative surrounding this profession in the media centers on self-entrepreneurship and the
expanding role of domestic organization as a central facet to proper citizenship. Media and
celebrity organizer Peter Walsh is one of the most recognizable faces associated with an anti-
clutter rhetoric as part of building a more minimalist lifestyle. Coming out of TLC and Oprah’s
network OWN, Walsh’s popularity within the professional organizing field has made the leap
into a variety of self-help strategies that merges clutter and the wellness industry to achieve
emotional well-being.
49
The decluttering narrative also extends into other areas of crisis and self-
care. Walsh’s self-help book, Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat? makes the case for
mental and physical connection between America’s obesity epidemic and the culture’s larger
affinity for material stuff: “I learned long ago that if you focus on the stuff, you will never
conquer the clutter and deal with the fat and excess that fills your home.”
50
Walsh makes the
connection between clutter and obesity speaks to how the language of therapy has become
deployed and institutionalized to understand how clutter is an obstacle to one’s happiness and
self-fulfillment.
More generally, the decluttering narrative is represented by the mainstream media as
a blockage of one’s ability to live a satisfying life. Walsh claims in an Oprah.com post that
clutter has become a metaphor for how people live messy, unsatisfying lives: “We use those
metaphors because clutter robs us of life. It robs us socially, when we're too embarrassed to have
people over. It robs us spiritually, because we can't be at peace in a cluttered home.”
51
Walsh
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situates clutter as both tangible and intangible regarding how people are unable to live what he
calls their “best life.” Walsh’s more recent product launch with Office Max also serves as an
important relationship with various industries in addressing clutter as a psychological problem
that can be fixed with commodity-oriented and organizational solutions. In the product promo
video for Office Max and Walsh’s (In) Design filing system, the video features both Walsh and
an Office Max marketing employee. The presentation of the filing system is couched in both
Walsh and the company’s philosophy of organization. “The moment you let flat surfaces get
covered in stuff, you have lost the battle,” Walsh claims as the camera pans across a modeled
cluttered desk. War and battle rhetoric is a common feature of disease metaphors. Susan Sontag
writes about the tendency for cancer, more specifically, and disease, more generally, to be
described and pathologized through a discussion in which “disease itself is conceived as the
enemy on which society wages war” (66). Thus the use of the term “clutter” by Walsh reveals
how the term becomes utilized in a self-help narrative, in which a subject’s defense system gone
awry or weakened by bad habits.
Since 2008, a recent number of online posts and articles have brought attention to the
role of professional organizers as part of the emerging post-recession economy. For example, an
online story about startup experiences and the labor of professional organizing featured a woman
who had decided to enter the profession due to her acquired skills from teaching, event planning,
and paralegal work that demonstrated her skillset as “pulling things together.”
52
The connection
of past professional work experiences (usually more dominantly female-centered forms of labor
like teaching and event planning) is a featured motif in a number of professional organizing
narratives. Oftentimes negotiating both being a wife and a mother, the dominant narrative that
74

emerges surrounding the organizer is that the job allows for a certain level of flexibility that
comes with a job that moves between the domestic and public space.
53

The media attention to decluttering narratives also stems from the types of
organizations and professional services that have developed as a way to legitimize clutter
therapy. The National Organization of Professional Organizers (NAPO) provides an important
institutional component to the service of organizers seen on a number of reality TV shows. The
organization first started in the 1990s and has since developed a curriculum, certification,
database, and various partnerships as part of a larger organizing industry. This last year, the
organization hosted its 7
th
annual NAPO organizing awards that recognized A&E’s Hoarders as
“The Most Educational National TV Show About Organizing.”
54
The awards also distinguish
between a number of products and brands that have become associated with the professional
organizing world, including The Container Store and celebrity figures like Peter Walsh and his
own decluttering services. The ICD Guide to Chronic Disorganization, which is distributed by
the Institute for Challenging Disorganization, is another avenue for care regarding how hoarding
and clutter are classified. Professional organizer Judith Kolberg is attributed to the origins of the
professional organizing industry as well as creating the term “chronic disorganization” as part of
an everyday vocabulary for professional organizers to help clients confront issues with clutter.
55

The Institute for Challenging Disorganization defines the condition as “having a past history of
disorganization in which self-help efforts to change have failed, an undermining of current
quality of life due to disorganization, and the expectation of future disorganization.”
56
The focus
on “quality of life” as a particular classification code becomes an important entry point for how
institutions and groups utilize a therapeutic language involving clutter as a way to address the
shortcomings of someone who always confronts a messy home and work life.
75

More generally, there has been a shift in the media and the therapeutic movement
to see clutter and the role of the professional organizer as part of the mental health process. The
popular magazine Psychology Today published a piece all about the intermixing role between
therapy and professions outside of psychology in addressing issues of organization and hoarding.
The article positions a seasoned psychotherapist and his account of meeting and learning about
the role of professional organizer as another type of therapeutic expert: “Their approach is not
unlike those used years ago, when behavioral therapists rode elevators or traveled through
tunnels with their phobic patients or clients in the desensitization process.”
57
The in-home labor
and treatment of the professional organizer is one of the main features of his or her expertise.
The actual assessment process by professional organizers in handling cases of clutter vs.
hoarding is documented in a National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization entitled the
“Clutter-Hoarding scale.” This assessment is broken down into five categories of general
household decline. Level one is considered low by professional organizing standards regarding
the amount of clutter/neglect in the home. Using words and phrase like “appropriate minimum
animal control” in reference to the legal limits of owning pets; “no odors,” and “no excessive
clutter,” the parameters of the home as a functional space in relation to each room and its
intended use provides a base-line for the escalading disorder for the other four categories.
58

TLC and A&E both employ this type of labor on each network’s show on hoarding.
Searching for local organizers depending upon the location of the episode, TLC is known for
utilizing services from the NAPO database. In a particular example, TLC revealed their desire
for using a local organizer in order to complete the treatment and filming process 4-6 weeks after
the initial cleanout of the hoarder’s home.
59
The average income for professional organizers
varies, but the profession itself is considered to be on the rise to the changing nature of work-life
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balance and the sheer amount of clutter that has become part of people’s everyday lives.
60
To
hire a professional organizer by the hour, the labor ranges from $50-200. Most of the organizers
represented on TLC and A&E are female professionals with their own particular brands and
commodity tie-ins. For example, Clean House organizer Linda Koopersmith’s featured work is
centered in the family office. The after-image of the remodeled office features donated shelving
units by a Closetmade system. Koopersmith’s signature folding is also featured as part of the
after-image labor. In a number of episodes, Koopersmith reveals to the home’s subjects the
aesthetic display of the clothing in compact and evenly displayed shapes as part of the final
design: “Everything is color-coordinated and folded.” The work of creating an aesthetically
appealing space, including the folding of clothing within the drawer itself is part of the featured
labor of the professional organizer. In Koopersmith’s self-help book, she further outlines the
space of the ‘Walk-in Closet’ as an extension of the busy professional and the imperative
function of space as “hard-working.”
61
The coded language for hard-working spaces functions in
a way to relate to a career-oriented individual who is time-sensitive and in need of spaces that cut
out anything extra in terms of ‘wasted’ time looking for lost, unused, and misplaced items. The
actual labor of making the closet is further broken down into segments of products, installation
instructions, money and time that further reiterate the spatial and financial benefits of
organization as part of a contemporary trend.
As I will outline in the next section, the organizer becomes a familiar figure rooted
within a decluttering economy that extends into the rise of disaster related labor in the recession
era. Part of the evolution of the recession era reality format also extends the labor of the
organizer into the increasingly complex diagnosis and treatment process for hoarding as a mental
illness. The last section of this chapter examines this trend in the reality TV format, and
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specifically, how the hoarding narrative incorporates earlier iterations of decluttering self-help
logic into a social, cultural, and political climate of recession imagery and housing crisis.

Medicalizing Hoarding
In a 2012 Atlantic review on A&E’s Hoarders, the article acknowledges the physical
manifestation of hoarding as a mental illness: “If hoarding is a true mental disorder, it is so
because of its physical reality -- the out-of-control clutter can go so far as to be life-
threatening.”
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The author’s connection between the physicality and the internalized viewpoint
that culturally constructs mental illness reinforces the visual way in which reality TV produces
hoarding as a pathology for viewer and advertising consumption. If we are to reflect upon
Gilman’s assessment of mental illness and its more general pathology as a visual construct of an
inner struggle, hoarding becomes a particularly key case study regarding how mental health is
visualized and pathologized along the lines of clutter.
The legitimate and separate classification of hoarding as an official diagnosis in in the
fifth edition of the APA’s (American Psychological Association’s) DSM (The Diagnostic and
Statistical manual of Mental Disorders) also speaks to the medical and therapeutic communities
response to hoarding as a mental health crisis. Compulsive hoarding is still part of the Obsessive-
Compulsive criteria and classification; however, the new edition of the manual also updates and
recognizes hoarding as having a distinct set of diagnostic criteria and patterns of behavior.
Compulsive hoarding is defined as “the persistent difficulty discarding or parting with
possessions, regardless of the value others may attribute to these possessions. The behavior
usually has harmful effects—emotional, physical, social, financial, and even legal—for the
person suffering from the disorder and family members.”
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The narrative surrounding hoarding’s
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popularity in literature and psychology has been noted briefly in the works of Freud and
Fromm’s discussing of the ‘hoarding orientation.’
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For years, hoarding was thought to be a
subset of Obsessive-Compulsive disorder. Psychologists paint a more contemporary history for
hoarding’s diagnosis that began more-or-less in the 1990s.
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Recent tests reveal complicated
nature of hoarding as pathology, including a number of genetic and environmental factors
involved in distinguishing why people hoard.
The treatment for mental health in the U.S. involves a complex set of institutional forces
that have been brought to media attention with the more recent violent shootings and legislation
of the Affordable Care Act. To better understand the recent trajectory of mental health
classification in the U.S., it is important to examine the commodification and institutionalization
of psychology. One of the main classification tools used by doctors, insurance agencies, and
various mental health specialists is The Diagnostic and Statistical manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM). Published by the American Psychological Association, the DSM III (3
rd
edition)
“became a widely popular and profitable commercial enterprise” to classify and label various
mental disorders.
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Suddenly particular behaviors that had previously been undiagnosed or part
of a popular assessment of attitude “were now in need of care and management and were
henceforth pathologized.”
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The history of the DSM and psychiatry from the 1950s until the
1980s had focused more so on “the treatment of neuroses to more generalized maladaptive
patterns of behavior, character, and personal problems.”
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The 3
rd
edition of the manual
fundamentally changed how psychiatry operated in favor of “categories of illness rather than
blurry boundaries between normal and abnormal behavior.”
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According to a 2012 Washington
Post article, the US spends close to 113 billion annually on mental health treatment, a figure that
accounts for 5.6% total of national health care spending.
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The article further identifies the more
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recent recession-era cuts at the state level to mental health and dire consequences that have
resulted in shifting the care to other agencies. On top of the fact that a number of health
providers do not have adequate mental health coverage plans, which leaves the financial costs to
the patient is part of a much larger picture regarding the marginal treatment of mental health as
part of proper civic health.
The role of reality TV as a model for proper citizenship and well-being is central to the
format’s engagement with privatized notions of health. At the same time, part of the fascination
of the show and the representation of the pathology on screen involves the work of a professional
organizer, psychiatrist, and professional cleaners/haulers as part of the therapeutic labor and
treatment process.

The economic incentive of therapy shows—oftentimes offering an exchange
of services in gaining access to the subject and their domestic space is one of the few available
resources in helping the subject to avoid a particularly devastating consequence. In the case of
decluttering narratives, the public interrogation of the domestic space invites the audience to
judge the home and the family alongside the show’s experts in understanding acceptable levels
of clutter and how to properly organize the space of the home. In the case of the hoarding
narrative, the domestic space is often already beyond repair and full of objects deemed
unsanitary and valueless and to the point of excess that can only be redeemed through a clean-out
and psychological intervention. In what Anna McCarthy identifies as reality TV’s “neoliberal
theater of suffering,” the performance of the hoarding narrative emphasizes both the trauma of
the subject due to abuse, loss, or death and the state of the home as a casualty to the hoarder’s
mental state.
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The treatment for hoarding is complex and varied due to both the psychological aspects
of trauma and acquisition and the material objects themselves. The struggle to give away items is
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used in the hoarding narrative as further evidence of the irrationality of the subjects’ attachment
to particular objects. The treatment for hoarding and its representation within the media features
various cognitive and organizational approaches to the behavior. Psychologists use cognitive
therapy as a targeted way to approach behaviors associated with hoarding and is “directed toward
decreasing clutter, improving decision-making and organizational skills, and strengthening
resistance to urges to save.”
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For example, in a recent episode of TLC’s Hoarding: Buried Alive,
the process of evaluation—a technique used by both psychologists and professional organizers
on the show-- came to a stand still as a psychologist attempted to ascertain the value of the
hoarder’s law books that were covered in rat feces. Attempting to showcase the therapeutic
process of understanding and detaching the woman’s value from the books themselves, the
psychologist utilizes a familiar decluttering trope in labeling the subject’s scholarly identity
formation with the objects as part of an inability to let go.
Psychologist: Tell me why these law books are so special to you?
Michelle: I spent 10 years in law school
Psychologist: Looking at the condition of them, do they still look viable to you?
Michelle: Under the cover they are still readable.
Psychologist: these are covered in rat feces and urine.
Michelle: I can cut off the cover. I just need the words.

As the interview continues, the psychologist reveals to the viewer that Michelle’s type of
hoarding is attached to her identity: “All these so things are false identities of what she wants to
achieve.” The process of intervention in this case involves a logic that is situated within the
decluttering trope. That is, when comparing an intervention process in shows like Clean House
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and thinking about the language used to assess and evaluate why subject’s clutter, a similar logic
can be traced when looking at the other end of the clutter spectrum. As a hoarding figure,
Michelle’s reluctance to see her situation is part of the mental illness that is being exposed and
depicted in the show’s narrative structure. At the same time, part of the therapeutic logic is to set
up an exercise or scenario in which the subject must perform his or her illness as part of a self-
help situation, in which there is still a question of whether or not the subject understands the
extent of their predicament. McCarthy articulates this reality TV convention as one of many
“traumatic teachings” that define the format.
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The “traumatic teachings” become visualized in
the form of a broken down and decaying piano, the unread stacks upon stacks of books, and
other various unfinished projects that all stand in as part of the hoarder’s eventual understanding
(and the viewer’s understanding) of a life taken over by unruly desires. Anthropologist Susan
Lepselter explains this unfulfillment as part of a larger fantasy that constructs hoarding
narratives: “The fantastic, ambivalent, unruly desire for the endless potential of a chaotic state
can be shaped and tamed by instructing the hoarder in the ways of performing the proper use and
exchange of commodities.”
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Through the therapy narrative, the objects themselves become the
literal and metaphorical clutter that impedes the patient’s progress to lead a better life.
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Disaster Hoarding
To understand the disaster economy that has arisen out of the hoarding phenomena it is
helpful to consider the different agencies and forms of labor that have become intertwined with
the psychological and physical cleanup that accompanies a hoarding diagnosis. Both reality
shows focus heavily on a community approach to resources and types of aid that contribute to the
cleanup process. The term ‘community’ reflects the mixture of public and private resources that
accompany a hoarding cleanout. It is important to note that the show itself utilizes a mixture of
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volunteer (family and friends of the hoarding subject) and privately funded labor (professional
organizer, clean out crew, psychologist) at the expense of the network in aiding the subject’s
recovery process.
The actual costs associated with hoarding range significantly due to various contributing
factors to the hoard and the actual cleanup costs associated with securing the home. In a 2013
Forbes’s article, cleaning specialist Matt Paxton identifies the costs as somewhere between
15,000-60,000 dollars.
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Oftentimes the costs associated with a heavy cleanup include a variety
of services ranging from a clinical psychologist, cleaning services like Paxton’s own company
Clutter Cleaners, professional organizers, Pest control, bio-waste pick-up, and various other
cleanup and home remodeling/pricing services. The actual cost of a hoarding case can vary and
can sometimes be funded by state agencies in restoring an apartment or home or local task forces
that are dedicated to providing hoarding resources for lower income patients.
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The formation of
the San Francisco Hoarding Task Force in 2007 recently released their citywide report. Much of
the report’s findings center on low-income housing and taxpayer services that need additional
coordination to better assess and treat those with the behavior. The actual costs associated with
various public agencies that focus on hoarding or have clients with hoarding behavior are much
higher. In general, the report looked at agencies like the Department of Aging & Adult services
and found that extra cleaning costs amounted to $64,000.
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Landlord costs due to hoarding
behavior are further broken down into types of problems like pest control, loss of rent, eviction
and cleaning costs.
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The DSM categorization of hoarding is thought to help offset some of the
costs associated with the disease; however, much of the current treatment for hoarding continues
to be funded privately by individuals or charity organizations.
As much as the therapy narrative attempts to make sense out of the hoarding subject and
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to fix the psychic suffering of neglect, abuse, and living badly, the hoarding narrative also points
to what McCarthy articulates as “a story of unresolvable psychic pain.”
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The hoarding narrative
paints a broader image that is rooted within a visual post-2008 landscape of foreclosures and
financial fallouts that confront models of proper homeownership. The junk and clutter becomes
the main picture to how subjects preserve their lives. In a similar vein, cultural theorist Marita
Sturken writes about disaster spectacle in relation to what is abject. For Sturken, the remnant of
dust and its relation to 9/11 engage with the social and political implications of the debris: “Thus,
while the dust is still seen to be a remnant of the dead, its status as the toxic mix of pulverized
offices, computers, glass, and equipment has transformed it into a polluting substance.”
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Sturken’s notion of dust as a paradoxical and difficult thing to grasp in relation to the specificity
of an event like 9/11 offers a way to engage with the remnants of a much slower and uniquely
different cultural and financial event that shaped the housing and financial collapse in 2008. The
cultural signifier of the pile and how this symbol has become attached to the dirtiness and
anxiety over the fallout of home ownership speaks to how both the home itself and its upkeep is
at the center of consumer citizen debates. Referring back to the earlier set-up of hoarding and the
Collyer brothers case that began this chapter, theorist Scott Herring pinpoints the connection
between dirt, junk, and the cultural legacy that the brothers represented in what he looks at as an
“unfinished cultural history of disorder and ‘gross disorganization.’”
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The cultural legacy of dirt
and junk, and I would also add the pile, forms a powerful spectacle of objects that has been
pathologized and continues to be in the 21
st
-century representation of the recession. The visuality
of the pile as a source of shame and relationship to a subject’s failure at maintaining the home is
central to the organization and construction of both decluttering and hoarding narratives.
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The commodification of clutter narratives has extended into recession era trends
regarding the upkeep of the home. The recent focus on the labor of remediation and
extermination marks a particular turn in recession era home improvement. Restoration magazines
like R&R (Restoration and Remediation) have indicated a particular turn in addressing property
cleanup that emphasizes the more emotional competency that is required in dealing with those
who hoards: “Throughout these sensitive situations, it is imperative that the workers in a client’s
home are compassionate and considerate.”
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A 2009 New York Times article entitled,
“Foreclosure Trash-Out: Ill Fortune and it’s Leavings,” addresses the market for specialist
cleaning as a recession era necessity. The article further details the rebranding strategy of Real
Estate Investment firms in addressing the foreclosure crisis, “as a specialist in “home
preservation” — the process of cleaning, securing and maintaining foreclosed properties for
banks that begins with the process referred to as trashing out.”
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The nature of hoarding cleanup
and its emergence during a particular recession-era foreclosure crisis has created a boom for
“dirty” jobs that no one before the recession wanted to do, but have in recent years, found a
major market and labor pool of subjects starting up their own businesses. The labor of cleaning
out a foreclosure home involves an extreme amount of clutter removal, and as the article states,
the home becomes measured in cubic yards vs. the actual square footage of the property. The
physicality of the cleanup paints a much broader picture for those whose jobs it is to come in and
remake the home.
Understanding the way disaster intersects with middle-class notions of decluttering is
important to the classification of hoarding as part of a commodity and mental health narrative.
Disaster capitalism has co-opted a therapeutic approach regarding hoarding narratives that are
carefully constructed by non-traditional therapy roles. As I laid out in my introduction to this
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chapter, the rise of disaster capitalism as a response to a particular crisis like the 2007-2008
recession highlights the commodification of the crisis through a combination of professions and
services centered in and around the home. Both the rise of professional organizing industries and
disaster cleaning services and the deployment of this labor as treatment for mental health
reinforces how hoarding is deeply tied to consumer culture. I will focus the last section of my
analysis on three particular disaster-related specialists and their management of the home—the
cleaning expert, organizer, and the real estate agent-- and the transition and adaptation of therapy
as a mode of recession era labor outside the psychology field.
The visual spectacle of cleanup day is a narrative device featured in both hoarding
shows that highlights the tensions involved in cleaning out a debris-ridden home. The
participation of the psychologist and professional organizer are fundamental to the cleanout
process; however, the labor of particular home remediation specialists also factors into the
treatment of the hoarder. The arrival of various junk removal and hauling crews sets the stage to
what will be the featured climax of the show. The trucks are routinely featured as the contents of
the home are often dumped directly into the truck bed, eventually to be hauled away. The tension
that this process serves, offers a dramatic way for the hoarder to interact with a variety of
individuals, ranging from mental health experts, family members, and junk removal laborers.
The show’s psychologist becomes a frequent skeptic who openly admits to the unlikelihood of
the hoarder being able to handle the process of the dramatic and short removal period.
The attention to hoarding as a public crisis is deeply tied to earlier constructions of
decluttering types. Figures such as cleaning expert, Matt Paxton, use a language of therapy and
self help in assessing types of hoarders. In Paxton’s self-help book on hoarding, he identifies
nine variations of subjects and hoards he has come across as part of the cleaning process. Out of
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the nine listed, the “information junkie,” the “shopaholic,” the “do-it-yourselfer,” and “memory
keeper” resonate with those along a clutter continuum scale.
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Someone who is identified as a
“memory keeper” similarly stores items associated with their family and children in the form of
clothing, toys, and photographs. Paxton further articulates that this type of hoarding behavior has
more to do with “an unconscious effort to stop time.”
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The pathological implication of one who
identifies as a personal heirloom collector is reinforced by a similar therapeutic logic of desiring
or loving too much. In this instance, the act of holding onto the past in the form of outdated
objects is the obstacle to one’s well-being and mental health. The physicality of the objects as a
kind of force also defines the pathological implications of hoarding memory-related items. In
Paxton’s description of a particular client, who “lived alone in a trailer home,” the manifestation
of the clutter becomes hyper visual in the form of “two rooms filled five feet high with her
daughter’s dolls, toys, crafts, and clothes.”
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The physical description of the filled rooms offers
readers a way to visualize the disaster of holding onto one’s stuff and the consequences of rooms
that have reached the limits of their carrying capacity. If we are to return to the earlier discussion
on the clutter type who holds onto family photos, the language used to describe a person and/or
family that carries too much stuff becomes invested in a narrative of emotional loss and
realization. An Oprah magazine article entitled, “Coping with Memory Clutter,” featuring
professional organizer, Peter Walsh, highlights memory clutter framed in a way a particular
family deals with the fallout of a deceased son. The memorialization of the son becomes a
process in which the physicality of the clutter is channeled in the family’s emotional process of
touching and going through the physical objects associated with the son and his bedroom. Rather
than going through “piles,” the family goes through “good memory stuff” as part of the coping
mechanism in sorting out the family’s relationship to the son and their future life in the home.
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Stuff in this instance, for the popular de-cluttering narrative, is not organized or pathologized
into the force of physical piles, but rather, serves as a way for readers to understand their
orientation to stuff as healthy and proper. The evaluative criteria in defining “good” stuff vs.
“bad” stuff is wrapped into the family’s ability to prioritize certain material objects over others.
The reality TV spectacle of hoarding and intervention formats also illustrates an intense
fascination with the domestic space and clutter. Through visual cues like over-stuffed garages,
paper and books piled to the ceiling, a non-operating closet organizing system, the narrative
reveals signs more typically associated with the middle-class home. At the same time, the
spectacle of a domestic space beyond the repair of a makeover also reveals the limits to that
fantasy of a clean and functional space. “I get a high of superiority from watching their stories,
followed by the shame of using my leisure time to watch their self-destruction,” writes Tara
Ariano in a recent Slate piece on hoarding narratives. The hoarding narratives utilize a language
of clutter as a way to incorporate a larger audience; in other words, clutter becomes a diagnosis
that includes “pack rats” and those who may not be diagnosed as “hoarders,” but an audience
who, at the same time are the subject/consumers that have acquired too many objects. A&E
extreme clutter expert Matt Paxton makes this observation regarding the connection between
clutter and the pathology of hoarding: “Most hoarder houses end up looking like the owners
collect general clutter—too many old clothes, sheets and towels, tote bags, warehouse-sized
crates of food, and other items from daily life.”
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Already the notion of ‘clutter’ and the ‘hoarder’
share a similar set of characteristics regarding the slippery slope of those who are overwhelmed
by stuff. However, experts make a distinction between hoarding and clutter in the way that the
objects interfere with living a livable life.
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At the center of the hoarding narrative and its
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popularity in the 21
st
century is the continued role that reality TV, therapy, and consumerism
play in assessing how subjects live meaningful lives.
The fascination with hoarding has as much to do with objects and the hoarder’s
relationship to them as it has to do with the larger spectacle of climbing over piles of papers and
debris that clutter and transform the boundaries of the home: “For hoarders, every object is rich
with detail. In this way, the physical world of hoarders is different and much more expansive
than that of the rest of us.”
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The physicality of the pile in the hoarding narrative is the obstacle
that cleaning experts must constantly negotiate. Beginning with an outside shot, the home’s
interior and exterior are juxtaposed to emphasize the visual classification that is necessary to
identify a hoarder’s home—a mass of stuff. This juxtaposition of space highlights the hidden
nature of hoarding by showing the home as any other home on the outside with a hidden secret
that expands beyond the viewer’s imagination. Once inside, the focus on the items within the
hoard such as decades worth of newspapers, gallons of bodily fluids, discarded food debris, and
various personal possessions is presented in a way that is beyond shocking to the viewer.
Featured A&E cleaning specialist, Matt Paxton’s own particular brand as an extreme
clutter expert provides an important look into the rise of particular hoarding services that include
the combination of therapeutic and “dirty jobs.” Paxton’s own online presence (which includes
social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and his own podcast) has also created awareness
surrounding his clean-out work and the therapeutic approach he and his company have adopted
in treating clutter as a disease. Paxton writes in his hoarding self-help book, “to work with the
hoarding families, it's not about the trash, hoarding is about a mental situation and you have to
totally understand the hoarder and their family before you can go in that house."
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Paxton’s most
recent partnership with ServiceMaster restoration provides an important link between the
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therapeutic and disaster services that are now associated with hoarding as a particular cleanup
category.
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In an interview with the president of the company, the focus on restoration as part of
total cleanup is expressed as part of a therapeutic recovery for disaster situations: “The similarity
is there for the hoarding business, estate cleanup, as well as the work we do every day with
restoration, whether it’s a small homeowner’s job or some of the major catastrophes.”
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Much of
Paxton’s brand and work within the restoration and disaster relief community highlights an
extension of more common services ranging from decluttering jobs, senior relocations, hoarding,
and full service moving.
Paxton’s role on A&E’s Hoarders ranges from more of a therapeutic figure to hardcore
cleaning specialist who constantly moves between these two roles. In the first episode of the 6
th

season of the show, Paxton becomes immersed in the hoarding and cleanup process in an unusual
way after agreeing to spend a night in a hoarder’s home. The narrative structuring device of the
expert making contact with the subject and assessing the condition of the home is coupled with
the show’s attempts to visualize the internal workings of a hoarder’s mental state. The sequence
begins with Paxton’s introduction to the subjects two sons and setting up Paxton’s inquiry into
the home and the pathology:
Paxton: How bad is it in there?
Son: It’s bad. It’s really bad.
Paxton (confessional interview): I’m trying to get into Patty’s head. We all see how they
survive during the daytime. What I don’t know is how a Hoarder survives the night.”

In night vision, Paxton narrates his walk through the home. “I know there’s spiders in this house.
I know there are snakes in this house. I know there are rats in this house, but I don’t see them.”
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The visual spectacle of the home is captured more through Paxton’s stumbling off-screen sounds
as the visual space of clutter encapsulates the frame. The sequence itself shares similarities with
the channel’s more masculine and adventure-oriented programming associated with dirty jobs
and cleaning.
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As Paxton narrates what it is like to be inside a hoarder’s home at night, the labor
provided by his role becomes a therapeutic assessment that uses the architecture of the home as a
metaphor for the hoarder’s mental state. “I can’t image this being a safe spot,” Paxton reveals to
the camera. The camera cuts to images of boxes upon boxes cluttering the frame with close-ups
of animal feces and discarded trash. Paxton furthers this narration of the home by identifying the
safe spot, “there are pizza boxes and cookies.” Sitting down amongst the pile, Paxton allows for
the viewers to voyeuristically experience the hoard as a site of suffering but also refuge for the
hoarder. Aurally, the sequence uses short bursts of music that are eerie in tonality to further
convey a heightened sense of danger for Paxton as he attempts to understand the hoard within the
confines of the home. As an outside expert, Paxton’s expertise on the hoard and the effects of the
behavior on the home are linked to the trauma of a subject who has been unable to process both
the physical conditions of the hoard and the subject’s past abuse.
Paxton also utilizes therapeutic language as part of the clean out process. For example, in
season 5, episode 4 of Hoarders, Paxton’s dual role as a cleaning expert and therapist is
highlighted as he helps a mother and daughter confront the hoard. Performing a similar role to
the psychologist in staging a traumatic intervention in the domestic space of the home, Paxton
confronts the mother and daughter regarding the hoarding behavior and its consequences. “This
is the therapy you need to get better… If you continue to avoid it, it will look like this again,”
Paxton claims in front of the camera. The scene itself visually reaffirms the process of the clean
out and the standstill of the process by the hoarder in attempting to reconcile her feelings about
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letting go of the stuff and confronting her traumatic past. As the episode reaches its climax,
Paxton is interviewed in the final stages as part of the assessment of the mother-daughter
relationship: “This family stayed relentless. They never left. Unconditional love. That is how you
help a hoarder.” The confessional interview by Paxton reiterates the transformative process. At
the same time, the labor of recovery is also juxtaposed to the sheer volume of the hoard. “Carrie
let go of 55,000 lbs. of stuff. She is ready to move on,” Paxton states to the camera. Paxton’s on-
screen presence and labor as a cleaning specialist is intermixed with a therapeutic approach as
part of the ultimate treatment process. Admittedly, the hoarding narrative and Paxton’s labor on
the show refrain from the same sort of makeover logic that structure many reality formats that
feature the re-made subject via commodities. In this instance, Paxton’s labor and tie-ins with
home cleaning and removal services reinforces a different orientation toward the intervention
format that highlight the charitable role of line of work that deals with removing bodily fluids,
human waste, and various objects as part of the subject’s remaking process.
In addition to the labor of a cleaning expert, the function of the professional organizer
also becomes part of the logic in organizing the disaster space. Emanating from a middle-class
narrative associated with clutter, the role of the professional organizer in a hoarding narrative
carries a familiar logic in dividing and reassessing the types and quality of objects that occupy
the subject’s home. Featured organizer, Dorothy Breininger functions in a similar quasi-
therapeutic role that balances the therapy of psychology with the practical and dirtier labor of
cleaning and organizing the home. The featured event of the clean out becomes a way for the
organizer to showcase expertise by creating a plan for the hoard by having the hoarder construct
separate piles of things to keep, give away, and to recycle/throw out. Additional labor in the form
of organizing a clean-out crew is also part of the job in helping “usually a month’s worth of work
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completed in a matter of two days.”
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In season 6 of Hoarders, the role of the organizer becomes
similarly featured as part of the therapeutic labor in assessing the condition of the home and its
objects. Offering a tough-love approach, Dorothy’s role within the show and as part of the
treatment team assesses the functionality of objects like clothing and furniture, while also
offering counseling to the hoarding figure regarding the actual space of the home. Stressing the
volume and visuality of the hoard, Dorothy exclaims to the camera, “20,000 pieces of clothing.”
The pathology of the hoarding subject’s condition is captured as Dorthoy attempts to reason with
the subject regarding the value of the objects. “What is this for?” Dorothy asks holding up a red
children’s outfit. “My nephew’s daughter will wear that,” a subject claims. Quickly Dorothy
identifies the lack of physical space to accommodate an object without immediate value.
Addressing the camera again, the physical movement of objects and the lack of progress made
during the cleanout process becomes intensified as Dorothy admits to the relocation of the hoard
rather than getting rid of it: “I cleared out all of the bedrooms but the rest of the house is full
again.” The hoarding narrative and the labor of the professional organizer in this case serve to
reiterate the spatial complexities of collecting too much stuff. At the same time, the therapeutic
function of the organizer also invokes an additional labor of marriage counseling when it comes
to the space of the family home. For example, in the first episode of season six, featured hoarder
Debra must confront both her rocky marriage and the cluttered beyond capacity space of the
master bedroom. Bringing the couple together, Dorothy uses a language that addresses the
problem solving skills involved in a partnership: “This is your master bedroom…you have to
share some of the work. I would like you to stay here together and come up with a plan on how
to get rid of this.” The couple proceeds to argue about the space; however, a major plot point
within the show is to reveal the tension and breakdown of the family unit due to not only the
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physical collection of objects, but the stubbornness of the hoarding figure who cannot “see” her
own dysfunction.
Both hoarding narratives utilize a makeover trope as part of the climatic turn for
professionals to help subjects re-achieve their life as clean, whole, and proper citizens. As
featured Hoarders professional organizer Dorothy claims, “We like to think that making over the
person creates a new being…like making over the house.”
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Brenda Weber argues the makeover
trope is invested in a complicated array of powers and forces build proper and highly visible
citizenship: “TV makeovers, overall, are fueled by what defines the imagined American citizen:
autonomy, free-will, upward-mobility, self-determination, self-construction, and meritocracy.”
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The proper citizen represents a pull between the production of a middle-class sensibility
combined with the subject’s own reluctance and non-normativity that puts them into the spotlight
to be remade. The TLC network in particular uses the makeover trope in their programming;
however, the use of this trope in Hoarding: Buried Alive presents a much more abbreviated fix to
the larger problem of mental illness as being curable within the visual realm. The show uses this
trope as the final segment of the show to quickly show the six-week aftercare process for the
hoarder and the progress they have made with both the professional organizer and psychologist.
Both shows do not focus on the long-term effects of hoarding as a behavior, but rather the
shorter-term revelations of an intense 1-2 day cleanout of the hoarder’s home. It is not
uncommon for TLC’s Hoarding to feature a subject under incredible pressure and odds to
actually cleanout their home due to an eviction/relocation notice.
The recognition of hoarding as a problem concerning public and private resources also
includes the role of property investors and Real Estate agents who have emerged in the post 2008
economy as part of a recovery narrative featured on reality TV. Working with a team of cleaners,
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psychologists, organizers, and exterminators, the real estate agent becomes an agent of care in
facilitating the management of the home and mental health. A number of episodes for both
Hoarders and Hoarding Buried Alive focus on the possibility of eviction and the loss of the
home as a central catalyst. Rarely, though, does the show feature a subject who has already lost
their home at the point of filming. In TLC’s Hoarding: Buried Alive, the 7
th
season featured a
subject whose home had been foreclosed and purchased by a Canadian real estate investment
team as part of flipping plan. Airing on November 6
th
, 2013, the episode entitled “Full of Rats”
refrains from going into the subject’s background except to show a picture of her husband and
child (both of which are blurred for privacy purposes). Rather, the viewer is introduced to a
figure who has lost everything—her family, well-being, and most importantly her home;
however the reasons for this loss and triggers are never fully articulated or explored. The episode
highlights a slightly different situation for the subject due to the fallout of a foreclosure crisis.
With the help of two home flippers--two brothers from Canada with a home buying
business—the narrative transforms into a story of charity in which the process and treatment
becomes wrapped into the labor by the homebuyers in helping the subject cleanout and regain
her home. The actual restoration of the home becomes complete once the brothers resell the
home back to the original homeowner. At the same time, the show refrains from going into the
economic realities of the purchase except to point out (in voiceover narration) that the original
homeowner had lost the home due to back taxes on her mortgage. How the woman received a
loan from the bank does not factor into the narrative and the eventual philanthropic move by the
home flippers in giving back the woman her newly remodeled home. The house flippers become
part of the episode’s philanthropic approach in helping the woman regain her livelihood. In the
final minutes of the episode, the woman who moments before struggled to get rid of rat-covered
95

law books is suddenly returned to a completely gutted out interior with new appliances and
furniture. The visual spectacle of a gutted-out and newly remodeled home is signified by new-
looking furniture and freshly painted walls. In an interview with a local Canadian real estate
newspaper, the brothers revealed that the furniture was in fact donated from a different property
they had purchased in the region. The article also highlights the “reality TV bug” the brother’s
received from doing charitable work like this. In many ways, the work of charity—in this case,
in service of a subject with severe mental health issues on top of losing her home—becomes
wrapped into the deal of doing the show as part of a future career launch.
99

The final reveal or after image of Michelle’s home reveals the brothers’ remodeling of
the domestic space as treatment in dealing with her mental health. The “after” image of the home
reinstates the value of the home as belonging within a middle-class narrative of comfort and
aesthetic respectability. In Weber’s assessment of the before and after image, “The makeover
enforces this need for self-care in After-bodies, while stressing that Before-bodies are incapable
of such salutary management.”
100
Even though the makeover takes place in the last three minutes
of the show’s narrative, it serves as an important structuring device in understanding how a
figure like Michelle becomes part of this process, whether or not she completely understands the
process or not. The fact that she is appreciative and in awe of her newly transformed home
reinforces a certain narrative logic of charity and her own second chance at performing the role
of a proper homeowner. In a confessional interview, Michelle narrates her surprise at the Gore
brother’s desire to sell back the house to her at the original flipping price: “When I hear…I feel
so fortunately…I feel so blessed.” The scene plays out visually with Michelle riding up in new
car and seeing the complete transformation of her new home. The brothers give her a tour in
which she notices features like the fireplace and textures of the furniture. Repeatedly, though, the
96

brothers play a paternalistic role in reminding Michelle to keep the home clean: “It’s your house
now…keep it clean from now on.” At the same time, if we are to understand the logic of the
show and Michelle’s struggle with a hoarding pathology, the makeover in this instance also
operates on a much darker, paradoxical level. The spectacle of the makeover and the hoarding
narrative lends itself to a certain visual process of signification of outward renewal. The effects
and treatment of a mental illness become part of this spectacle and after-image in a way that
conflates the treatment of hoarding as part of a process of middle-class values and aspiration of
home ownership. Even though the show does emphasize continued aftercare therapy, the
visuality of mental illness and its equation with a recession era, class conflict further frames the
foreclosure crisis and the pathological within a certain fantasy logic.
Conclusion
The emergence of hoarding narratives as part of a post-2008 economy reflects how
mental illness has been co-opted as part of a lifestyle format, while also integrated into the
spectacle of the fatigue of the domestic space and home. The narrative is rooted in a middle-class
popularized notion of decluttering logic taken to its logical and recession disaster era extreme. At
the heart of the hoarding narrative and its contemporary genealogy in relation to consumer
discourses is understanding how cultural value construct an American public’s relationship to
well-being and living the good life. The Collyer brother’s case and the construction of hoarding
by the mainstream media offers insight into how the disorder was first visualized and
pathologized through particular forms of collecting and terms like ‘junk.’ Almost a half-century
later, the spectacle of disaster in the form of hoarding speaks to an increasingly complicated way
in which reality TV formats engage with cultural politics of the recession era. The proliferation
of shows featuring addiction have fused with home improvement, cleaning, and other makeover
97

tropes as part of more general representation of the pathological in the post-2008 era. The
representation and therapeutic treatment of mental illness on reality TV continues to mark the
more privatized, charity focused treatment of health in the U.S. Even though these shows bring
together a community of experts and volunteers in highlighting the much larger impact of
hoarding behavior, the show also operates on a level that reinforces the self-made subject who
must understand the consequences of his or her behavior. The hoarding narrative and its media
attention over the past five years have also coincided with a DSM official diagnosis and mental
health classification. By legitimizing the pathology, the rise of therapeutic labor outside of the
psychology field is a major source of treatment of the behavior and the clean out of the home. At
the same time, the treatment for mental health has a much different consumer and civic-minded
responsibility than compared to the self-care that constructs much of physical health. Thinking
about health in terms of major corporate consumer events that coalesce around particular
diseases like Cancer and the physical activism of walk-a-thons and 5ks, the notion of disease as a
public commodity and which diseases become valuable and represented is part of how health is
configured and prioritized.
The turn to decluttering as a middle-class solution to the removal of excess goods and
unused objects is rooted in a therapeutic language that connects objects with the trauma of
various life events. Hoarding straddles an uncomfortable line that shares in a middle-class
decluttering logic of therapy and ridding oneself of emotional baggage. However, a number of
hoarding narratives are also all about extreme and dire financial situations in which subjects have
lost jobs, homes, and families that highlight the classed constructions of acquisition and types of
consumer behavior that fall outside the middle-class.
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The decluttering narrative reiterates the wholeness of the home. It is distinctly middle-
class in that it proposes a way to rid the home of cheap objects in favor of a more aesthetically
and financially pleasing way to live under the stress of work, children, and the maintenance of
the home. This is a narrative that is about safety and upkeep and self-management par
excellence. Clutter is dangerous and causes problems but can be solved and overcome within the
therapeutic framework. The middle-class family understands stuff as therapeutically linked to
their happiness and emotional stability. On the other hand, the emergence of the hoarding
narrative as an extension of the decluttering story also shares in similar characteristics of self-
realization and performing the labor of organization taught by figures like the psychologist and
professional organizer. At the same time, the hoarding narrative that is framed in a recession era
context also illustrates an uncomfortable connection between the middleclass home and
visualizing disaster. The management of disaster and the economy that has emerged in taking
care of and managing the home frames how a pathology like hoarding represents a more
downward trend in the effects of overconsumption. Additionally, the mental health framework
by which the hoarding narrative operates also complicates how hoarding is presented in relation
to a decluttering narrative. The reality for hoarding narratives is much more destitute and situated
within a downward mobile economy that signals an exclusion on the hoarder’s part from
normative consumer world. The intervention format works to save the hoarding figure, to clean
out their home and offer therapeutic help; however, the reality of mental illness in this case also
becomes complicated by structural histories and inequalities that are exasperated by housing in
the U.S. and the production of the suburban dream home. The complicated use of space and the
excesses of owning too many appliances, clothing, and other household objects is rearticulated in
the hoarding narrative to show what happens when clutter goes beyond the middle-class norm of
99

stuffed garages and messy bedrooms, to the piles of clothing, books, and other debris that
transform the confines of the home into the ultimate uncanny form. Ultimately, by examining the
relationship between the decluttering and hoarding narratives in a recession era economy, the
therapeutic has come to signal an adaptable model that demonstrates how consumerism and
pathology are intertwined in treating and cleaning subjectivities.

100

NOTES

1
Stuart Levine, “A&E Hoarders’ Holds Auds,” Variety, August 18, 2009,
http://variety.com/2009/scene/news/a-e-hoarders-holds-auds-1118007429/.
2
"TLC holds on to 'Hoarding'." Daily Variety. May 5, 2010.
3
Ken Tucker, “Hoarders, Hoarders: Augustine’s House, “ Entertainment, January 17, 2015,
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20322302,00.html.
4
TLC is known for lifestyle and makeover shows like What Not to Wear and Say Yes to the Dress.
5
Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, eds. Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in An Age of
Austerity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
6
Brenda R. Weber, Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2009), 7.
7
Meghan Lewit, “The Recession Hits Reality TV,” The Atlantic, May 6, 2011,
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/05/the-recession-hits-reality-tv/238490/.
8
Diane Negra and Yvone Tasker, 7.
9
Samantha King, “Civic Fitness,” in Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, ed.
Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 201.
10
King, “Civic Fitness,” 202.
11
Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2007), 5.
12
Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, Better Living Through Reality TV (Malden: Blackwell Publishing,
2008), 86.
13
Ouellette and Hay, 86-87.
14
Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1985), 24.
15
Gilman, 24.
16
See: Jane M. Shattuc’s The Talking Cure (New York: Routledge, 1997), 112. Much of reality TV’s
foray into therapeutic discourses and self-help is also all about management and control. For Shattuc, the
confessional format signals a much more ingrained notion of “social control.” That is, “Talk show
viewers learn to police themselves in the name of ‘mental health.’” The intervention format similarly
relies on a language of psychology and what Shattuc identifies as an American revision to this language.
17
Mimi White, Tele-Advising: Therapeutic Discourse in American Television (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 19.
18
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 2.
19
See: Kevin Fox Gotham, “Make it Right? Brad Pitt, Post-Katrina Rebuilding, and the
Spectacularization of Disaster,” In Commodity Activism, ed. Roopali Mukherjee
and Sarah Banet-Weiser (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 97-113.
20
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador), 2007.
21
Gotham, 105.
22
Harold Faber, “Homer Collyer, Harlem Recluse, Found Dead at 70,” New York Times, March 22, 1947,
ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851-2009).
23
Faber, “Homer Collyer, Harlem Recluse, Found Dead at 70.”
24
Faber, “Homer Collyer, Harlem Recluse, Found Dead at 70.”
25
Scott Herring, "Collyer curiosa: A brief history of hoarding." Criticism 53, no. 2 (2011): 172.
26
Ibid., 173.
27
Ibid., 173.
28
Andy Newman, “Collyers’ brothers Mansion’ is Code for Firefighters’ Nightmare,” New York Times,
July 5, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/nyregion/05hoard.html?_r=0.
101

29
Stephanie Schorow, “Dangers of Too Much Stuff,” NFPA Journal, January 1, 2012,
http://www.nfpa.org/newsandpublications/nfpa-journal/2012/january-february-2012/features/the-dangers-
of-too-much-stuff.
30
Jeanne E. Arnold, Anthony P. Graesch, Enzo Ragazzini, Elinor Ochs, Life at Home in the Twenty-First
Century (Los Angeles: The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2012), 3.
31
Jane E. Brody, “It’s Time to Say Goodbye to all that Stuff,” New York Times, November 21, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/health/the-hoarder-in-you-a-book-that-can-help-cut-through-the-
clutter.html?_r=0.
32
“Gallery: The New Junk Drawer,” UCLA Today, June 19, 2012, http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/celf-
the-new-junk-drawer.
33
Arnold et al., 24.
34
Arnold et al., 26.
35
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A social critique of the Judgment of taste (Harvard University Press,
1984).
36
Meredith Bryan, “What Kind of Clutterer Are You?” Oprah.com, February 14, 2012,
http://www.oprah.com/home/Whats-Your-Clutter-Style-Peter-Walsh-Declutter-Tips/5.
37
Oprah’s decluttering movement is one of the more popular and repeated narratives in her empire. The
annual decluttering feature in O Magazine, “Decluttering Your Life,” offers readers and viewers tips on
how to rid the home of excess. In the March 2014 issue of the magazine, Oprah shares with her readers
her own battle with clutter and the event of the yard sale as part of her removal and sharing process. “And
what I need is dogs and books, light and space. Instead of feeling walled in by stuff, I want to feel
surrounded by calm.” See: http://www.oprah.com/home/Oprahs-Yard-Sale-Oprahs-Auction_2.
38
Charles Kammerer, Real Simple Media Kit. 2015. http://www.realsimple.com/microsites/media-
kit/#mission-statement
39
“The Quality Consumer,” Real Simple Media Kit. 2015. http://www.realsimple.com/microsites/media-
kit/pdf/rs_the_quality_consumer.pdf
40
Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 171.
41
Ibid., 172.
42
Ibid., 174.
43
Ibid., 175.
44
The Style Channel is now owned by Esquire.
45
Amanda D. Lotz, Beyond Prime Time: Television Programming in the Post-Network Era (New York:
Routledge), 2009. Lotz defines the “post network era” as television’s transition as entertainment and
institutional force in the 2000s. Part of this marking of a new era had to do with shifting formats and
viewing habits (DVR and other devices that allowed viewers to record at watch episodes later).
46
Matt Zoller Seitz, “Reality TV: A Blood Sport that must Change,” Salon. 18 August, 2011.
http://www.salon.com/2011/08/18/reality_tv_blood_sport/.
47
Scott Collins, “TLC’s Hook on the Heartland,” LA Times, June 20, 2010,
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jun/20/entertainment/la-ca-tlc-palin-20100620.
48
Marisa Guthrie, “TLC and Discovery Chief Eileen O’Neil on ‘Honey Boo Boo,” The Hollywood
Reporter. Sept. 20, 2012.
49
Peter Walsh began his role as an organization expert on the TLC show, Clean Sweep (2003-). He later
became a fixture on Oprah’s network OWN with his own decluttering show, Extreme Clutter. He has a
number of self-help books on various aspects of decluttering that connect to larger social, economic, and
health issues facing the American public.
50
Peter Walsh, Does This Clutter Make my Butt Look Fat? (New York: Free Press, 2008), 8.
51
Jessica Winter, “Peter Walsh’s Surprising Way to Clean Up Clutter,” Oprah.com, March 2009,
http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Peter-Walshs-Secrets-to-Cleaning-Up-Mess-and-Clutter.
102

52
Sara Skillen, “Startup Stories: A Journey to Professional Organizing,” Project Eve, October 7, 2013,
http://www.projecteve.com/startup-stories-a-journey-to-professional-organizing/.
53
See: “Organize This: A Six-Figure Income” on CNNMoney.com. This article was published in 2005
(before the economic crash); however, it situates the professional organizer within a part-time economy.
At the same time, those who are willing to work full-time (at least according to this article) can reap the
benefits of a possible six-figure profit by doing freelance work or owning a freelance company that hires
out organizers.
54
“Winners Announced at 7
th
Annual NAPO Los Angeles Organizing Awards,” NAPO Press Release,
January 31, 2013, http://www.prlog.org/12071005-winners-announced-at-7th-annual-napo-los-angeles-
organizing-awards.html.
55
“Institute for Challenging Disorganization History,” https://challengingdisorganization.org/content/icd-
history.
56
“Frequently Asked Questions,” http://challengingdisorganization.org/content/frequently-asked-
questions-public.
57
Robert London, “Decluttering—Is it Therapy?” Psychology Today, November 5, 2010,
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/two-minute-shrink/201011/decluttering-is-it-therapy.
58
Clutter-Hoarding Scale (St. Louis: The Institute For Challenging Disorganization, 2011).
59
Mary Beth Schweisert, “Quarryville Organizer Helps Woman on TLC’s Hoarding,” Lancaster Online,
December 3, 2013, http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/926855_Quarryville-organizer-helps-woman-
on-TLC-s--Hoarding-.html.
60
Craig Wilson, “Got Clutter? There Are Experts to Help Dig Your Way Out,” USA Today, April 16,
2012, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/home/story/2012-03-29/clutter-professional-
organizers/54302250/1.
61
Linda Koopersmith, Beverly Hill’s Organizer’s Home Organizing Bible (Gloucester: Fair Winds Press,
2005), 58.
62
Lindsay Abrams, “‘Hoarders:’ From a TV Spectacle to a Newly Defined Psychiatric Condition,” The
Atlantic. August 10
th
, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/08/hoarders-from-a-tv-
spectacle-to-a-newly-defined-psychiatric-condition/260997/.
63
Ferris Jabr, “The Newest Edition of Psychiatry’s “Bible,” the DSM- 5, is Complete,” Scientific
American, January 28, 2013, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dsm-5-update/.
64
Frost, Randy O., Gail Steketee, and David F. Tolin. "Diagnosis and assessment of hoarding disorder."
Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 8 (2012): 219-242.
65
Frost et al. “Diagnosis and assessment of hoarding disorder.”
66
Illouz, Eva. Saving the modern soul, 165.
67
Ibid., 165.
68
Mayes, Rick, and Allan V. Horwitz. "DSM‐III and the revolution in the classification of mental
illness." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 41, no. 3 (2005): 250.
69
Mayes and Horwitz, 250.
70
Sarah Kliff, Seven Facts About America’s Mental Health-Care System,” Washington Post, December
17, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/17/seven-facts-about-americas-
mental-health-care-system/.
71
Anna McCarthy," Reality television: a neoliberal theater of suffering," Social text 25, no. 4 93 (2007):
19.
72
Sanjaya Saxena and Karron M. Maidment, "Treatment of compulsive hoarding," Journal of clinical
Psychology 60, no. 11 (2004): 1143-1154, doi: 10.1002/jclp.20079.
73
McCarthy, 25.
74
Susan Lepselter, "The disorder of things: Hoarding narratives in popular media," Anthropological
Quarterly 84, no. 4 (2011): 941, doi: 10.1353/anq.2011.0053.
103

75
See: Susan Lepselter, “Intimating Disaster: Choices, Women, and Hoarding Shows,” in Reality
Gendervision, ed. Brenda R. Weber (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 259-281. Lepselter explores
hoarding reality TV narratives as indicative of a larger societal expression of crisis. A key component for
Lepselter’s exploration of disaster and hoarding also connects to the representation of mothers and the
larger neoliberal framework of “choice motherhood” that is invoked on these hoarding narratives.
76
Robert Laura, “Will Retirement Turn you into a Hoarder?” Forbes, August 23, 2013,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlaura/2013/08/23/will-retirement-turn-you-into-a-hoarder/.
77
Beyond Overwhelmed: The Impact of Compulsive Hoarding in San Francisco and Recommendations to
Reduce Negative Impacts and Improve Care (San Francisco Task Force Report, 2009),
http://www.mentalhealthsf.org//documents/Task%20Force%20Report%20%28FINAL%29.pdf.
78
San Francisco Task Force Report, 19.
79
San Francisco Task Force Report. 23.
80
McCarthy, 25.
81
Marita Sturken, Tourists of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 181.
82
Herring, 162.
83
Andrew Whitmarsh, “Hoarding: Not Your Typical Restoration Job,” R&R, December 2, 2013,
http://www.randrmagonline.com/articles/85882-hoarding-not-your-typical-restoration-job.
84
Steven Kurutz, “Foreclosure Trash-Out,” New York Times, March 19, 2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/garden/19trash.html.
85
Matt Paxton, The Secret Lives of Hoarders (New York: Perigee Book, 2011), 19-29.
86
Matt Paxton, 29.
87
Paxton, 29.
88
Peter Walsh, “Coping with Memory Clutter,” Oprah.com, January 1, 2006,
http://www.oprah.com/oprahs-lifeclass/Coping-with-Memory-Clutter/5.
89
Paxton, 19.
90
Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee, Stuff (New York: Mariner Books), 2011.
91
Frost & Steketee, 15.
92
“Teaming Up to Help Hoarders,” MyFoxMemphis, November 7, 2013,
http://www.myfoxmemphis.com/story/23910074/helping-hoarders-one-home-at-a-time#ixzz2sI97hzSf.
93
Eric Fish, “Talking Hoarding: The R&R Q&A,” R&R, November 27, 2013,
http://www.randrmagonline.com/articles/85888-talking-hoarding-the-rr-qa.
94
Fish, http://www.randrmagonline.com/articles/85888-talking-hoarding-the-rr-qa.
95
Negra, Diane. "Gender Bifurcation in the Recession Economy: Extreme Couponing and Gold Rush
Alaska." Cinema Journal 53, no. 1 (2013): 123-129. See A&E shows like Storage Wars, Shipping Wars,
Parking Wars, and Duck Dynasty which are part of what theorist Diane Negra identifies as part of the
gendering economy in reality TV as part of a recession era turn. Negra looks specifically at the reiteration
of “the glorification of working-class resilience and adaptation” as part of a masculinized representation
of labor in the recession era.
96
Deb Lee, “Hoarders Snapshot: My Life as a Hoarding Expert by Dorothy Breininger,” Organize to
Revitalize, January 21, 2010, http://dallisonlee.com/blog/2010/01/21/hoarders-snapshot-my-life-as-a-
hoarding-expert-by-dorothy-breininger/.
97
Hoarders, Season 6, episode 8.
98
Weber, 79.
99
Paul J. Henderson, “Buried Alive: B.C. Brothers Tackle Hoarder’s House Crawling with Rats,” The
Vancouver Sun, November 6, 2013,
http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/television/Buried+alive+brothers+tackle+hoarder+house/91
32020/story.html.
100
Weber, 51.
104

Chapter 3.
How to be Pinteresting: Maternal Scrapbooking and Emotional Well-being in the 21
st
-
Century

In 2012, the website College Humor launched the animated short video entitled “The Fall
of Pinterest,” a parody that uses the social media site Pinterest to illustrate the cultural wars
between gendered online spaces. As the tagline for the video claims, “The Internet’s only safe
haven for girls comes under attack. From the rest of the Internet.”
1
The digital short portrays
Pinterest as a place of feminine collecting and lifestyle culture through bushels of kale, glue
guns, and cupcakes. Set to a Middle-Earth Game-of-Thrones-style backdrop, the animated short
highlights male-dominated spaces, like Reddit, and figures (memes, trolls and Facebook bros)
and the type of battle between the sexes that plays out on online spaces and the gendered forms
of control that occupy particular online and social media platforms.
The video also addresses how gender-specific labeling, specifically with respect to
female consumption, occurs in online spaces. In 2012, the website Buzzfeed ran a tongue-in-
cheek opinion piece, entitled “32 Signs You’re Addicted to Pinterest,” that similarly parodied
common posts on the site: mason jar concoctions/lighting fixtures, barn weddings, braids,
rainbow cakes, and children’s billowy clothing. The article was one of many that identified
collecting as indicative of consuming with a certain level of sophistication and therefore of one’s
sense of style and taste. The article plays with the frivolity of feminine collections and how the
status of weddings and mason jar lighting fixtures, for example, have become signs of one’s
status regarding time, money, and lifestyle.
Pinterest markets collecting—a historically informal and feminine domestic activity—as
a central experience to on and offline participation, organizing one’s imagined and lived life. In
105

order to understand the historical precursors to this modern phenomenon, I situate Pinterest
within the history of scrapbooking and collecting, examining the gendered aspects of these
leisure activities. I consider the adaptation of an older media format, but to also examine the
gendered dimension of scrapbooking and its manifestation in a contemporary online
environment. Key to understanding this history and its manifestation in the digital realm is
considering Pinterest as a system of emotional well-being in which users prove worthy, class-
based motherhood. The symbol of the virtual “pin” as a visual mode of communicating a
subject’s interests, aspirations, and tastes recalls a history of 19
th
and 20th-century female
scrapbookers celebrating refinement, beauty, and order.
Since the platform emerged in 2009, media and tech critics overwhelmingly acknowledge
Pinterest as a feminine space made up of users between the ages of 25-35. Forbes’ article
“Women are From Pinterest, Men are From Google+?” and the Washington Posts’ article
“Addicted to a Website Called Pinterest: Digital Crack for Women” illustrate the critical
attention devoted to the platform’s addiction-like quality amongst female users. As one reporter
claimed as part of her own personal investigation of the site, “Pinterest has earned a reputation as
a site for Mormon housewives, mommy bloggers, and basic white girls.”
2
Even though the site
has many objects that range the spectrum of interests and classification, this critical discourse
focuses on how feminine collecting culture has shaped the site and the contradictions involved in
high and low cultural forms within an online, participatory environment like Pinterest. The
platform’s appeal lies in its more intimate and invitation-only status for creative professionals
and those well connected within the design and arts world in the early iterations of the site. The
rise of Pinterest as a feminine coded site also reflects a performance of good motherhood and the
106

culture of recipe sharing, design, and kid activities that make up much of the content and
popularity of the site.
Emerging within an era of financial and technological anxiety, Pinterest has flourished as
a digital space for female users to fantasize about living the good life through the act of
collecting. As Angela McRobbie and Yvone Tasker explore in their work on television and
popular culture in the recession era, “Recessionary popular culture has latched onto the
commodification of domestic femininities in ways continuous with but also distinct from
previous eras, with female consumer resourcefulness becoming a new theme on many fronts.”
3

Accordingly, Pinterest has evolved in the post-2008 climate by adopting a marketing rhetoric
centered on resourcefulness. As a representative from the digital platform’s business marketing
video claims, “They use Pinterest as a planning tool…the more detailed information you have,
the easier is it going to be to see the pin that you are promoting maps back onto their lives.”
4
The
instructional video addresses marketers using the platform; however, the language that Pinterest
uses encourages a level of participation by both advertisers and users that explains and models
how to use certain products and/or create experiences that thematically engage with a DIY
economy of resourcefulness.
Female resourcefulness on a platform like Pinterest reveals anxieties attached to
performing ideal motherhood. In 2013, a poll by the online news source Today came out
highlighting the role that Pinterest plays in heightening anxiety for mothers: “42 percent said that
they sometimes suffer from Pinterest stress – the worry that they’re not crafty or creative
enough.”
5
The article addresses symptoms ranging from rapid clicking (or pinning) through
images of recipes to feeling failure at attempts to imitate perfect cakes and crafts as types of
anxiety that plague a number of women—especially mothers—who use the site on a regular
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basis. The threat of Pinterest as feminine and pathological frames the public discourse on the
site.
The activity of collecting, in particular, becomes a way for users to establish an identity
on the platform. As Pinterest co-founder, Ben Silbermann, has stated: “ ‘most people don't have
anything witty to say on Twitter’ or any major news to share on Facebook. But everyone can
collect stuff. Pinterest relies on "repinning" other people's content, other people's beautiful
bathrooms.”
6
Pinterest’s defining feature for users centers on the platform’s ability to be a place
to aspire, to dream, and to ultimately collect already generated images. The representation of the
self on the platform is ultimately about aspiration through the careful cultivation of images that
designate taste, culture, and skill. In this way, Pinterest marks itself as a commodity tool through
offering the ability to collect and to curate one’s style and future life narrative. Moreover, a
user’s collection reflects anxieties associated with proper forms of gendered consumption.
Pinterest’s construction by users as a feminine platform relies upon the circulation of
images associated with sentimentality. Pins of cupcakes, babies, domestic interiors, and fashion
become part of the platform’s trafficked and repinned content. As I will explore throughout this
chapter, the circulation of sentiment illustrates the platform’s marketing strategy centered on
curating a beautiful life full of projects. At the same time, the representation of “women’s
culture,” and more specifically, motherhood on the platform engages with a common language of
images associated with perceived similar experiences and attitudes about ideal and domestic
femininity.
7
Users pin content on a platform like Pinterest that engages with a form of
motherhood that is oriented toward commodity experiences as indicative of the “good life.”
However, another side of this expression includes a reaction by users to an overly
sentimentalized space. As I will explore, the ironic display of ideal motherhood functions
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alongside the sentimental as a way to disrupt the commodified experience of being a mother in
the U.S. in the 21
st
-century. By performing sentimental and ironic ways of engaging with content
as a good “pinner” and mother figure, the formation of the “millennial mother” demonstrates
mastery of emotional wellbeing in the contemporary post-recession online environment.
I use an interdisciplinary approach, analyzing archival objects that are transitory and
immaterial—tech blogs, popular think pieces, user Pinterest collections, brand collections that
feature popular advice literature, and Pinterest’s own marketing materials—to think about the
construction and reception of a platform that includes many different channels and forms of
visual information. However, the social evaluation of ephemera and the transitory nature of
status updates, tweets, instagram photos, and any number of other digital communication and
sharing modes in the 21
st
century make analyzing this platform particularly difficult.
I examine three popular pinners that illustrate how the mother figure demonstrates
emotional well-being as related to the performance of both sentimental and ironic conceptions of
motherhood. First, I interrogate pinner Ann Romney, the wife of 2012 United States presidential
candidate Mitt Romney, and her rise to popularity on the Pinterest platform. Her Pinterest
account in particular engages with a highly sentimental visual archive of recipes and campaign
photographs that demonstrate motherhood that is tied to a national culture of comfort. Next, I
turn to designer and blogger Joy Cho and her role as a major contributor to Pinterest as an early
adopter. Her role as a lifestyle pinner aligns with a version of perfect motherhood that is tech
savvy and entrepreneurial. Lastly, I examine popular pinner Tiffany Beveridge’s board, “My
Imaginary Toddler Daughter.” Beveridge’s parody board featuring Quinoa as her imaginary
daughter acknowledges a motherhood archive that plays with the cultural obsession over high-
end children’s clothing. At the same time, Beveridge’s creation of this figure allows for an
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affective performance of ironic motherhood that reveals the tensions of a visual depository coded
by largely white, upper-middle class images.

Pinterest and the Digital Photo Collage:
The promotional YouTube video for Pinterest, featuring the platform’s marketing efforts
centered on “all the good stuff” of the otherwise unruly web,
8
implies that Pinterest is a
generative archive of positive images and messages and also a much more tailored search engine
than Google.
9
As a repository of “good” images and inspirational projects, the physical layout for
the site models an image board or personalized scrapbook. Co-founder Ben Silbermann furthers
this point by explaining the personalized interaction users have with objects and ideas: “you
should feel like you’ve walked into a building full of stuff that only you are interested in.”
10

Pinterest encourages users to think about the platform as a space full of one’s collected and
curated content.
11
The process for setting up a Pinterest account is presented as already familiar
and accessible for those with access to the Internet, available time, and a sense of style and order.
Setting up an account with Pinterest requires a Facebook or email sign-in with a
password. One can join either as a business or as an individual to fully utilize the site. Using
one’s real name or pseudonym, the set-up process prompts users to create boards and to follow
five boards made by other users that will populate one’s own Pinterest home page. The boards
range from individuals to organizations with “pinned” content and themed categories to help the
user guide his or her exploration of the platform and to ultimately model their use after other
“pinners.” Pinterest describes a “pin” as a “visual bookmark.”
12
The pin serves to populate and
create the actual content for the platform, but to also be repinned—the process in which users
come across other user’s pins and decide to add the image to their collection. Each pin links to an
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original referral source like a blog or a website that helps with directing more potential traffic to
one’s original content. As the business guide for Pinterest claims, “Create a range of boards that
showcase your brand’s personality and taste, and make sure each board has enough pins to make
if feel substantial.”
13
The creation of a board requires the ability to make sense of thematically
connected visual information. One might create a board based upon key interests like varieties of
coffee beans, fashion collections, or DIY kid projects or boards could also be connected by
similar images of embrace or emotional gestures seen across a number of boards that populate
the platform. To make a “good” board, or rather, a board that will be seen by others and repinned
requires an understanding of how to collect, and how the collection translates into the pinners’
sense of appeal and value.
The most valued collections promoted by the Pinterest corporation (and reflected in the
tech and blog world) illustrate how to leverage the most useable and interesting content that can
become repinned and shared with others. Etiquette articles aimed at Pinterest users point to the
type of person using the platform and the identity derived from using images to demonstrate
one’s interests and likes. The etiquette advice also highlights the more amateurish tendencies of
inexperienced users who both over-pin or re-pin on consistent basis without generating their own
original content. As online reporter David K. Israel writes in his Pinterest guide, “Pinner E pins
everything and anything! This is definitely a pinner you want to follow with caution”.
14
Being a
“good pinner” relies on the rules of sociality, which, in the case of Pinterest, reflect the
discretionary tastes of users who understand when pinning too much information is boring,
excessive, or distasteful.
15
Journalist Rick Poynor connects the language of collecting to
discernment and control: “Such boards look random because what they are, in effect, is a big
heap of things with no strong connection other than that someone likes them a lot. Sometimes the
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refinement of a person’s curatorial eye is enough to give the collection coherence within the
board. Just as often, a mishmash of images will inadvertently reveal that the pinner’s grasp of the
material isn’t so great.”
16
One’s ability to make “refined” decisions about content speaks to a
larger anxiety that is historically entwined in collecting as “associated with elite lifestyles.”
17

Even though Pinterest is open to anyone to use, the act of collecting and display is not without
cultural codes of proper consumption and hierarchies of taste that make certain boards and
pinners more celebrated and followed.
18

Much of Pinterest’s activity in promoting its platform in 2014 and 2015 has centered on
the site’s relationship to marketers and businesses in testing ways to monetize the site. In these
promotions, the pin becomes a quantifiable collecting activity on the platform that attracts
advertisers and users to mobilize content. In March 2015, the company made known its
continuing relationship with advertisers in the release of “animated pins.” This particular pin
stems from the company’s initial testing of “promoted pins” to see how users responded to
blocks of ad content targeted at more general categories that users are guaranteed to see.
19
In
2013, Silberman’s blog outlined the introduction of “promoted pins.” According to Silberman,
these pins “work just like regular pins, only they have a special “promoted” label, along with a
link to learn more about what that means.”
20
The “animated pin” moves as the user scrolls
through their account. Part of this movement to capture business has been the company’s ability
“to position itself as an essential social-media platform for marketers.”
21
The platform released
its own series of how-to guides for business users explaining ways to increase traffic and to
release and capitalize on “helpful” content. In one guide, for example, a Pinterest employee
explains how to use text with an image in a way that allows for users to search for key terms and
search words.
22

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Valued at 3.8 billion in 2014, Pinterest’s investment in creating a creative user base,
while also toying with how to monetize the site is part of the tension social media platforms face
in producing and gaining value. Pins and repins follow a similar logic regarding the platform’s
movement in creating more ‘beautiful’ content, while also creating a more integrated space for
brands to flourish and capitalize on the site’s predominately visual narrative. Even though the
site has yet to fully monetize, Pinterest has formed various partnerships that are setting the stage
for eventual monetary gain. In a 2014 profile, Pinterest founder Ben Sliberman discussed the
tension between the site’s attempts to make money and the original vision of “making a product
that's really, really useful and really inspiring to you.’”
23
Silberman presents his own tension in
introducing features to monetize the site, but at the same time, situates the need for introducing
ads and featured content as part of the overall logic in the site’s ability to sustain wish lists and
travel fantasies. If you scroll down Silbermann’s blog post, a number of commenters critically
question the use value of the promoted pin in assessing (oftentimes randomly) user’s interests
and likes. One commenter warily notes Pinteret’s inevitable decline into a Facebook-like sellout
of ad content that litters the integrity of user’s feeds: “I just hope that Pinterest doesn't go the
way of Facebook where they decide how many people see statuses and links and pictures based
on some random algorithm that changes regularly. What I like about Pinterest is that if I follow
somebody, I see everything that they pin in my feed.”
24
The users’ comment highlights the
trouble social media companies have with implementing changes to the format, especially
changes that appear disruptive and programmed that do not reflect what the user actually desires
out of the platform experience.
As the platform has gained popularity with users and the company continually searches
for ways to monetize the site, the status of Pinterest as a virtual collection reinforces classical
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debates over value. The classification system of Pinterest’s vast amount of virtual objects isn’t
without its critics. In 2014, Print Magazine published a piece about overly generalized content
without proper context: “I understand why people pinning for personal inspiration don’t bother
with this, but images endlessly repinned without basic information shape an online culture in
which decontextualization—the stripping out of meaning—is accepted as a matter of course.”
25

Critical arguments over web and digital content, including copyright and authorship issues,
continue to shape discussions on authenticity and control over the digital realm.
26
With over 30
billion pins, the categorization of pins and boards is also a matter of taste.
27
The general
categories of content like “Collections,” and “Love” reproduce the pinner’s particular notion of
that category and what constitutes images of collections (feathers, globes, worldly items, coins,
wooden crafts). For example, in 2013, TIME featured a story about the top 30 pinners as a way to
“to cut through pinner glut and highlight expert curators in a variety of popular fields: food,
fashion, technology, design, lifestyle and weddings.”
28
By highlighting certain experts in relation
to Pinterest’s vast landscape of collections that are understood as reflecting high and low cultural
statuses, TIME reinforces popular notions of proper collecting. For example, TIME highlights
the account by stylist Ginny Branch Stelling and her 91 boards and 132,000 plus followers that
feature a range of topics and themes on pop culture, architecture, and design trends. There are
collections labeled “embrace,” “ethereal,” and “gestures.” The “embrace” board thematically
links together pinned images of couples embracing and kissing each other. A couple of the
pinned images also contain reproduced text from Jane Eyre, which further reinforce a reading of
the image as not only romanticized but also as elevated more than just a cheap romance book
cover. Much of Pinterest’s content recombines high and low cultural forms to highlight the act of
pinning and collecting as also an activity that designates taste and popularity.
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As collection discourses feature ways to demonstrate proper taste, they also align with
middle to upper-middle class assumptions about disposable income. Pinterest invokes a
discussion on taste and the anxieties associated with feminine consumption. The pinner is the
ultimate decipherer of taste, culture, and class. However, the rise of a particular type of female
user as one who is frivolous also reveals historically situated anxieties over gendered forms of
consumerism. Cultural critics and opinion pieces focus on the ultimate time waste of using
Pinterest and especially how this waste connects to an undisciplined female demographic. As one
reporter for the Washington Post writes, “It’s the photo scrapbook of hopes, dreams and desires
for grown-ups, mostly those of the female persuasion. And that raises the question of whether
that’s actually a healthy thing for grown women to be spending time compiling a virtual hope
chest.”
29
The reporter raises the question of female time management and fantasy that guide
much of how users engage with the site. The pathological implications of women’s consumer
activities as trivial are well-documented as a cultural response.
30
The cultural critique of
women’s leisure activities as neglectful of the domestic from has significantly shaped much of
cinema and television histories. In particular, women’s attendance in shaping emerging film
practices at the turn of the 20
th
-century reveals cultural anxieties over women’s leisure time and
increasingly public roles as consumers. Another critic from the women’s magazine Redbook
similarly frames using Pinterest as a morally inferior pursuit. The headline, “My Affair with
Pinterest—and How I Ended it for the Best,” captures the obsession of pinning and collecting
images at the cost to her family and other real world responsibilities. In the article, the critic
adds: “Although you have many other ‘activities’ you could be doing in your ‘free’ hours —
paying the bills, making dinner, finishing that freelance article — it's so much easier to just sit
and look at pictures.”
31
Thus, as the Redbook reporter articulates, the activity of wasting time
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online raises familiar anxieties attached to women’s work and leisure in the domestic sphere. As
much as the platform enacts fantasies associated with wellbeing and happiness, a longer history
of gendered activities associated with the collection shape the reception of this platform in the
public realm.
Women’s Magazines
The history of women’s relationship to popular culture and consumerism is rooted in a
visual and textual history of women’s magazines. The popularity of advice columns and the
development of gendered content proliferated in the late 19
th
-century. Magazines like Ladies
Home Journal, founded by Cyrus Curtis and Louisa Knapp Curtis, developed out of single
columns to a massive advertising, advice, and consumer institution targeted toward women. As
Ellen Gruber Garvey claims regarding the connection between shopping and magazines, “the
magazine joined in one package, or booklet, the commercial world of goods an sales with the
world of private musing and romantic fantasy.”
32
The relationship between shopping and the
magazine is well-documented and figures heavily into how advertisers and department stores
targeted the middle-class female shopper: “Like the department stores that invited women in to
look, dream, and purchase, magazines invited women to claim some printed material as their
own—and to use it also to look, dream, and decide on purchases.”
33
The women’s magazine
became an important way for advertisers and editors to construct and map women’s domestic
roles and their relationship to consumerism. Ladies Home Journal’s promotion of advertising as
central to the magazine’s intended reader (the middle-class female) paved the way for a complex
relationship between women’s roles in the public sphere and anxieties over proper forms of
consumption that constructed how women should be spending their time at home. The historical
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format of the magazine featured a mix of advice columns and self-help promotional products as a
way to address the anxieties of middle-class femininity during the turn of the 21
st
-century.

Millennial Motherhood
Cultivating a female demographic roughly between the ages of 25-34, Pinterest’s
popularity with this group of users also underscores cultural anxieties associated with
motherhood as an economic force in the 21
st
-century. A recent TIME report identified the
contemporary demographic of mothers (born between 1980-1992) as predominately made up of
women having children out of wedlock.
34
This figure of motherhood reveals a highly contested
position in the current media and economic climate. Seen as lazy, debt-ridden, and technology
savvy, the Millennial figure encompasses the anxieties of the post-2008 collapse alongside the
flourishing of social media technologies.
35
Constructed as a marketing category by advertisers,
the “Millennial mom” reflects a cultural, financial, and social force. The millennial mother is
also entrepreneurial minded as ABC News reports, “More than half those surveyed report
wanting to start their own business.”
36
With the increasing flexibility of online and digital tools,
mothers are able to construct ways of making a living that utilize already performed
domesticated labor. Furthermore, the ABC report identifies the shift from online coupon saving
as part of the immaterial labor of motherhood, to the commodification of domestic labor like
household tasks and carpools as part of the new wave of money making potential for mothers in
need of a flexible job.
37

The antecedent to the Millennial Mom emerged from motherhood discourses of the
1980s-2000s and what Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels described as the “New Momism.”
This trend encompasses a postfeminist logic of perfect motherhood as highly individualized and
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commodity-oriented (buying the best, most elite/educational products for one’s child), and the
fulfillment of motherhood via the child.
38
This figure similarly faced constant scrutiny from the
media as either perfect or dangerous. The emergence of the “welfare queen” as a conservative
talking point also helped to shape the villainizing of non-white and low-income mothers reliant
on government programs. Thus motherhood of the 1980s and 90s offers a critical insight into the
ways media has shaped motherhood into the 2000s. The anxiety of achieving a choice-oriented
motherhood continues to shape the current media narrative on good parenting and the “millennial
mom,” but also the complexities of performing motherhood within a neoliberal and online
framework.

Maternal Collecting Histories: Mediating Motherhood
The complex construction of motherhood and its expression on online spaces like blogs
and Pinterest also invokes a historically mediated discussion on scrapbooking and maternal
collections. Scrapbooking became popular in the U.S. during the 19
th
-century. Women and
especially mothers became the targeted audience of scrapbook making. The activity provided a
way for middle-class and upper middle-class mothers to demonstrate care and memory keeping
in the form of family photos and memorabilia associated with the domestic sphere. Even though
the family featured heavily into the collective making of scrapbooking, women and girls, in
particular, became associated with the activity.
39
Activities like collecting trade cards were
particularly rooted in the pleasures of collecting and organizing representations of life that
allowed for an acceptable form of participation in the realm of consumer culture.
40
The
introduction of photography and the album also featured into the early commodification of
maternal collecting culture as highly sentimentalized. Art historian Patrizia Di Bello writes about
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19
th
-century album making and the visual language of photography as “peculiarly successful in
creating convincing fictions; in this case, of a happy and pleasurable motherhood.”
41
The
historical link between happy motherhood and scrapbook and album making forms perpetuated
cultural conceptions of “middle class gentility.”
42
Demonstrating a mother or woman’s class
position and competency in running a household significantly rested on the constructed roles of
female domestic life and leisure pursuits like painting and music associated with one’s class
position. Significantly, though, scrapbooks became ways for families and especially mothers to
document and archive family histories.
Scrapbooking offered women ways of fantasizing about and participating in upper-class
lifestyles. This culture of collecting took shape in collage-like displays that expressed tactile
techniques and the acquisition and arrangement of materials as portals into personal and
collective histories about domestic life, travel, remedies, and commodity goods. The gathering of
different types of material objects such as scraps of paper, photographs, trade cards, and
handmade paintings and writings are part of the complicated array of information and detail that
made up each individual book as an artifact. The “tactile experience” of scrapbooking and
constructing and juxtaposing images speaks to a feminine collecting discourse that reveals the
lived experiences of those who compiled the books. By “holding and turning pages, marked by
the touch of the women who arranged them,” the act of handcrafting and manipulating the object
became a central form of self-expression.
43
The activity of scrapbook and album making allowed
for women to experiment and to demonstrate affective attachments to objects and images of
loved-ones that challenged ways of conventional thinking about women’s roles and material
culture during the 19
th
and into the 20
th
-centuries.
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Pinterest is a vastly different medium to compare to 19
th
-century scrapbooking and album
histories; however, the way the platform invokes particular formal properties of the aesthetic
tradition—namely, the collage or photo-like collection of images through virtual pin boards and
individual pins and constructing narratives of the self to share with other viewers—speaks to the
way the platform embraces an affective community built on a familiar archive of domesticated
well-being. The mastery and experience of affect within a digital landscape significantly shapes
and fosters how individuals spend time online. The ability to feel bored or to feel rage or even
happiness contributes to a larger flow of information and the sharing of experiences within a
digital public. Adi Kuntsman articulates this point through the notion of “affective fabrics,”
which she defines as “the lived and deeply felt everyday sociality of connections, ruptures,
emotions, words, politics and sensory energies, some of which can be pinned down to words or
structures, others are intense yet ephemeral”
44
For Kuntsman, the relationship between affect and
the digital encompasses a wide array of communication technologies (like phones, social media,
blogs) that capture how people relay information. In this case, a platform like Pinterest engages
with an affective community of social connections in the form of pins, repins, and comments that
shapes the flow of information and exchange on the platform.
Jose Van Dijck’s notion of connectivity is a useful framework to consider Pinterest’s rise
as an affective social media platform. Van Dijck uses Michel de Certeau to think about the ways
daily social interactions and experiences, or the “ephemeral manifestations of social life,” have
been coopted by social media in influencing and directing how people interact and share.
45

Adding to this adoption of utterances and various ways people interact, Van Dijck points to the
ways social media platforms co-opted “Key terms used to describe social media’s functionality,
such as the ‘social,’ ‘collaboration,’ and ‘friends,’ resonate with the communities jargon of early
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utopian visions the Web as a space that inherently enhances social activity.”
46
Much of
Pinterest’s original design and imagined use is rooted in an utopian logic that expands the
parameters of the search as much more encompassing of discovery. The platform’s success with
users relies on the ability for individuals to curate an experience or group of images rather than
scrolling through thousands and thousands of unrelated threads. The social currency of pins and
repins is part of how Pinterest measures the popularity of certain users and the circulation of
content. Invoking the ‘popularity principle,’ Jose Van Dijck examines how popularity drives the
inherent value social platforms place in individuals and companies that accumulate followers as
higher valued content: “The choice for a ‘like’ button betrays an ideological predilection: it
favors instant, gut-fired, emotional, positive evaluations. Popularity as a coded concept thus not
only becomes quantifiable but also manipulable.”
47
Referencing the social media site Facebook,
Van Dijck’s understanding of the ‘like’ function offers a critical way to think about the
construction of popularity as an element that has come to define users’ interactions with the site
as both non-commercial and highly consumer-oriented.
In particular, the relationship between digital technology, affect, and motherhood is
exemplified in the formal properties of the blog. Tracy Jensen’s work on the digital motherhood
community examines the nuances involved in online participation, specifically around the topic
of parenting culture. Building upon the work of Sara Ahmed, Ann Chetkovich, and Adi
Kuntsman, Jensen considers the performance of motherhood and agency online as part of a
ephemeral and “affective participation.” This participation reflects an embedded “script” in
which mothers perform “individualism, entrepreneurialism, and a fantasy of self reliance.”
48

Jensen makes a particularly apt point regarding the construction of motherhood online. She
argues that parenting culture reinforces certain affective ideals that flourish and build
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interactions, pieces of advice, and how individuals engage with motherhood within the consumer
and political realm. The way motherhood is performed on a digital platform like Pinterest
illustrates how a self-help culture becomes perpetuated through pins and boards that highlight
domestic well-being.
The pin and pin board reflect this digital archive of largely intangible and fleeting forms
of communication that structure how users traverse the platform. The pin and the act of pinning
and repinning also illustrate how Pinterest has commodified the social and affective form of the
collection as part of the architecture of the site. The process of repinning and participating on the
platform allow for users to participate in good maternal collecting practices. In other words, the
commodification of collecting and scrapbook making contributes to how the platform caters to
and ultimately supports a larger maternal presence made up of individuals and brands attempting
to capture and imagine motherhood in an intensely visual form.
Pinterest also engages in what Jensen describes as “a place to vent” for mothers about the
anxieties of parenting practices.
49
Even though Pinterest circulates in largely positive imagery
and fantasy, the platform also allows for deviation from sentimental forms of parenting culture.
The construction of meta-commentary boards like Quinoa and the popular “Fail” boards, which
feature attempted DIY projects, engages with a type of critique that allow for emotional
expression that poke fun at the indulgences of over-the-top cupcakes, children’s bedroom
designs and high fashion for toddlers.
Central to this affective maternal space is the theoretical framework provided by Lauren
Berlant’s The Female Complaint and how genres centered upon female fantasies and encounters
engage with a messy intimate and political life: “In this discursive field the emotional labor of
women places them at the center of the story of what counts as life, regardless of what lives
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women actually live.”
50
For users of Pinterest, the fantasy of the ‘good life’—especially the life
associated with positive, fulfilling motherhood—engages with the labor attached to the
successful use of the platform: users pinning and repin to demonstrate their cultivation of taste
through a visual short-hand of objects and feelings attached to particular and familiar
representations of love, generosity, and happiness—the ultimate embodiment of maternal well-
being.
The digital and contemporary engagement with maternal well-being becomes expressed
in both sentimental and ironic forms. The circulation of emotion on social media, and more
specifically, a site like Pinterest, also points to how emotional culture is commodified and thrives
in the late capitalist era. This sharing of sentiment on a platform like Pinterest constructs a
maternal archive that largely relies upon a common visual vernacular for well-being in the form
of cupcakes, children’s clothing, and DIY projects. The ability for users to take the time to pin
images, and have the appropriate taste to create, share, and enjoy the look of these images is part
of a shared experience of comfort that circulates the platform. For example, a shared feeling of
adequacy toward an image of a cupcake encompasses good motherhood and emotional well-
being. As I will explore in Ann Romney’s political board, the cupcake also takes on political
meaning while highlighting the Romney campaign during their 2012 run for the U.S. presidency.
As the following section will demonstrate, sentimental culture on Pinterest engages with a
national discourse on good motherhood through recipes, happy consumerism, and campaign
images that reinforce wholesome and sweet imagery with parenting that is void of politics and
ambiguity.
At the other end of this spectrum of engagement, the ability to be and to demonstrate
irony is key to maternal pinning practices. A major concern for postmodern aesthetics and the
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adoption of camp is rooted in the hipster’s relationship to the authentic and artificial. For Jake
Kinzky, camp aesthetics and hipster culture coincides with “the detachment from this reality, a
refusal to be fully complicit with what is going on now.”
51
The way this ironic detachment
manifests itself is through the fascination with “garbage-dump-chic” and other failed and
nostalgic objects that make up the current response to an overly commodified culture.
52

Emotional irony becomes a way to further detach oneself from objects and experiences that were
once ‘beautiful’ or traditionally associated with the mainstream as a way to construct alternative
and unique experiences and feelings. At the same time, this search for the “authentic” has
become part of the mainstream. Susan Sontag’s seminal essay “Notes on Camp,” captures this
relationship to the “anti-serious,” or “…the sensibility of failed seriousness” as a certain style:
“More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious.’ One can be
serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”
53
This engagement with the anti-serious
offers a way to read boards like “My Imaginary Well-Dressed Toddler Daughter” as a mastery of
emotional wellbeing.
54
Being able to participate in a culture of sentimentality also means being
able to critique it. As the final section for this chapter will reveal, the performance of millennial,
hip motherhood engages with the platform as a way to demonstrate the complexities of the
scrapbook form within a 21
st
-century digital age.

Motherhood and Sentimental Patriotism via recipes
In 2012, in the midst of the Romney and Obama presidential campaigns, the online
blogging forum Gawker featured a piece on the social media platform Pinterest and how both
first wives, Ann Romney and First Lady Michelle Obama, used the site. The satirical piece
identified Ann Romney’s use of the platform as an extension of her patriotic branding. Pins
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featuring American-inspired recipes, flag motifs, and objects associated with U.S. nationalism
and the nuclear family reinforce how the platform functions as a political tool. The reporter
acknowledges how Ann, like many others, uses Pinerest to perform aspiration through the
pinning structure: “Finding inspiration, imposing it on friends and strangers, and then completely
ignoring that "inspiration" in favor of whatever you would normally do. That's what Pinterest is.
And Ann Romney gets it.”
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Critics saw Ann’s account as the Romney camp’s political move to cultivate female
voters. Accordingly, Ann’s account plays into much of the sentimental culture that defines
Pinterest while also reinforcing a larger national campaign surrounding women’s domestic well-
being with political savviness. Responding to various fake Mitt Romney boards on the platform
that played up his wealth and status through images of luxury items, Ann’s board reads as a
sentimental response that demonstrates her relationship to femininity through images of
cupcakes, recipes, and personal family photos that highlight her family life. As a 2012 Slate
article claims regarding Ann’s board, “...it means there’s a counter to the mudslingers right there
on Pinterest.”
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The performance of femininity combines features an intimate view of domestic
life that reinforces her maternal role within a digital public.
The actual pins and collection of images become part of what Lauren Berlant describes as
an “intimate public.” According to Berlant, this “public is intimate when it foregrounds affective
and emotional attachments located in fantasies of the common, the everyday, and a sense of
ordinariness.”
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The appeal of Ann Romney’s account and its relationship to an “intimate public”
plays upon her ability to perform this sense of middle-class and middle America normalcy. In
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this case, the performance of white, heterosexual motherhood becomes the common vernacular
across her boards and images of shared foods and consumer-oriented experiences.
Ann Romney’s logline for her personal account emphasizes her role as both a mother and
grandmother: “Mom of five boys. Grandmother of 22. Best-selling author.” With over 17,000
followers and 10 boards, the account reinforces a visual collage of curated domestic items that
stand in for a larger national debate over race and class.
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For example, the pin board entitled
“The Romney Family Table” features a pin of a shortbread cookie. “First recipe from my new
cookbook,” the first sentence claims with the break down of the recipe. This pin in particular
reflects a number of similarly themed cookie pins on the site.
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However, at the same time, the
public comments on the board also highlight how Romeny’s demonstration of domestic aptitude
also interacts with politics. As one commenter writes, “Wish you were our first Lady in the
White House, and maybe we wouldn't be so stressed and eat all these cooookies! Monsters in the
house!!! :).”
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Celebrating Ann’s performance of femininity and her relationship to the politics of
Washington, the implications of this comment recur throughout numerous other posts. Still,
overwhelmingly positive, this comment stands out in particular for the author’s sentiment in
wanting a Romney White House. The visual imagery of a standard shortbread cookie and its
classification as comfort food—a direct opposition to the healthy food promoted by Michelle
Obama’s Let’s Move! program—point to the ways in which comfort and resentment thrive on
Ann’s Pinterest page. Another commenter reinforces this point by highlighting the Obama
administration’s health food image: “Shortbread is soooo much better than broccoli!”
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In other
words, the cookie pin illustrates a relationship to motherhood and nation that allow for viewers to
express ambivalence toward the Obama administration and its caloric stresses that a Romney
household would not have.
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The relationship between Ann’s more intimate portrait of Romney family life on her
Pinterest account and the larger conservative campaign featuring women speaks to the
complicated representation of motherhood on the platform. Much of Ann Romney’s board is
presented as overwhelmingly positive. The decision to include campaign objects and images also
contributes to the larger effect of sentimentality and whiteness that also underline much of the
campaign. In particular, the pin featuring Ann Romney’s RNC speech targeted towards mothers
highlights the purchasable bumper sticker with the slogan, “Moms drive the economy.” The
sticker as an object within a larger political-domestic collection reveals the tensions surrounding
the more recent media backlash to the feminist movement. As Maureen Dowd’s article in the
New York Times entitled “Phony Mommy Wars” addressed, “Ann Romney is a good mom. She’s
also a good pol.” The point of the article highlights the larger cultural discourse over working
and stay-at-home mothers, and the issue of class that outlines the “choice” between these two
roles. The move by the Romney campaign, and by extension, Ann Romney’s Pinterest account
addresses mothers and the motherhood lifestyle as one centered on labor in the middle to upper-
middle class domestic sphere. It is a nostalgic look at motherhood that places Ann’s service
squarely within the home. Responding to the charge of never working, or rather, not having to
work in the same capacity as other middle-class and working-class American mothers, Ann
Romney and the Republican campaign focus on the performance of motherhood in and of itself
as a certain kind of sentimental labor.
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In a more general sense, the Romney Pinterest account features a hyper visual collection
of domesticated motherhood that reproduces innocence. The “campaign” board incorporates a
mix and match of her larger Pinterest account, including recipes, newspaper links, images of the
Romney family, and crafts projects associated with the campaign trail.
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The scrapbook aesthetic
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of political campaign pins juxtaposed with newspaper links allows for the viewer to construct a
more complete image of Ann’s performance of idealized motherhood. One particular pin features
a Telegraph article link with Ann’s cooking as a central theme of the Romney/Ryan campaign.
The headline, “Campaign Recipe: the Welsh Skillet Cakes that have made Ann Romney’s
cooking famous,” reinforces a white immigrant experience as the backdrop to her production of
motherhood.
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A family recipe passed down from her Welsh grandmother, the pin focuses on
Ann’s reproduction as distinctly American in her European immigrant roots. In the Telegraph
article, Ann Romney’s larger political and family life reflect this collision between private and
public life in the form of Ann’s role as cook and maternal figure. At the same time, the affective
response of the comments highlights the anxieties over politics and whiteness within a
depoliticized environment that constructs how users envision Pinterest.
The three most “loved” images on the board feature the heavily sentimentalized objects
of cupcakes and Mitt holding a baby, and the more iconic campaign image of Mitt and Ann
holding hands while waving to a crowd. With over 240 repins, the simple image of “Mitt 2012”
cupcakes is accompanied by the expressive caption, “cute!” The actual comments for the pin
both reinforce the positivity associated with the sweetness of the object and, by extension, what
some commenters see as a wishful presidency.
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Comments like “Love these!” “Yum,” “Go
Mitt,” and “Moms and women for Mitt” reflect an overall evaluation of the pin itself.
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The pin
is simple in its visual imagery—a red, white, and blue cupcake with no accompanying recipe.
When considering this pin in relation to a larger performance of motherhood, the sentiment
produced by the object engages with the ephemeral quality of cooking and food. As Amalie
Hastie writes regarding the production of celebrity cookbooks and food, “…it [the act of cooking
the recipe] offers a temporary sweet experience, and then it is gone.”
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In a similar way, the
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campaign trail for the U.S. presidency reflects this ephemeral experience that is quickly
consumed. While Hastie explores the construction of food in relation to film and the film
viewing experience as temporary, it is also worth considering how the performance of a
campaign (through food and other domestic objects) becomes pinnable and shareable within a
digital landscape. The cupcake, then, offers a way for viewers to participate and to further
construct an affective relationship between the Romney campaign and their own civic and
intimate participation. It is not so much about following a specific recipe in this case, but more
so the embodiment and message the cupcake signifies as a sweet and simple object and the
affective participation of sharing and making similar cupcakes with family and friends. Ann’s
documentation of the campaign in this sense is not so much about the labor that went into the
making of the cupcakes, but rather, the affective deployment of the cupcake itself as both a
political and highly emotional object. Mastering emotional well-being for Ann Romney reflects
both the mastery of Pinterest as a tool and also how the cupcake visualizes and embodies a
certain layer of affective politics. Ann’s performance of motherhood through her pinboard
illustrates how sentimentality on Pinterest centers on shared objects that are read as both political
and domestic. As the next section will examine, the role of the lifestyle pinner offers a
contemporary look at motherhood that is sentimental but framed within a neoliberal marketplace
of consumer experiences. Ann Romeny’s account utilizes a 1950s style approach towards
motherhood that fits within the confines of a national project. Pinner Joy Cho’s lifestyle account
reflects the ultimate embodiment of entrepreneurial and millennial motherhood.

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The Lifestyle Pinner and Sentimental Motherhood

The mastery of emotional wellbeing as central to motherhood and the contemporary
female experience takes form in the lifestyle Pinterest account. Motherhood in the 21
st
-century
and its representation across a digital spectrum of blogs and images has increasingly been woven
into a much larger lifestyle industry that constructs how women in general navigate work and life
balance. In thinking about how Pinterest engages with an affective community that appeals to a
younger, Millennial demographic, the abundance of brands and pinners who produce and
consume products and experiences associated with motherhood formulate a larger lifestyle
landscape that combines fashion, art, food, and design that embrace emotional well-being.
In 2012, TIME Magazine featured pinner Joy Cho as one of the most influential accounts
on the platform.
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With over 13 million followers, 88 boards of curated content and linked to her
highly successful blog, Cho’s Pinterest tagline, “designer, blogger, food enthusiast,” illustrates
the more recent turn toward lifestyle pinning as part of female-centered entrepreneurial space
within the digital world.
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The account features different aspects of the “good life” presented
across boards ranging from those that highlight commercial partnerships with various brands like
Target to those that the use children’s fashion to capture Cho’s relationship with her daughter.
The lifestyle blogger or Pinner in this case is instrumental to the mastery of emotional
well-being in visual form. A cultural evaluation of the good life—not merely fashion—expands
brands, genres, and forms to model successful, modern womanhood. Pinterest is also a format
that readily captures the affective practice of image collage and the feminine realm of domestic
living. Following the previous section’s focus on Ann Romney’s pinning and the politics of
sentiment captured in recipes and staged family photos, this section turns to the performance of
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pinning as a successful enterprise, one built upon miscellaneous texts that together comprise the
embodiment of good motherhood and a healthy and happy life.
The emergence of the lifestyle blogger has shaped much of the online fashion and health
world as a model of success. As Minh Ha T. Pham writes regarding the lifestyle blogger Suzy
Bubble and her larger critical reception across the fashion world, “narratives constructing her as
an exemplary self-stylist, social media user, and consumer—in short, as an ideal neoliberal
subject—persist.”
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The success posed from highly trafficked blog sites has also shaped the
emergence of “pinfluencers,” or popular pinners on Pinterest with highly frequented and
followed accounts.
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Joy Cho’s early presence on Pinterest combined with her interests in
fashion and design has resulted in highly public branding tie-ins. Most recently, Cho’s design
talent was featured in her party product line for Target entitled “Oh Joy for Target.”
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The
corresponding board highlights how the seasonal party products are “super special and fun
without having to spend the time making decorations from scratch.”
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Featuring paper fan
wreaths, baking projects, and various other decorations, the board showcases Cho’s personal
design, and especially her style as a mother in creating inspirational projects that bring together a
mother-daughter bond.
The digital narrative of Cho’s success relies upon her image as a self-starter and business-
savvy working mother. Recently, Style magazine featured an editorial on Cho’s place within the
online design community and her embodiment of the digital lifestyle neoliberal figure: “we have
always loved her vibrant aesthetic, design edit, and entrepreneurial spirit.”
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To live the good life
one must be industrious, creative, emotional, and embrace the labor of motherhood. Cho’s brand
capitalizes on pop psychology surrounding happiness and the creation of beautiful objects to
capture a narrative of the good (and whimsical) life. Motherhood is the ultimate style that reflects
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a conglomeration of a life well lived and consumed. For example, the promotional video for
Cho’s YouTube channel highlights her skills as a designer, stylist, and cook. Cho connects to her
target demographic (millennial mothers) by addressing the popularized narrative of parental
stress and time management: “And really, who does?” Cho asks her viewers regarding the
question of time to complete various household and lifestyle tasks. The solution, Cho poses, will
be to watch her videos for “that unexpected added touch of style” and “At the end of the day, it
is all about making your world a happier place.”
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The promo visually highlights Cho’s various
projects, including help from her daughter as part of the overall domestic production process.
Ultimately, the production of good motherhood is also about entrepreneurism. In this case, Cho
encourages an image of her own happiness via aesthetic changes and a cultivation of taste as a
way to manage one’s family and life.
This is not a new message. Much of the postfeminist discourse centers on perfect
motherhood and a project of ultimate self-sacrifice and self-improvement as essential to female
choice and empowerment.
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What has shifted, though, in the current post-2008 moment has more
to do with how happiness and emotional wellness figures into a brand. It is about having a
certain style to address life’s harsher realities or just to live each day with a sense of well-
managed achievement. As Sarah Banet-Weiser claims regarding the contemporary era of
consumer culture and brand relationships in defining the role of the entrepreneur, “The newly
imagined entrepreneur is not defined in the traditional sense of being a business owner or
investor, but rather is an entrepreneur of the self.”
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Cho’s brand and recognition as a popular
and influential blogger set the framework for her media extension onto Pinterest. As an author
for Blog Inc. and Creative Inc., Cho captures the contemporary manifestation of the creative
web-based entrepreneur/curator. While Cho recognizes the business side to becoming a blogger,
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a key feature to the performance of contemporary blogging by Cho and others connects to a
larger shift in attitude regarding work-life balance that celebrates passion of what one does over
the economic gain from the pursuit: “While many people see blogging as a potential job these
days, I always emphasize that it should be approached with passion in a topic—what it is that
YOU have to share with the world.”
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This narrative of the self as one ultimately driven by
passion and a story connects to other celebrity narratives of success and goal-driven aspiration
that eschew larger economic realities of freelance labor.
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At the same time, the narrative of the
self that is embodied by the lifestyle design blogger has translated well into aspiration driven
platforms like Pinterest.
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In a recent online editorial entitled “The Most Pinteresting People in the World,” the
article highlights the sudden rise to popularity for mostly non-famous individuals: “the twenty
most popular pinners, who all have more than 4 million fans, include a hairdresser from Utah, a
grandmother from Tennessee, a freelance photographer and the mother of Pinterest’s CEO.”
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Even though Cho’s popularity was already part of her blogger presence, the larger narrative of
success that underwrites how Pinterest cultivated content for the platform turns to figures who
were not celebrities already, but who were picked by Pinterest to showcase their design savvy.
The most successful pinners like Cho have cultivated brand tie-ins that help highlight products.
Some pinners receive paid compensation for pins (even though Pinterest does not support this
policy). Perhaps what is most significant here in considering the role of the pinner and how she
fits within a neoliberal model of entrepreneurship is the relationship between the pin and the
model of exchange that defines a flexible and self-promotional economy.
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To be a good pinner requires frequent pinning as a daily activity. Cho has admitted to
pinning 10-20 images per day as part of her success.
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The major stand out, though, for finding
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pins within a sea of Pinterest’s 30 billion images is to write captions. The caption allows for the
image to become authenticated by Cho and recognizable to her followers. It also serves a larger
purpose within Pinterest’s technological architecture in which certain pins become more popular
than others. It is worth noting, though, that the architecture of the pin does not utilize a time-
stamp in the same way as a blog. Rather, much of Pinterest’s appeal for users is the never-ending
thread of images that do not get stored away. Part of the popularity of the platform has to do with
the afterlife of pins posted months or even years ago that suddenly become circulated by other
pinners. At the same time, the non-time stamped currency of the pins also follows a logic
inherent within the platform regarding content discovery and thus the ultimate goal of one
becoming “inspired” by various pins and projects. The pin becomes part of a personal archive of
one’s aspirations and the ultimate embodiment of success that has not yet come but is forever in
the ether of one’s betterment and self-improvement project. In a certain way, the collection of
pins, rather than being a source of abandonment, allow for a constant stream of information to be
gathered around a particular subject. It is not so much about time stamped efficiency that
embodies the neoliberal subject (pinner), but rather a type of labor in repinning and collecting
images at an abundant rate that serves as a reminder for one’s visual depository of well-being.
Cho also utilizes Pinterest’s positive messaging to build upon and construct a community
of pinners and consumers to share in her lifestyle brand and creative projects. Even Cho’s tagline
identifies positivity as a key form of participation on her boards: “(I politely request that you
play nice with others & keep your comments kind and constructive).”
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The labor of Cho’s
commenters who both repin and comment upon her boards reflects larger issues surrounding
digital and immaterial labor. The amassing of positive images and comments on Cho’s account is
built by individuals who spend time on her boards, who pin, like, and comment on images and
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brand tie-ins. It is an invested community that shares in building an affective lifestyle and
wellness archive. This archive collects happiness and motherhood, and associates a more general
positivity around objects like napkins, placeholders, and lanterns, amongst other crafts to the
good life.
Overwhelmingly, Cho’s comments are positive and highlight her brand as carefully
curated moments of happiness embodied by an upper-middle class lifestyle. The reiteration of
positivity can be seen in recurring comments like “cute” both in Cho’s captions and in the actual
comments. The themed boards and Cho’s account necessitate the repetition of cuteness as
inherently linked to the performance of motherhood. In one sense, the performance of
motherhood is made up of moments that largely go undocumented. Cho weaves in her
relationship to motherhood as an extension of her self—that is an ongoing project that highlights
her role as an entrepreneur and the way motherhood intersects with her personal and professional
life. Performing good motherhood therefore requires a certain skill set illustrated by Cho (and
many others who frequent Pinterest) that is aware of her child’s emotional development but also
captures moments spent together as a way to document the relationship and its various stages.
Cho’s pregnancy-inspired board entitled, “Dressing the Bump,” captures a mixture of
fashion pregnancy wear as part of a larger orientation toward happy, innocent motherhood. The
board also features still images from her YouTube series about dressing during pregnancy as a
way to capture her multimedia brand presence. One particular black and white image features a
mother and daughter side by side.
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The visuality of the black and white construct and
sentimentalize the image as something to be remembered and memorialized as part of a material
collection. The mother is visibly pregnant while the daughter emulates her mother by sticking
out her stomach. A simple caption of “Cute!” accompanies the photo. Commenters reiterate the
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caption’s sentiment by likewise describing the photograph as “Cute.” In this case, motherhood is
visually constructed and oriented towards a pleasurable experience of mother-daughter bonding
over the mother’s pregnancy. The clustering of pleasurable objects like the little girl, the
mother’s pregnant stomach, and the object of the pin itself as a funny and sentimental image of
the family reinforces a construction of motherhood as an overwhelmingly innocent experience.
The fetishized pregnant stomach is rendered in the world of Pinterest as the ultimate symbol of
maternal happiness and wellbeing that point to both aspiration and the function of memory.
When juxtaposed within Cho’s larger maternal archive, this board allows for other pinners and
viewers to participate in an active motherhood project invested in a shared repetition of
experiences and objects aimed to reproduce maternal happiness that is safe and innocent enough
for motherhood to be acceptable, and for the pregnant belly to be sentimentalized and worn like a
fashion accessory.
Cho’s product tie-in board between her brand presence as a blogger/designer and the
fashion company Boden captures the more ephemeral commodity experience of performing
motherhood. In the board “Little Bits of Happiness - Oh Joy + Boden,” Cho highlights her
experience of motherhood in a collection of personal photos and product snapshots. The tagline
for the board addresses the product tie in with Boden as part of Cho’s larger happiness project:
“From January 19 to Feb. 16, I’ll be sharing my favorite moments of happiness between mother
and daughter including fun clothing pairings, DIY, and simple everyday moments to appreciate
and enjoy.”
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Cho’s construction of happiness on/through Pinterest recalls the function of albums
in the late nineteenth century. In her exploration of the Waterloo Album, Patrizia Di Bello asserts
that late nineteenth-century album culture offered mothers an important space to fantasize about
the family outside of normative Victorian era constructions.
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Happy motherhood was embodied
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in the placement of images that demonstrated the mother’s “physical enjoyment of her
children.”
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For example, Di Bello examines the Waterloo family album and the “cutting and
pasting together two prints to make one group composition” by the mother.
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This act of collage
illustrates a way for the mother to be closer with her children as “the heart of the family.”
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Di
Bello examines a distinct historical period regarding motherhood and the role of albums in
producing representations of motherhood as related to producing good citizens. The function of
the album within a digital landscape like Pinterest, and for Cho’s board, in particular, illustrates
the way maternal culture continues to fixate on the happiness as integral to a motherhood project.
The album and scrapbook aesthetic in the 21
st
-century highlights a commodified
experience of motherhood as a lifestyle design. Victorian era conceptions of album culture and
the construction of elite lifestyle and taste offers a way to consider how a platform like Pinterest
allows users to demonstrate and to invoke a tradition of feminine consumption practices. Taste in
the 21
st
-century and within an American context highlights not only the act of consumption as a
necessity to certain class positions, but good consumption that requires skill on the part of the
consumer in being able to differentiate between types of designs, fabrics, furnishings, and styles
that ultimately showcase one’s income level and appropriate level of aspiration. The cultivation
of taste in relation to motherhood on a site like Pinterest plays into a distinctly American
consumerist logic aimed at buying the best for one’s child, while at the same time, understanding
that cultivating taste connects to what others already perceive as good, fashionable, beautiful,
and collectible. To be a good, tasteful mother, one must also be a good collector of objects; one
must understand how to assemble collections of things that share in a definition of happiness
which also largely shares in an upper-middle class version of motherhood.
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The physical layout of the pins allows for the pinner to read Cho’s board within a familiar
set of maternal gestures. The first pin features Cho and her daughter sitting together. Dressed in
party ware, the caption identifies Cho’s desire as a mother to document the mother-daughter
experience: “One of my favorite things to do is take mama + daughter portraits once a year so we
can remember how we've grown together.”
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The pin offers an entry point for other pinners and
viewers to look through Cho’s collection. Attached to the clothing company Boden, the
collection reconstructs motherhood as a kind of labor of love and consumerism achieved through
the outfits that one wears to capture a well-lived childhood and motherhood experience.
Additionally, the pin sets the stage for Cho’s dynamic role as a mother, as the Cho and her
daughter similarly evolve and develop together. This exemplary act of recollection is juxtaposed
to pins featuring mother and daughter paired outfits. For example, the pin “Mama + me / A
sunny day” highlights the affective quality of the mother-daughter themed outfit as another
element to achieving and mastering happiness with one’s child.
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Laid out in a minimalist
style—against a white background and without bodies to model the outfits—the image allows for
the viewer to imagine herself wearing the ensemble. Both outfits are youthful in appearance,
pairing a rainbow-colored coat for the mother with a pink jumper for the daughter. Paired
together, the outfits exemplify Cho’s light-hearted style that is centered on the world of the child
but also appropriate for the adult mother. Fashion thus becomes another way to embody and
demonstrate knowledge and also to memorialize otherwise ephemeral moments of mother-
daughter growth through documentation and emulation by the reader-pinner.
Scrolling through Cho’s board, the remaining pins offer additional ways for the mother
and family to practice edible and material DIY projects that demonstrate the practice of
motherhood as hands-on and tactile. The ephemeral nature of motherhood as an extension of
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childhood is further captured in temporary activities like food preparation and Easter egg family
photos. These activities and photos link food with the memorializing function of motherhood as
a project.
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The Easter egg pin features a visual how-to of the picture-making process with the
cutouts of the family (on printable paper) and the end result of each member of the family’s
personal image on an egg. Reading Cho’s board as a whole offers a way for pinners to embody
and emulate motherhood as a series of temporary experiences. It is about capturing motherhood
in the more traditional album sense but also consuming motherhood in the form of kid’s
activities that are sentimental and grouped accordingly to produce an archive of maternal well-
being that is sweet, tasty, and innocent. For example, the pin captioned “A spring morning |
Taking care of the animals on the farm,” highlights a simple mother-daughter moment at the
petting zoo. The image features Cho and her daughter in a familiar pose of closeness and care.
Cho kneels next to the girl as she looks at the object in her hand. The comment section features a
shared sense of sentimental experiences. As one commenter states, “Fun! Our daughter loves the
petting zoo too. And I bet the goats love getting brushed.”
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The comment expresses a sense of
shared outings and the feelings of “love” attached to the experience of brushing and touch as part
of the mother-child connection. Motherhood thus becomes a way for pinners to affectively create
bonds and to participate in a visually rich environment in which the feel, the look, and the sense
of the experience is vicariously lived through both the pin itself and the possibility (and reality)
of creating similar moments of intimacy.
Cho’s multiplatform presence isn’t particularly unique compared to the recent emergence
of other lifestyle brands capitalizing on an increasingly interconnected and digital public. Rather,
Cho’s account points to ways in which self help advice literature, fashion, cooking, design, and
parenting are all forms of an affective commodity-oriented landscape, in which well-being
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shapes the entire enterprise. To consider how Pinterest creates a community is to also consider
how the platform encourages an archive of well-being and how motherhood is centrally located
within this archive. The production of maternal care and the well-being of the family construct
much of how motherhood is marketed and deployed across the platform. At the same time, Cho’s
embodiment of the lifestyle pinner also captures how motherhood becomes part of a consumer
and entrepreneurial experience. Being a good pinner offers different types of commodity and
affective relationships to motherhood that opens up ways for a pinner like Cho to demonstrate
her mastery of emotional well-being. The platform’s scrapbook aesthetic visually captures a
range of experiences associated with motherhood that are fleeting and traditionally
undocumented. In this case, bonding gestures and DIY projects are all part of a larger consumer-
oriented project that points to motherhood as the ultimate investment in one’s life and style. As
the next section will outline, the role of pinner and her understanding of the Pinterest form
illustrates another type of performance of motherhood that occurs on the platform. The use of
irony offers additional ways for the pinner to master emotional well-being. The motherhood
project, in this case, becomes a way to negotiate the role of the mother as an author herself
through the unruly fashionista child.

Hipster Motherhood and the Author of the Ironic Toddler Fashionista
A child twists to the side as she looks at something stuck to the bottom of her shoe.
Positioned against a white background, the red converse shoes and 1950s bandana stand out as
part of the little girl’s hip attire. The accompanying text playfully reimagines an otherwise stock
image of a girl within a fashion catalogue: “One time Quinoa thought she had accidentally
squashed a bug, but what she had really squashed was all the predictable style rules society has
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tried to place on her.”
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On the one hand, the image is simple in that the girl has something stuck
to her shoe. On the other hand, after reading the image with the accompanying text, the clothing
choices of the bandana, converse shoes, and purple jeans offer a much more culturally ironic
tone. The girl looks more like a character from Rebel Without a Cause than a typical toddler. The
image and text reveal a satirical tension between the sentimentality of children’s culture and
fashion, and the cultural knowledge of consumer culture centered in late capitalism. She could be
from any fashion layout; the girl is hip, quirky, while also knowingly understands youth rebellion
and her place within the “most ‘mainstream sub-culture’ to date.”
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In 2013, the popularity of pinner and author Tiffany Beveridge’s “My Imaginary Toddler
Daughter” board on the platform spread quickly across the web. Online sites like Buzzfeed and
Jezebel highlighted the board and the quirky premise of the imaginary Quinoa as a girl fashion
icon. “Meet Everyone’s Well-Dressed Daughter Quinoa,” a Jezebel article states in its headline.
The article highlights the upper class trend regarding children as embodying a sophisticated taste
palette for a larger lifestyle industry: “Quinoa, a Blueprint-cleanse-in-a-sippy-cup, already-
exfoliating, so-over-Bushwick toddler, is basically a third Gwyneth Paltrow child who only lives
in the Internet.”
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Framed as a parody board of the parenting and child fashion craze across the
Pinterest universe, Quinoa represents the excesses of childhood fashion, upper middle-class
lifestyle choices, and the privilege associated within a community of advice and self-help ethos
across the web. Using stock and fashion photographs of children in various high fashion outfits
coupled with her commentary, Beveridge performs a more critical motherhood project that
juxtaposes her own role as a mother and author.
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As the previous section detailed regarding the lifestyle pinner, the construction of
emotional well-being is firmly rooted in the care of mothering as a kind of scrapbook consumer
project that encompasses a certain style of parenting that is entrepreneurial-oriented. The
proliferation of motherhood as a domestic achievement engages with this inherently sentimental
consumer project that places the child as a central to the mother’s identity. On an image-based
platform like Pinterest, the performance of motherhood visually captures moments of “good”
motherhood via objects and experiences associated with performing this kind of parenting and
the act of pinning and collecting images that has historically been tied to maternal scrapbooking.
Good motherhood shares in a similar consumer model encouraged by a platform like Pinterest
that encourages good pinning practices (also elite pinning and consuming practices). A good
pinner understands how to group, collect, and display images that reflect a familiar set of objects
and ideas associated with good motherhood. Wanting the best for one’s family and children is
captured in a combination of products and fashion choices—especially high end labels designed
for children—that demonstrate wellbeing as a collectible style for how one practices
motherhood.
As a fashion icon, Quinoa represents the more recent emergence of high-end children’s
fashion. Elite fashion Brands like Calvin Klein, Gucci, and Burberry Kids have become part of
children’s clothing culture with collections focused on comfort and style that emulate an adult
sensibility. Fashion magazine Elle recently documented this trend in a recent editorial spread
entitled “Designer Minis.”
98
The spread shows 22 different brands and the move by high-end
labels like Gucci and J Crew in capitalizing on a stylized motherhood via the child. Much of the
language used to describe the fashions plays upon comfort and what J-Crew baby brand
identifies as “the adult line’s casual, cool aesthetic.”
99
The playfulness of children’s fashion
142

becomes embodied into a designer language of “hooded capes,” “frayed denim,” and “iridescent
leather” as a way to market high-end adult designs as functional but also fashionable for the
child. The move by clothing lines, magazines, and designers in capturing childhood as an
extension of an adult aesthetic sensibility, especially one centered on “cool” proliferates across a
platform like Pinterest with pins and boards dedicated to children’s hipster fashion. Beveridge’s
board on Quinoa plays with this high-end fashion culture and by extension how parenting has
become intertwined in the performance of the hip and ironic child.
Beveridge plays with and subverts the role of the mother by excluding her from Quinoa’s
world. Unlike Joy Cho’s evocation of motherhood as a central figure to the promotion of lifestyle
pinning, the role of the mother for Beveridge is present in her absence from Quinoa’s life. Even
though there are pins that feature Quinoa’s au pair, the parental role is relegated to the sidelines
in favor of the little girl’s exploits and adventures through a largely adult-free world. Quinoa
rearticulates the anxieties of children growing up rapidly amongst a sea of media images and
influences outside most parents’ control. In this case, Quinoa is in the know of the adult world
and understands the nuances of class signs and material culture as inherently linked to her
performance. Rather than being a passive female figure, Beveridge uses the innocent and overtly
sexualized images to ascribe Quinoa with agency in her commentary on the excesses of elite
consumer culture.
100
Beveridge’s authorship in this case reflects a different look into a maternal
and well-being archive that allows for a more ambivalent motherhood. Mixing sentimentality
with irony, the figure of Quinoa and her engagement with lifestyle activities allows for a critical
analysis of motherhood as a practice in the early 21
st
-century. For Beveridge, the pinning of
Quinoa not only reveals the mechanism of Pinterest as a platform itself—largely made up of
143

sentimental attachments to feminine culture—but that motherhood shares in a kind of authorship
that also requires a sense of humor and wit as part of the pinning process.
This process is also a way for the author to master her craft, to demonstrate her
knowingness of advice literature aimed at parents, and to deploy irony to comment Pinterest
itself. Beveridge recognizes the role of her own voice in constructing a combination of mother-
daughter advice literature: “I try to make the voice so that you don't really know where Quinoa
begins and the mother's voice ends. It's a blurry line."
101
Referring to herself as “Quinoa’s
mom,”
102
Beveridge negotiates her voice and commentary within a highly visualized world of
photo collages. A number of pins are framed in the third person, adding to the ambiguousness
and play between Beveridge’s voice and that of Quinoas’. Other pins feature Beveridge’s own
“I” and other personal pronouns as the maternal role in capturing her fantasy daughter’s hyper
conscious fashion and lifestyle decisions. In one particular pin, a little girl wears a floral inspired
shirt with matching head accessories. The girl’s expression is blank and the background is
indicative of a fashion catalogue photo shoot. The caption states: “Frustrated with my lack of
accessories for her, Quinoa summoned nearby butterflies to step in.”
103
Another pin features a
girl modeling a navy blue frock strung together by a simple rope. Similarly, Beveridge inserts
her position as the mother figure: “I sent Quinoa to a sleepover one night and she returned the
next day wearing her pillowcase as a modern frock. Silly girl!”
104
The caption in this case adds to
Beveridge’s performance of motherhood as self-aware of her child’s fashion obsession. By
performing Quinoa, Beveridge reveals the ambiguities of a maternal archive that play with the
mother’s attempt to be active in her child’s life and the role of the child in taking on and
emulating an adult world of emotional irony.
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Reading Quinoa and Beveridge’s boards as part of a larger whole, the pinner can piece
together a narrative of becoming and being an author for Beveridge that plays with maternal
culture. In a way, Beveridge’s understanding of Pinterest’s logic as a tool for users to construct
fantasy worlds as well as stories about their real lives and blurring distinctions between the two
is significant to using the platform. Beveridge’s account features 21 boards ranging from book
interests, fitness, and fashion. With links to her other published articles alongside Pinterest
articles about how to market and pin, Beveridge offers pinners a larger narrative of being an
author and mother that understands the business of pinning. Even on Quinoa’s board,
Beveridge’s promotion of her book highlights the savviness of motherhood as a kind of
authorship: “A few years ago, Tiffany Beveridge was contemplating whether she wanted to have
a third child. Instead, she gave birth to a Pinterest board.” The caption plays upon the popular
birth and baby culture by highlighting Beveridge’s creative development of Quinoa as similar to
that of giving birth. Clicking on the pin links to an external interview in the Philadelphia
Inquirer that further iterates the role of the imaginary daughter as a gateway to Beveridge’s
career as a writer: “What I really wanted was a career where I could write books. In an odd way
this imaginary child gave me that, and made this dream come true.”
105
Thus the reading of
Quinoa through Beveridge highlights her own career as a writer and author that allows for
readers (and pinners) to view the creation of Quinoa as a project about writing that can co-exist
with a type of motherhood that is more ambivalent and generative.
This expression of the mother-daughter bond is best embodied in Beveridge’s recent
book project on Quinoa as a metacommentary on popular narratives of digital celebrity stardom.
Entitled How to Quinoa: Life Lessons from My Imaginary Well-Dressed Daughter, the book
similarly mimics the digital version of Quinoa on Pinterest in a scrapbook aesthetic. Constructed
145

as a how-to guide, Beveridge's book invokes the more recent emergence of social media guides
on celebrity stardom. “This book will show you how to Quinoa,” Beveridge claims in her
introduction. “By the time you’re done reading, you will be exponentially more interesting and
on-trend.”
106
The joke of the book, and of the Pinterest account too, is the eventual procreation of
similarly constructed children (or the ironic knowing of such children and their parents) who
have been taught how to participate in an elite and privileged lifestyle.
The high-end fashion child as an extension of proper motherhood also speaks to a
contemporary media sensation that connects high-end designers and celebrity culture with highly
integrated and fast modes of media circulation and popularity via platforms like Instagram and
Twitter. Take, for example, the 5-year old child fashion star, Alonso Maeto, who gained
popularity through his curated selfies on Instagram. Known as “The 5-year-old Boy Who’s
Become an Instagram Style Icon,” the boy’s quick rise to fame is framed through an inherent
ability to understand hip new styles and being technologically savvy.
107
The authenticity
articulated by the selfie shot also adds to how followers—including other high-end stylists—
have labeled his iconic status as having ‘swagger’ and demonstrating confidence.
108
The child in
this instance exudes an understanding of a largely adult world; he knows how to pose and how to
look good for not only the untrained masses, but for the fashion professionals who spot and
analyze trends. The role of the parent too is constructed as behind the scenes and supportive of
the child’s use of social media technology as an expression of the self. As Mateo’s mom claimed
in a recent interview, he “just loves being in front of the camera.”
109
In this instance, the child
and mother figure become intertwined in a narrative of motherhood that celebrates a certain type
of authenticity regarding a child and mother’s awareness of social media and fashion as an
extension of the self. The mother can guide the child into making certain decisions about
146

clothing (she teaches him the differences between types of t-shirts) in order to perform and
perfect proper taste. And likewise, the child understands clothing choices as being significantly
tied to his own self-expression and reception across the web.
110
This performance of
motherhood and the child as both semi-adult figures is significant to Beveridge’s commentary on
motherhood as tied to the aesthetic sensibilities of the child.
The manifestation of this ambivalent motherhood plays out on Quinoa’s Pinterest board
as a self-reflexive parody of hipster aesthetics and parenting culture and, by extension, of fashion
controversies over class and whiteness. With over 428 pins, Beveridge’s board engages with a
variety of pop cultural references that construct the world of privileged childhood as self-aware:
“Quinoa absolutely loves a juxtaposition. And irony. And gummi bears,” one caption reads.
111

The image features two girls dressed in pink looking up into the camera. Referencing pop
cultural news headlines like actress Gwyneth Paltrow’s “conscious uncoupling” from her
husband to movie references like Twilight and 50 Shades of Gray, the collection playfully mixes
the sentimentality of childhood with adult sensibilities. Additionally, the actor-turned-activists
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and their lifestyle cues are the ultimate symbol of the elite family.
The pin features a group of children of different ethnic and racial backgrounds and an adult
female figure wearing a headdress. The accompanying text plays upon the mediated imagery of
celebrity and the global family: “Quinoa loves it when her au pair Fontanelle opens up the dress
up closet, rounds up the neighborhood kids, and they all go out for an afternoon of Jolie-
Pitting.”
112
The text reinforces the children’s multi-cultural backgrounds as well as the
consumption and appropriation of the headdress as ironically hip within an urban street
environment. The use of the headdress as part of a number of mainstream fashion pieces made
media headlines in 2010 with popular clothing chains like Urban Outfitters to a French Glamour
147

magazine profile of the “American Indian” as a sort of bohemian style.
113
The au pair’s
headdress reinforces the role of both white privilege and appropriation that has become
synonymous with hipster fashion. At the same time, Beveridge critically highlights the excesses
of this fashion sense by also referencing the celebrity family as an embodiment of this style. To
be able to play and participate as a Jolie-Pitt, Beveridge points to a very privileged and
cosmopolitan subject that plays dress-up with the other. Part of the recognition of this privilege
and the Jolie-Pitt clan as an emblem of the global Hollywood family is through the family’s very
public persona (news and tabloid narrative) of adoption and cultural exchange. Being able to
move through urban areas and around the globe signals a type of motherhood that enjoys a
disposable income, as well as a certain level of mobility around urban and poorer sites of conflict
that separate the middle and working class family from that of an elite.
Part of the fun in reading Quinoa’s board as ironic also relies on a highly visualized
culture of maternal sentimentality that makes up much of the platform’s popularity. As with Ann
Romney’s account, the intense focus on hyper visual images, gestures, and recipes associated
with American nationalism and comfort culture aid pinners in reading her board in a prescribed
way. The collage-like layout of children holding hands or posing also relies on a recognizable
sentiment (especially when considering a longer album and scrapbook culture centered on
maternal sentiments and children). Two pins in particular, one in which a little girl is kissing a
baby, and a pin featuring a group of children riding their bikes in Fourth of July colors invokes
maternal sentiment popularized in gestures and colors associated with the public and political
realms. The first pin featuring the gesture of the baby kiss includes a caption referencing the
visual vernacular of the gesture: “Just in case she decides to become president someday, Quinoa
has been taking baby-kissing classes twice a week.”
114
Comments by fellow pinners reinforce the
148

joke of this pin. As one pinner simply writes, “Practical,” while another asks “How are lessons
going?” The second pin involves a group of girls posed on bicycles with streamers of red, white,
and blue hanging off the handlebars. The caption plays upon an ironic celebration of the Fourth
of July by highlighting how much more Quinoa will celebrate the American holiday compared to
the masses: “I dare you to try and love America as much as Quinoa and her friends. That's right,
I dare you.”
115
Commenters similarly express this sentiment by pushing the notion of freedom
and American idealism even further. As one commenter writes, “So young, yet Quinoa
appreciates that America is the home of the free--free to be fashionable!” The comment captures
the irony and sentiment attached to the national holiday. Quinoa’s freedom, in this case, stems
from her performance of innocence and youth, but also a market-based freedom that celebrates
choice as the ultimate embodiment of U.S. nationalism.
Conclusion
Reading Quinoa’s board within a maternal collection also reveals the tensions
surrounding motherhood within an advanced capitalist country like the United States. A 2014
Slate article highlights the growth of viewing motherhood and having children as part of a
“lifestyle” choice: “it’s a decision that’s no different from moving to San Francisco or buying a
motorcycle. If you choose to buy that Harley or have that baby, it’s on you, lady.”
116
Due in a
large part due to the welfare rhetoric of the 1980s, and larger lack of resources to support lower
and middle income Americans in adequately providing for a family, the “choice” to be a mother
is divided down class lines.
The performance of motherhood as tied to a rhetoric of consumption defines parenting
and childhood culture of the 21
st
-century. Being a good parent relies on models of middle and
upper-middle class consumption. By drawing comparisons between 19
th
and 20
th
-century
149

scrapbook culture to the 21
st
-century design of a visual image board, the representation of good
motherhood continues to evolve along aesthetically and sentimentally constructed lines. A
platform like Pinterest commodifies the scrapbook and collecting experience as a way for users
to construct and visualize their lives on the web. The rhetoric of good collecting practices
dictates and is dictated by other users on what counts as a life that is tastefully and visually well
lived.
The production of sentimentality in the form of familiar images of childhood and mother
bonding speaks to how both brands and individuals circulate within a maternal archive on
Pinterest. An account like Ann Romney’s highlights a particular sentimental visual rhetoric in
the form of cupcakes, recipes, and family photos that also reinforce heteronormative and
nationalist forms of care and comfort. Her performance of motherhood centers on pins and
pinning culture that is sweet and largely reproducible as something to eat. Similarly, Joy Cho’s
brand embodies sweet motherhood. At the same time, this performance of motherhood also
intersects with the emergence of new forms of digital labor. As I outlined in the previous
sections, the role of the blogger and pinner in the case of Joy Cho is significant to the
construction of entrepreneurial motherhood that demonstrates a feeling like happiness as a
combination of material goods and non-material experiences. Cho’s account in particular
highlights a type of motherhood that explores this role through a stylized lifestyle. On the other
end of the spectrum, a board like My Imaginary Well-Dressed Daughter offers room to consider
how users can adjust and adapt content in a way that comments upon the cultural investment in
motherhood through irony and ambiguity. In this case, though, the motherhood project is made
up of a collection of ironic 21
st
-century musings, experiences, and products that allow for
maternal ambivalence. The pinner, Beveridge, helps viewers to better understand how emotional
150

well-being continues to play out in the maternal archive of the 21
st
-century, and how irony
contributes to a view on motherhood and the child that allows for a sort of self-critique on the
part of the mothers in recognizing the absurdity and privilege of childhood high fashion as an
embodiment of perfect motherhood.
More generally, though, the performance of motherhood on a platform like Pinterest
illustrates how the site circulates in affect. As much as cultural critics have labeled the platform
as a feminine space with varying degrees of cultural value, Pinterest’s intimate design allows for
users to engage with the messiness of contemporary 21
st
-century life. Being able to curate all
aspects of one’s life, including one’s parenting style and imagined child illustrates how wellness
reflects a commodity-oriented experience that is managed, controlled, and visualized by the
individual.

151

NOTES

1
“The Fall of Pinterest,” last modified June 4, 2012, http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6778520/the-
fall-of-pinterest.
2
Rachel Wilkerson Miller, “What Happened When I Lived According to the Pinterest Popular Page,”
Buzzfeed, December 15, 2014, http://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelwmiller/all-we-do-is-
pin?utm_term=.tsazzdpv0Y#.ieNWWm1V.
3
Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, eds. Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in An Age
of Austerity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 7.
4
“Getting Started and Optimizing Promoted Pins with Pinterest,” accessed March 20, 2015,
https://www.creativelive.com/courses/how-advertise-pinterest-pinterest.
5
Rebecca Dube, “‘Pinterest Stress effects nearly half of Moms, survey says,” Today, May 9
th
, 2013,
http://www.today.com/parents/pinterest-stress-afflicts-nearly-half-moms-survey-says-1C9850275.
6
Carole Cadwallaldr, “Ben Slibermann: The Modest Genius Behind Pinterest,” The Guardian, April 5,
2014, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/05/pinterest-interview-ben-silbermann-social-
media.
7
See: Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). Berlant examines
“women’s culture” by thinking about the mass commercial circulation of female centered genres that are
invested in sentimentality.
8
“What’s Pinterest?” Pinterest YouTube Video, April 8, 2014,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QkMOdW0Kyc.
9
The comparison between Pinterest’s role as a curatorial site to search engines like Google has been
noted by industry professionals, especially those looking at the platform’s relationship to commodity
culture. In a recent interview, Pinqora analytics CEO Sharad Verna identified Pinterest’s investment in
the visual as part of the site’s transition into a search engine: “ ‘I do believe that Pinterest is gradually
becoming the Google of the visual web.’” See http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/13/a-pin-on-pinterest-is-
worth-25-more-in-sales-than-last-year-can-drive-visits-orders-for-months/.
10
Max Chafkin, “Can Ben Silbermann Turn Pinterest into the World’s Greatest Shop Front?
Fastcodesign, August 30, 2012, http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670681/ben-silbermann-pinterest.
11
The actual relationship between Pinterest as a searchable site and the way users look for content is part
of the very design that structures how users make sense of the images: “You start with the words and you
say I want to find these words. When you’re discovering something, we’re helping you figure out the
language. If you are interested in discovering something new, you might not know what to type in. Here,
the language is the end state.” For Pinterest, the language becomes about discovery and how to brand the
process of discovery as part of an authentic user experience. Even though the site is built upon
complicated designs and computations to string images together, the site is also marketed as inherently
human: “And most pins are on thousands and thousands of boards. So there are thousands of human-
generated strings that describe each of these objects.” See: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670681/ben-
silbermann-pinterest.
12
“What’s Pinterest,” Pinterest promo video, last modified April 8, 2014.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QkMOdW0Kyc,.
13
“Best Practice Guide,” accessed on March 19, 2015,
https://business.pinterest.com/sites/business/files/best_practices_2_en.pdf.
14
David K. Israel, “What Kind of Pinner are You? The 8 Types on Pinterest,” Mental Floss, April 2,
2012, http://mentalfloss.com/article/30350/what-kind-pinner-are-you-8-types-pinterest.
15
Additionally, users who do not sufficiently label or give credit to his or her sources are problematic. For
legal reasons, Pinterest has had to become more strict and upfront regarding pinnable content. According
152

to the website, users must credit images that do not belong to them. And if the image is from a search
function, users should be cautious in pinning it without prior approval from the source. The platform’s
invested interest in keeping the site useable must negotiate how content curration circulates on the site,
and also how users and companies police their participation on the site in order to reflect good
communication and content use.
16
Poynor, Print Magazine.
17
Patrizia Di Bello, Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England (Hampshire: Ashgate
Publishing Limited, 2007), 41.
18
Patrizia Di Bello’s book on Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England offers an
important historical examination of albums and scrapbooks as rooted in feminine forms of collecting.
More specifically, Di Bello links the culture of collecting with class and taste concerning a women’s
position in English society.
19
Maureen Morrison, “Pinterest Narrows Ad Targeting; Tests Animated Pins,” Adage, March 14, 2015.
http://adage.com/article/digital/pinterest-narrows-ad-targeting-tests-animated-pins/297428/
20
Ben Silbermann,“Planning for the Future,” Oh, How to be Pinteresting (blog), September 19, 2013,
http://blog.pinterest.com/post/61688351103/planning-for-the-future.
21
Morrison, http://adage.com/article/digital/pinterest-narrows-ad-targeting-tests-animated-pins/297428/.
The article addresses how Pinterest has begun its own advertising summit called “Pinstitute” to attract
potential marketers and brands to the platform.
22
“Getting Started and Optimizing Promoted Pins on Pinterest,” Pinterest, accessed March 19, 2015,
https://www.creativelive.com/courses/how-advertise-pinterest-pinterest.
23
Carole Cadwalladr, “Ben Silbermann: The Modest Genius Behind Pinterest,” The Guardian, April 5,
2014, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/05/pinterest-interview-ben-silbermann-social-
media.
24
Christine Pittman, comment on Silbermann, “Planning for the Future,” September 20, 2013,
http://blog.pinterest.com/post/61688351103/planning-for-the-future.
25
Rick Poynor, “Observer: Pinning Down Pinterest,” Print Magazine, July 23, 2014,
http://www.printmag.com/featured/observer-pinning-down-pinterest/.
26
See Henry Jenkins’ Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York: New
York University Press, 2006), 39. Jenkins examines the various ways fan practices shape media
consumption and viewing. Using Michel de Certeau’s notion of ‘poaching,’ Jenkins critically thinks
though how readers (and viewers) reshape texts “as a kind of cultural bricolage.” This is a significant
point when thinking about Pinterest and how users construct texts on the site that disrupt/distort an
original meaning. See Raymond Malewitz’s The Practice of Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in
Contemporary American Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 7. Malewitz turns to
“rugged consumers” as part of a late 20
th
-century discourse on how users and objects navigate a complex
world of consumption practices: “Through engagement with material objects, the bricoleur, like the
rugged consumer, views the world outside the prescribed limits of sanctioned use-values.”
27
Douglas MacMillan, “Pinterest is Valued at $5 Billion; Scrapbooking Site Raises $200 Million
Investment,” The Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2014,
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303908804579564511829407056.
28
“30 Pinners to Follow, 2013 Edition,” Time, September 5, 2013,
http://techland.time.com/2013/09/04/30-pinners-to-follow-2013/.
29
Petula Dvorak, “Addicted to a Website Called Pinterest: Digital Crack for Women,” Washington Post,
February 20, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/addicted-to-a-web-site-called-pinterest-digital-
crack-for-women/2012/02/20/gIQAP3wAQR_story.html.
30
See: Shelly Stamp’s Movie Struck Girls (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) for an account on
the anxieties of female film viewing practices that circulated during the turn of the century. Lynn Spigel
examines television’s role in the 1950s and similar gendered accounts of viewing practices that shaped
153

women’s roles inside and outside the home. The critical response to women’s roles as consumers and
protectors of the family construct much of the discourse of the period (also the anxieties and complexities
that television offered regarding public vs. private space). See: Lynn Spigel’s Welcome to the
Dreamhouse (Durham: Duke University Press), 2001.
31
Julie Tilsner, “My Affair with Pinterest—and How I ended it for the Best,” Redbook, April 5, 2013,
http://www.redbookmag.com/home/a15135/make-peace-with-pinterest/.
32
Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture,
1880s-1910s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3-4.
33
Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of
Consumer Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995), 16.
34
Belinda Luscombe, “More Millennial Mothers are Single than Married,” TIME, June 17, 2014,
http://time.com/2889816/more-millennial-mothers-are-single-than-married/#
35
Emily Esfahani Smith and Jennifer L. Aaker, “Millennial Searchers,” The New York Times, November
30, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/01/opinion/sunday/millennial-
searchers.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
36
Genevieve Shaw Brown, “Millennial Moms Focused on ‘Me’ Time, Study Says,” ABC News, January
30, 2014, http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/millennial-moms-study-points-time/story?id=22296806.
37
Shaw Brown, http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/millennial-moms-study-points-time/story?id=22296806.
Taskrabbit is an online app that connects professionals with people in search of household and other
domestic related tasks. The site claims to help, “clean your house, run your errands, clean your oven,
build your IKEA furniture, and hang your shelves.” For more info, see: https://www.taskrabbit.com/
38
Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels, The Mommy Myth (New York: Free Press, 2004), 4.
39
Susan Tucker, Katherine Ott, and Patricia P. Buckler, eds., The Scrapbook in American Life,
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 2006.
40
Ellen Gruber Garvey, “Scrapbook, Wish Book, Prayer Book: Trade-Card Scrapbooks and the
Missionary Work of Advertising,” in The Scrapbook in American Life, eds. Susan Tucker, Katherine Ott,
and Patricia P. Buckler (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 114.
41
Di Bello, 79.
42
Susan Tucker, Katherine Ott, and Patricia P. Buckler, The Scrapbook in American Life (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2006), 12.
43
Di Bello, 3.
44
Karatzogianni, Athina, and Adi Kuntsman, eds. Digital cultures and the politics of emotion: Feelings,
affect and technological change. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 3.
45
Jose Van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 6.
46
Van Dijck, 16.
47
Van Dijck, 13.
48
Jensen, Tracey. "‘Mumsnetiquette’: Online Affect within Parenting Culture." Privilege, Agency and
Affect: Understanding the Production and Effects of Action (2013): 131.
49
Jensen, 131.
50
Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 19.
51
Jake Kinzey, The Sacred and the Profane (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012), 49.
52
Kinzky, 47.
53
Susan Sontag, Essays of the 1960s & 70s (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc, 2013),
270-71.
54
It is important to note that Sontag’s essay also has many critics. For Moe Meyer, “Notes on Camp”
erased much of the critical and political discourse that rooted Camp within a queer discourse. Moe Meyer,
ed. The politics and poetics of camp (New York: Routledge, 1994).
55
Caity Weaver, “Ann Romney’s Pinterest is Better than Michelle Obama’s Pinterest,” Gawker, June 13,
2012, http://gawker.com/5918275/ann-romneys-pinterest-is-better-than-michelle-obamas-pinterest.
154

56
David A. Graham, “Ann Romney Blazes a Trail for Politics on Pinterest,” The Atlantic, February 21,
2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/02/ann-romney-blazes-a-trail-for-politics-on-
pinterest/253403/.
57
Berlant, 10.
58
Ann Romney, Pinterest Account, accessed March 19, 2015, https://www.pinterest.com/annromney/.
59
Ann Romney, “Scotch Shortbread,” accessed March 19, 2015,
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/112590059407724406/.
60
Ann Romney, “The Romney Family Table,” accessed March 19, 2015,
http://www.pinterest.com/annromney/the-romney-family-table/.
61
Romney, http://www.pinterest.com/annromney/the-romney-family-table/.
62
Maureen O’Connor, “Ann Romney’s Mommy War Becomes GOP Rallying Cry in Record Time,”
Gawker, April 12, 2012, http://gawker.com/5901504/ann-romneys-mommy-war-becomes-gop-rallying-
cry-in-record-time.
63
Raymond Malewitz uses Ann Romeny’s 2012 speech about Mitt Romney’s humble beginnings when
the couple was first married. The narrative of living in poorer conditions and of Mitt Romney as a
“creative repurposer” offers an important political glimpse into the Romeny’s adoption of Pinterest as part
of a DIY national project to reach consumers and voters alike. The Practice of Misuse: Rugged
Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 5).
64
Ann Romney, “Welsh Cakes Recipe,” accessed March 19, 2015,
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/112590059404264238/.
65
Ann Romney, “Cute (cupcakes),” accessed March 19, 2015,
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/112590059404611891/.
66
Ann Romney, “Campaign,” accessed March 19, 2015,
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/112590059404611891/.
67
Amalie Hastie, Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollections, and Film History (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2007), 184.
68
Erin Skarda, “The Top 30 Pinners You Should Follow Now,” Time, September 26, 2012,
http://style.time.com/2012/09/27/the-top-30-pinners-you-should-follow-now/slide/joy-cho-oh-joy/.
69
Joy Cho, “Oh Joy,” Pinterest account, accessed December 21, 2014, http://www.pinterest.com/ohjoy/.
70
Minh-Ha T. Pham, "“Susie Bubble is a Sign of The Times” The embodiment of success in the Web 2.0
economy," Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 2 (2013): 245.
71
A Pinfluencer is a marketing term used by various critics and business blogs as traffic driving pinner.
This person or brand can do so by curating particular online collections that connect with other business
and product tie-ins.
72
Joy Cho, “Oh Joy For Target,” accessed December 21, 2014, http://www.pinterest.com/ohjoy/oh-joy-
for-target/
73
Joy Cho, Oh Joy (blog), http://ohjoy.blogs.com/my_weblog/2014/02/oh-joy-target.html.
74
Raan and Shea Parton, “Joy to the World: Sitting Down with a Design Blogging Doyenne,” Style,
Feburary 11, 2014, http://www.style.com/culture/style-map/2014/joy-cho-oh-joy-interview.
75
Joy Cho YouTube Channel, September 18, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRgz9f11xkk.
76
See: Susan Douglas and Meredith Michael’s Mommy Myth. This work outlines a much longer history of
feminism and its aftermath throughout the 1980s and 90s in the U.S., and the media narratives that
centered upon perfect motherhood in the form of celebrity baby stories and mommy wars between the
housewife and career woman that ultimately pitted forms of motherhood against each other.
77
Sarah Banet-Weiser, Authentic™ - the politics of ambivalence in a brand culture (New York: New
York University Press, 2012), 37.
78
“Q&A: Joy Cho of Oh Joy!” thegitterguide.com, last modified on October 24, 2012,
http://theglitterguide.com/2012/10/24/qa-joy-cho-of-oh-joy/.
155

79
See: Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Managed Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Even
though Hochschild focuses her case studies on the airline industry, the notion of an “emotional style”
regarding one’s work is significant when considering how this idea manifests itself in a current freelance
and individualized economy. Cho’s brand encompasses a certain emotional style—she not only sells a
material product but it’s about an attitude (happiness) towards the product that is part of her effortless
labor.
80
Statistics for those who make a living (or how individuals are compensated) on Pinterest are difficult to
locate. Most of the information consists of how-to guides by media professionals in leveraging a platform
like Pinterest as an extension of one’s brand. Target’s relationship with Cho in gaining recognition for the
company’s products has been effected by the development of the “rich pin.” This pin was rolled out by
Pinterest in (2014) as a way for businesses to price their pins and attach them directly to their products.
Target was able to create the “Awesome shop” based upon this feature that showcased treading Pinterest
products linked to the company. Business’s use of the rich pin has been reported bringing in 70% more
traffic to company’s websites. See: http://www.brandchannel.com/home/post/2014/02/11/140211-Target-
Pinterest-Collections.aspx; http://www.brandchannel.com/home/post/2014/01/23/140123-Pinterest-
Profitability.aspx.
81
Bianca Bosker, “The Most Pinteresting People in the World,” Backchannel, December 19, 2014,
https://medium.com/backchannel/how-people-youve-never-heard-of-got-to-be-the-most-powerful-users-
on-pinterest-206770326006.
82
Some pinners have become wildly successful in their ability to make a living off pinning—as is the case
of one top pinner who posed the question of her own money making potential vs. more traditional models
of success: “To think about the money I’ll be making when I first graduate compared to what I make off a
pin, it just devalues things. Why would you go for a Ph.D. or master’s now if you can be a blogger and
make money by showing off these beauty products?” see: Bosker, https://medium.com/backchannel/how-
people-youve-never-heard-of-got-to-be-the-most-powerful-users-on-pinterest-206770326006
83
Alan Van, “Joy Cho On Signing with a YouTube Network, How She Became No. 1 Most Followed on
Pinterest,” NMR, February 11, 2014, http://newmediarockstars.com/2014/02/joy-cho-on-signing-with-a-
youtube-network-how-she-became-no-1-most-followed-on-pinterest-interview/.
84
Cho, http://www.pinterest.com/ohjoy/.
85
Joy Cho, mother and daughter in black and white, accessed on December 21, 2014,
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/21181060719517698/.
86
Joy Cho, “Little Bits of Happiness – Oh Joy + Boden,” accessed on December 21, 2014,
http://www.pinterest.com/ohjoy/little-bits-of-happiness-oh-joy-%2B-boden/.
87
Di Bello, 98.
88
Di Bello, 93.
89
Ibid
90
Ibid
91
Joy Cho, “Little Bits of Happiness- Oh Joy + Boden,” accessed on December 21, 2014,
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/21181060721794762/.
92
Joy Cho, “Mama + Me A Sunny Day,” accessed on December 21, 2014,
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/21181060721782969/.
93
Joy Cho, “DIY Family Photo Print Easter Eggs,” accessed on December 21, 2014,
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/21181060721408685/.
94
Cho, http://www.pinterest.com/ohjoy/little-bits-of-happiness-oh-joy-%2B-boden/.
95
Tiffany Beveridge, “My Imaginary Toddler Daughter,” Pinterest account, accessed on December 21,
2014, http://www.pinterest.com/tiffanywbwg/my-imaginary-well-dressed-toddler-daughter/.
96
Jake Kinzey, The Sacred and the Profane (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012), 2.
97
Anna Breslaw, “Meet Everyone’s Well-Dressed Daughter Quinoa,” Jezebel, June 24, 2013,
http://jezebel.com/meet-everyones-imaginary-well-dressed-daughter-quinoa-553923950.
156

98
“Designer Minis: 22 Kids’ Collection,” Elle, accessed on December 21, 2014,
http://www.elle.com/fashion/g8356/designer-childrenswear/?slide=1.
99
http://www.elle.com/fashion/g8356/designer-childrenswear/?slide=1.
100
See:Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, eds., Interrogating Postfeminism (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2007). Sarah Projansky’s essay “Mass Magazine Cover Girls” identifies the way girlhood is
constructed and consumed as a highly visualized format. The anxieties of girlhood become embodied in
the “can do girl” and the “at-risk” girl who for Projasky speak to an “ambivalence” around girlhood in the
U.S.
101
Samantha Melamed, “Pins that Needle,” The Inquirer, November 6, 2014,
http://articles.philly.com/2014-11-06/news/56395421_1_pinterest-quinoa-fantasy.
102
Hillary Manton Lodge, “The Adventures of Quinoa: An Interview with Tiffany Beveridge,” Hillary on
Writing (Blog), June 23, 2013, http://hillaryonwriting.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-adventures-of-quinoa-
interview-with.html.
103
Beveridge, “My Imaginary Well-Dressed Toddler Daughter,” Pinterest,
http://www.pinterest.com/tiffanywbwg/my-imaginary-well-dressed-toddler-daughter/.
104
Beveridge, Girl in modern frock (pin), http://www.pinterest.com/pin/27584616440424490/.
105
Melamed, http://articles.philly.com/2014-11-06/news/56395421_1_pinterest-quinoa-fantasy.
106
Tiffany Beverdige, How to Quinoa (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2014),5.
107
Joy Adaeze, “The 5-Year Old Boy Who’s Become an Instagram Style Icon,” The Cut, June 24, 2013,
http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/06/five-year-old-boy-whos-become-a-style-icon.html.
108
Adaeze, http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/06/five-year-old-boy-whos-become-a-style-icon.html.
109
Adaeze, http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/06/five-year-old-boy-whos-become-a-style-icon.html.
110
Mateo is also featured on Quinoa’s board as one of her many highly accessorized friends. Other
pinners have commented on Mateo’s presence (recognizing the child fashionista). Reading Quinoa’s
board as a collection of stock photos and other digital media images, the board also signals the larger
child celebrity social media phenomenon.
111
Beveridge’s Quinoa Page, Two girls in pink, http://www.pinterest.com/pin/27584616440640989/.
112
Beveridge’s Quinoa Page, An afternoon of Jolie-pitting,
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/27584616442697609/.
113
Anna Holmes, “Feathers and Fashion: Native American is in Style,” Jezebel, April 13, 2010,
http://jezebel.com/5516362/feathers-and-fashion-native-american-is-in-style.
114
Beveridge’s Quinoa Page, Baby kissing classes, http://www.pinterest.com/pin/27584616441825808/.
115
Beveridge’s Quinoa Page, I dare you, http://www.pinterest.com/pin/27584616440726979/.
116
Jessica Grose, “The Year Having Kids Became a Frivolous Luxury,” Slate, December 22, 2014,
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/12/22/the_cost_of_raising_children_why_we_now_see_paren
ting_as_a_frivolous_luxury.html.

157

Conclusion: Well-Being, Collections, and Love
In a 2015 ad campaign for the popular phone dating application Tinder, a young woman
reflects on her time spent in Europe for a recent vacation. A musical montage then shows the
woman sight-seeing at the Eifel Tower and other famous landmarks, while meeting up with
various men from her tinder matches at each location. Both whimsical and nostalgic, the ad
concludes with her return to work in an office, a setting indicative of her aspirational, fresh out
of college background.
1
She is young, unattached, and willing to meet and have different sexual
experiences. In a 2015 Adage article, entitled “Tinder Plus Takes Girl on Wild Adventures in
Love, Sex and Travel,”
2
the journalist describes the new “Passport feature,” one of Tinder’s
recent upgrades that gives users access to profiles in far away geographical locations. The article
rehashes the anxieties of young, white, promiscuous femininity; however, this time, within the
global dating realm that the application Tinder facilitates.
Introduced in 2012, the dating app has risen to immense popularity amongst a
predominately millennial (persons under 30 years old) demographic as one of the main
networking and courting sites on the market. Much of the popularity and recent controversy
surrounding the platform has centered on the visually dominant architecture and design of the
platform that encourages a superficial read on a potential partner’s level of attraction. A 2014
article by Buzzfeed reporter Anne Helen Petersen examined the visual cues that viewers gather as
fundamental to modern dating culture: “Tinder appears to encourage these narratives and
crystallize the extrapolation process and package it into a five-second, low-stakes decision. We
swipe, in other words, because of semiotics.”
3
The article unpacks class as a major visual cue in
the form of objects and symbols that individuals represent both consciously and subconsciously.
Being able to swipe left or right on a potential partner’s picture, and to eventually garner matches
158

(with those who also swipe right) is part of the collection-like nature of the platform. When both
parties swipe right, the app matches them and they can begin the messaging process.
4
A 2015
TechCrunch article explains the appeal of using the platform as an addictive popularity game:
“Users want to swipe more because that is the game of Tinder, but the match is the equivalent of
a turbo-charged Like on another social network.”
5

Tinder’s matchmaking capabilities commodify lifestyle experiences and gestures
typically associated with casual meet-ups. By examining well-being as an extension of television
and social media forms centered on the self-help narrative, I consider how models of care shape
how user and consumer access and perform wellness within a moment of middle-class anxiety in
the U.S. In my last chapter, I reflected upon how the social scrapbooking platform Pinterest
commodifies the collecting experience as part of a larger well-being performance turn by users in
activating aspirational lifestyle discourses. The emergence of the television shows like The Big
C, Hoarders, Hoarding: Buried Alive, and the platform Pinterest during the post-recession era
offer thematic insight into how institutions and individuals visualize well-being as a model of
healthy living. Tinder activates a discussion on collecting and curating as central to building the
self in the 21
st
-century. If we are to consider Pinterest a curated platform, Tinder similarly
engages in a logic of selection and curation by the user in formulating a geographically situated
base of partners. At the same time, Tinder promotes the activity of matchmaking as
predominately a visual activity that is both a game and archive of potential partners to choose
from. To analyze affect in the 21
st
-century relates to how we understand communication as a
circulated and commodified activity. The act of matchmaking constructs how individuals engage
with well-being as tied to technologies and multimedia formats to perform overall “good health.”
159

The development of new digital and social media technologies as integral to human
relationships and information shapes much of how a concept like well-being becomes measured
and consumed. Media genres like the talk show and Reality TV format inform a cultural history
of self-care and confession that construct proper models of citizenship. As Brenda R. Weber
reiterates, “the tie between neoliberalism and Reality TV is insistent, since so many of the
lessons of Reality TV reinforce a broader logic of independent entrepreneurialism that requires
the good citizen to commit to projects of the self.”
6
As I have claimed in my hoarding chapter,
the portrayal of mental health as part of a self-help narrative instructs viewers on the pathology
as tied to a cluttered home. The labor on the hoarding shows provided by the professional
organizer, psychiatrists, and moving experts illustrates how the pathology has also created jobs
and careers that cater to disorganized living.
The self-help narrative on reality TV also extends into the social media realm. As
viewers are made to understand the transformative self via camera angles, lighting, reveals, and
the ultimate makeover of the home or person, the role of social media activates this visual
skillset for users to effectively manage their own care and livelihoods. Self-help figures like
Oprah and Dr. Oz extend their own televisual branding onto a larger digital landscape. For
example, in 2010 Oprah launched her own mobile phone application as an added feature to her
network. Highlighting content from the website, the application allows users to watch additional
videos and other forms of uploaded content. This particular extension of the Oprah brand is
nothing new as a number of self-help figures and programs have opted to offer content online as
part of an interactive viewing experience. Both A&E and TLC’s shows feature interactive
websites with additional clips and resources to help educate viewers on the parameters of
hoarding. Discovery in particular has made a name for itself and brand through a range of
160

applications, quizzes, and clips that tie-in Discovery programming with a boarder health and
science community.
Scrapbooks, Collecting, and Female Consumerism
The gendering of consumer culture that shaped much of the 20
th
-century also shapes
much of how advertisers continue to construct female consumers. This turn toward well-being
had to do with advertiser’s construction of mothers and the reliance on female consumers to
make purchasing decisions for the family while also protecting against “the harsher thrusts and
shocks of progress.”
7
As Roland Marchand claims, “The consumer, whether class or mass (but
intrinsically mass), was a ‘she.’”
8
Advertisers in the 1920s and 30s presented fantasies for female
consumers that catered to an emotional appeal towards consumer goods. This appeal also had to
do with the proliferation of confessional and tabloid magazines during this period. The
popularity of publications like True Story that featured populist narratives “of temptations, love
triangles, and tragic adventures” opened up a segment of the population that had a disposable
income but was not elite.
9
Thus by the 1980s and 90s, the construction of the female consumer
is not simply someone to be marketed to, but a figure who shapes the form of television genres
like the talk show and the makeover reality TV format, both of which use a similar language of
disaster and crisis as the premise for the show.
The collection and the act of collecting in the 21
st
-century connects to a history of
gendered consumer practices like scrapbooking. Historically, the album and scrapbook reflect
what scholars like Naomi Schor and Susan Stewart have identified as part of feminine collection
centered on family and domestic life.
10
Album making in particular signaled a middle and upper
class feminine activity as a way to show off the family and artistic skills that went with the
practice of collecting and arranging. The feminization of platforms like Pinterest in the 21
st-

161

century speaks to a much longer historical legacy of women’s roles in society and anxieties
attached to the performance of feminine domestic activities. As Pinterest begins channeling the
platform’s image from one of a heavily feminine collecting site, to that of a discovery platform
for future projects, this move by the company illustrates how monetizing the platform begins to
shape and de-emphasizing the site’s initial public image as solely attached to female collecting
practices.
At the same time, the scrapbook format serves as a way to think about the historical
nature of collecting and to destabilized dominant narratives that circulate in popular culture.
The attraction to reading a board like “My Imaginary Toddler Daughter” is the way the board
plays with the conventions of Pinterest as a maternal and sentimental site. The act of reading
Quinoa’s board involves a precise set of tools available to users who understand hipster culture
(visual signifiers like fedoras, big glasses, skinny jeans, typewriters, old objects becoming new
again). Beveridge’s juxtaposition of her own background as an author with Quinoa’s
commentary on popular culture offers other pinners a way to read and view a creative project
that is outside more traditional channels.
Much of the larger aesthetic trends that have emerged within a late-capitalist and
recession-era (post-2008) context involve a cultural shift towards digital labor and defining the
self. Kinzey points to both “free” and “flexible” labor as key conceptual shifts towards work that
have had a dramatic impact on a person’s sense of self.
11
The rise of “immaterial labor” as a
driving force in this current moment speaks to the type of labor individuals do that “involves a
series of activities that are not normally recognized as work.”
12
The work performed on various
social platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Pinterest demonstrates this new type of creative
162

skill. As users post their own hobby videos, these videos become part of how the sites sell
content.
At the same time, postmodern aesthetics also encompass a more general layering of
styles, as seen in the sampling and remix culture popularized in not only music but also fashion,
art, and design. According to media theorist Eduardo Navas in his book Remix Theory, notions of
remixing and sampling extend beyond music theory, offering ways to think critically about how
cultural objects and practices are reproduced and recontexualized. Sampling, in particular,
becomes a way in the postmodern era “toward privileging the fragment over the whole.”
13
That
is, “Looping, or modular repetition is what defines media culture, and Remix as a form of
discourse.”
14
The use of sampling as part of a new media environment is crucial to understanding
the manifestation of social platforms and the construction of content that engages with memes,
collages, and repurposing that forms much of the content on social media sites, especially
Pinterest.
As a curation site, Pinterest provides a space for users to sample and loop a variety of
images and objects, both original and borrowed, and juxtapose them in ways that may or may not
reflect the image or brand’s original intention. Even though the idea of sampling originates in
music theory, it opens up a way to critically engage with how images and sounds on Pinterest
and other platforms are repeated in “the constant flow of information in fragments” through the
re-pinning of content.
15
The theory of looping is particularly useful regarding the experience of
repetition. Navas extends remix theory to weave together notions of temporality and spectacle in
thinking about postmodern fragmentation. Popular sites like Las Vegas become useful in
thinking of how loops are evident through contemporary culture: “images repeat with no
beginning or end.”
16
Pinterest operates in a similar way to looping by weaving together the
163

functional layout of the site as a photo-image board, but also how users generate and appropriate
images from any number of sources that are accumulated, collected, and curated.
The proliferation of blogs, fashion Tumblrs, Pinterest boards, Amazon accounts, dating
platforms like Tinder, films and TV shows encourage collecting behaviors and has enabled
individuals to amass visual archives, producing, what a recent New York Times reporter dubbed
“lifestyle pornography.”
17
The term refers to massive digital archiving of images associated with
travel, leisure, sports, home, entertainment, and other projects that reflect how users display and
account for their lives in a digital public for others to see. The process of visualizing information
also connects to the notion of “addictive yearning” as central to digital archiving and collecting
practices.
18
This notion of lack underscores much of how cultural critics think about the act of
collecting as an incomplete activity in which the collector is always in search of the missing
piece. Baudrillard specifically writes on the collection as a definite practice by “the fact of its
incompleteness, the fact that is lacks something.”
19
The fantasy of obtainment underscores an
application like Tinder, which offers individuals an increased visual field of potential partners,
all seemingly within reach. In fact, one of the ways individuals use Tinder reflects this obsession
with attraction and using the platform to like every profile as a way to see who likes them back.
At the same time, Tinder has reacted to this type of behavior by discouraging it as a form of
devaluation of the match. As the platform evolves to account for an increasingly busy and
diverse dating field, and to foster a need or a way for partners to potentially “meet” each other,
the application design also encourages users to commodify the process of dating into a curated
collection of matches. Some matches users connect with (if both users ‘match’ each other, they
can connect by texting), while others are part of a potential pool of dating possibilities that
remind the user of their status within a larger dating field.
164

Well-Being as a Mediated Historical Concept
A theme that underlines the dissertation centers on well-being as an earlier 20
th
century
concept and how it has manifested in the 21
st
-century. T.J. Jackson-Lear’s “Therapeutic Ethos”
captures a major societal and advertising shift from Protestant ideals to a new notion of the self
with “preserving secular well-being” as central for living the better, industrialized life.
20
The
business of advertising by the 1920s had incorporated a therapeutic approach to selling products
that “led advertisers to another realm between truth and falsehood.”
21
The rise of advertising
culture and how it has shaped the 20
th
-century connects to what Stuart Ewen writes about style as
“the official idiom of the marketplace.”
22
As advertising shaped much of 20
th
century life in the
promotion of the self, the production of “provocative surfaces” in the form of images promoting
certain fantasies of livelihood and care set the stage for a culture in the midst of anxiety and
constant change.
23

By the latter half of the 20
th
-century and into the 21
st
, the notion of well-being begins to
center more closely on neoliberal models of privatized care and consumer empowerment
discourses that celebrate one’s ability to perform optimal health. As I point out in Chapter One,
physical well-being and the role of cancer illustrates a tonal shift from shame to ironic humor
regarding Kathy’s adjustment to the disease. At the same time, the show’s engagement with
cancer also highlights a movement by premium cable networks to elevate particular narratives as
distinct and of higher value over others. The representation of cancer on the show coupled
alongside a female antiheorine figure reflects cultural anxieties over unruly motherhood and the
continued stakes in performing ideal and domestic femininity. In Chapter Two, I turn to mental
well-being and the reality TV genre as a way to think through the spectacle of mental illness and
its relationship to the self-help genre of the 90s and early 00s. Chapter Three considers emotional
165

well-being as a performance of good motherhood. By tracing well-being to the digital and social
media realm, I think about how the self-help narrative combines with different types of content
and branding that engage with entrepreneurial motherhood.
The ‘Female Problem” and TV
As I have outlined throughout my chapters, the “female problem” continues to manifest in
the televisual format and beyond. By turning to various media platforms and texts, I demonstrate
how the health narrative has expanded to include different sets of objects and relationships that
move beyond the talk show genre and therapy tied to television. The scope of the “female
problem” and women’s representation on media has become more complex in recent years, and,
especially in the post-recession era. Even though Showtime has largely finished its “female
problem” programming (Weeds, Nurse Jackie in its last season, the Big C, and United States of
Tara), the proliferation of female-centered narratives continues to be part of the televisual
landscape. As the antiheorine mother figure has shifted to different types of female characters,
especially regarding feminist-leaning figures like Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope and Tina Fey’s
show featuring Kimmy Schmidt, the number of complex female characters continues to reflect
the anxieties of representation in the contemporary moment.
24

The unruly woman figure shapes much of women’s roles on and off screen. Kathleen K.
Rowe explores this figure by turning to Roseanne as an “unruly act par excellence” in which she
exemplifies feminine excess to the point of being too fat, too loud, and too bodily.
25
In 2010,
HBO’s Girls introduced a version of this figure through Lena Dunham’s role as Hannah on the
show. Much of the online and critical attention to the show has centered upon Dunham’s dual
persona as both a public figure and the likeness to her performance on screen. Her character
epitomizes a number of cultural anxieties associated with the millennial figure; she is in-between
166

jobs, dresses poorly, and eats what she pleases. Much of Dunham’s performance of Hannah
plays with the conventions of proper femininity by thinking through anxieties associated with
women’s roles in the 21
st
-century.
26

Mental Well-being and Cluttered Lives
The pathological implications of owning too much stuff continues to abound across media
genres. I had the opportunity to attend the annual ACLA (American Comparative Literature
Association) conference hosted in Seattle, Washington from March 26
6h
-29
th
, 2015. I
participated on a panel specifically about hoarding as a cultural phenomenon. One of the main
points of discussion that developed over a three day period included the various distinctions that
hoarding encompassed as a largely 20
th
and 21
st
-century phenomenon.
The hoarder takes on a specific historical reference that also includes interrelated figures like
misers, ragpickers, packrats, and clutterers. As Rebecca Falkoff presented in her paper
“Possessed, Abandoned: on Hoarding and Fetishism,” the figure of the hoarder plays into notions
of misuse as a kind of “dis-use.” The hoarder of the 20
th
and 21
st
century scavenges in a way that
challenges issues of planned obsolescence.
27
As Raymond M. writes in The Practice of Misuse,
the way out late capitalist culture operates also connects to “the marginalization of minorities,
women, and other economically disenfranchised groups by linking them to ‘obsolete’
commodities and modes of production.”
28
The way the hoarder relates to objects relies upon a
different set of cues and orientation that challenge how objects interact and makeup our daily
lives. Susan Stewart examines the difference between a collector and a hoarder by addressing
this issue of taste and distinction that each subject has towards his or her object.
29
Writing about
the hoarder, Stewart turns to a psychoanalytical framework to think about the collection as
deeply tied to the self, but, in the case of hoarding, how the collection comes to “overload the
167

self with signification.”
30
The hoarder comes to occupy a place within collecting literature that is
pathological and outside the boundaries of what constitutes a good or orderly collector. This
pathology that constructs “bad” or “unorderly” collecting behaviors provides much of the basis
for clutter narratives.
Pinterest, Motherhood, and Collecting the Emotional Self
In the case of Pinterest, the culture of collecting ties into the performance of motherhood.
The role of the Romney campaign in 2012 utilized the platform in a way that capitalized on the
folksy- middle-class content creation to build a brand around national sentiment. The move by
politicians to capitalize on a younger demographic is nothing new. Capturing sentimental
motherhood in the form of sweet recipes and family photo ops, the 2012 Romney campaign
illustrated the turn by users in playing with a sentimental form of mastery as part of a national
motherhood project. At the same time, the campaign also revealed anxieties associated with
performing a version of ideal motherhood.
As I demonstrated with popular pinner Joy Cho and her version of sentimental and product-
oriented motherhood, the role of the entrepreneurial pinner also informs how motherhood
becomes stylized and branded within a 21
st
-century context. This construction of idealized
motherhood and womanhood also plays into a cultural narrative centered on entrepreneurism and
the family that has shaped much of media representations and advice literature in a post-2008
environment. As Diane Negra explores regarding women’s advice literature through particular
figures like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and her feminist-leaning text Lean in, the turn toward
“a new feminization of such entrepreneurial endeavors” marks a post-recession era environment
of female achievement while also positioned within a neoliberal framework about the self.
31
I
would further argue that part of this entrepreneurial turn that specifically centers on women and
168

marketable skills that crossover into other network connections also has significantly influenced
romantic partnerships and coupling in the post-recession era. Thus an application like Tinder and
the way it has marketed itself to female consumers and users utilizes a network logic (pulling
Facebook data in order to even have a Tinder profile). The single woman in this case and her
successful achievement of work-life balance includes the process of a partner selection that is
plugged into multiple channels of her social media life that are interconnected and illustrative of
her status as a potential partner.
The role of social media platforms in capturing communication and also providing avenues
of display are central to the performance of the 21
st
-century self. Emotional wellness and its
proliferation across new media technologies provide alternative forms of care that allow for self-
help narratives to flourish. The turn in tracing a televisual lineage of wellness representations to
newer digital technologies connects to how individuals and institutions construct and engage
with health in increasingly complex ways in a post-network era. The relationship between
information and the commodification of collecting reveals anxieties of feminine public and
private life, and how women continue to be framed as consumer-citizens in-charge of family,
business, and personal lifestyle choices. As self-help technologies and platforms encourage users
to collect and curate lifestyle and health experiences, this move by companies and users to
mediate an individual’s experience and to commodify social interactions reveals how much a
notion like well-being has become part of the common language to construct the self as healthy,
attractive, affluent, able-bodied, and centered in the domestic space of the home. Ultimately, the
proliferation of well-being narratives within a post-recession era context demonstrates how
health encompasses the anxieties of access to health care and commodity-oriented lifestyle
narratives.
169

NOTES

1
“Tinder Plus,” YouTube, March 2, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdef2anpd04.
2
Tim Nudd, “Ad of the Day: Tinder Plus Takes Girl on Wild Adventures of Love, Sex and Travel,”
Adage, March 4, 2015, http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/ad-day-tinder-plus-takes-girl-
wild-adventures-love-sex-and-travel-163270.
3
Anne Helen Petersen, “How I Rebuilt Tinder and Discovered the Shameful Secret of Attraction,”
Buzzfeed, September 11, 2014, http://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/we-are-all-
classists#.am3Oa1Jr07.
4
Tinder is owned by IAC (InterActiveCorp). The app was developed similarly to Facebook (which
started with elite educational institutions) in that it focused on college-age students specifically at USC
and UCLA campuses to test out the app. For more information, see:
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-09-05/dating-app-tinder-catches-fire#p3.

6
Brenda R. Weber, ed. Reality Gendervision (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 7.
7
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1985), 168.
8
Ibid., 66.
9
Ibid., 54.
10
Naomi Schor, "Collecting Paris," The Cultures of Collecting, eds., John Elsner and Roger Cardinal
(London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 252-74.
11
Ibid., 55.
12
Ibid., 55.
13
Edwardo Navas, Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling (New York: SpingerWien, 2012), 30.
14
Ibid., 31.
15
Ibid., 75.
16
Ibid., 31.
17
Carina Chocano, “Pinterest, Tumblr and the Trouble with Curation,” The New York Times, July 20,
2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/magazine/pinterest-tumblr-and-the-trouble-with-
curation.html.
18
Addictive yearning is defined as, “the feeling of being addicted to longing for something; specifically
being addicted to the feeling that something is missing or incomplete.” See:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/magazine/pinterest-tumblr-and-the-trouble-with-curation.html.
19
Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” in The Cultures of Collecting, eds., John Elsner and
Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 23.
20
T.J. Jackson-Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic
Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930.” In The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in
American History, 1880-1980, eds., Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Learns (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1983), 4.
21
Jackson-Lears, 21.
22
Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 22.
23
Ewen, 22.
24
The premise of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt—even though tonally a comedy—follows the
aftermath of a kidnapped woman, Kimmy, and her re-entry into mainstream society. The show plays with
popular culture figures and the types of characters that become quick media sensations (while also just as
quickly forgotten). Kimmy moves to New York with just a backpack and the clothes on her back. Part of
170

the show’s relationship to objects and to Kimmy’s development as a character has to do with her utter
lack of knowledge regarding modern consumer items and pop culture. She misuses and reuses items.
Coming from a horrific scenario of abduction and isolation, Kimmy’s relationship to a world of consumer
objects plays with the absurdity of popular culture in the form of selfies, plastic surgery, and her very own
Cinderella makeover. At the same time, the show also captures a certain sentiment in what Atlantic
journalist Megan Garber claims as part of a moment in TV and social media as “finding new platforms
for empathy.” Megan Garber, “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and the Rise of Empathetic Comedy,” The
Atlantic, March 13, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/03/unbreakable-
kimmy-schmidt-and-the-rise-of-empathy-comedy/387676/.
25
Kathleen K. Rowe, “Roseanne: Unruly Woman as Domestic Goddess,” from Feminist Television
Criticism, eds. Charlotte Brunsdon, Julie D’Acci and Lynn Spigel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 75-
76.
26
See: Lara Bradshaw, “The Critical Investigation of HBO’s Girls: Feminist Text, Quality, and Happy
Womanhood.” Spectator 34, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 32-38.
This paper address the role of the unruly woman figure by considering the complex negotiation a text like
Girls occupies in matching up with post-feminist ideals while also showcasing a different kind of
feminism and womanhood.
27
Rebecca Falkoff, “Possessed, Abandon: on Hoarding and Fetishism” (working paper/presentation,
ACLA Conference, Seattle, Washington, March 28
th
, 2015).
28
Raymond Malewitz, The Practice of Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 4.
29
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 153-54. Stewart writes about the differences between the wood
rat and the collector to consider how we evaluate certain collections over others. In this case, Stewart
looks at the wood rat’s ability to collect items of “intrinsic value” vs. collector’s understanding of objects
within a larger exchange economy.
30
Stewart, 163.
31
Diane Negra,"Claiming feminism: commentary, autobiography and advice literature for women in the
recession." Journal of Gender Studies 23, no. 3 (2014): 277, doi: 10.1080/09589236.2014.913977.

171

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182

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation explores the commodification of health narratives, and the cultural shift from shame and silence to public displays of empowerment that make disease discourses speakable and integrated into a larger media therapy culture. This project seeks to examine how physical, mental, and emotional well-being motivates consumers to monitor, organize, and live embodied lives. As a critical feminist project, I situate well-being in a post 2008 economy that takes into account the effects of privatized policies that have produced a culture of corporate activism and individual self-help as a way to navigate and make sense of an increasingly harsh economic and political climate. At the same time, I root this project within a 20th- century historical conception of self-help and consumerism by examining how particular products and companies link spiritual and emotional health to consumer products and individual betterment that proliferates in the 21st- century environment. I argue that U.S. well-being culture intersects with gender and emerging mediated genres that center upon clutter and the home as part of how the middle-class has adapted, transformed, and internalized self-care as central to citizenship. ❧ In my three case studies, I investigate three modes of well-being: physical, mental, and emotional health. I demonstrate how these forms of health overlap and intersect in increasingly complex ways that play out across media formats and new media technologies. In doing so, I demonstrate how the intersections between these modes are used as a model of better living. As I am particularly interested in the construction and development of well-being as an economy, I use the term “well-being domesticities” to illustrate the most recent trend of health, self-actualization, social awareness, and media discourses that dominates how narratives of health as both intimate and feminine are produced, experienced, and historicized within the contemporary post-2008 moment. The relationship between the home and the female body becomes a key historical framework that continues to shape how health and wellness are visualized and internalized across media formats. I turn to newer online platforms like Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook and their relationship with television to examine how wellness and notions of well-being are increasingly at the center of what constitutes a “livable” life. I approach well-being through a critical and cultural studies investment in examining representations across media formats and genres, but also by examining the economic and industrial stakes that shape wellness as an institutional force within the United States.

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Asset Metadata

Creator Bradshaw, Lara L. (author)

Core Title Well-being domesticities: mediating 21st-century femininity through physical, mental, and emotional lifestyles

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 07/20/2015

Defense Date 05/04/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Bodies,cancer,Care,clutter,digital,Domestic,economic,emotion,feminism,Happiness,health,Home,housewife,Lifestyles,mental,new media,OAI-PMH Harvest,physical,platforms,postfeminism,recession,television,therapy,well-being,wellness,Women,Work

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Imre, Anikó (committee chair), Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee member), Keeling, Kara (committee member), Seiter, Ellen (committee member)

Creator Email lara.l.bradshaw@gmail.com,lbradsha@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-599723

Unique identifier UC11298988

Identifier etd-BradshawLa-3641.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-599723 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-BradshawLa-3641.pdf

Dmrecord 599723

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Bradshaw, Lara L.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA