Scourging the Abject Body: Ten Years Younger and Fragmented Femininity under Neoliberalism

Abstract

The profoundly toxic character of neoliberalism’s recuperation of feminism has rarely been more powerfully articulated than in the television genre that promises to make women look better while making us feel worse. It is a genre whose pervasiveness and proliferation within broadcasting schedules has helped renew the hegemony of beauty culture as the apex of femininity at a historical juncture when women (in parts of Western society at least) are ostensibly more economically independent, socially engaged and politically visible than ever before. And it is a genre whose history is thoroughly tied into the changes in broadcasting structures and reception partly produced by the impact of neoliberal government policies on media ownership and regulation. That genre is the makeover show, the staple of contemporary television schedules and the progenitor of a thousand merchandising opportunities.¹