RIDICULE AS A STRATEGY FOR THE RECONTEXTUALIZATION OF THE WORKING CLASS

Abstract

This paper discusses the role of reality television in the ongoing transformation of Swedish working-class discourse. This transformation is linked to a neoliberal political project and concerns a shifting relationship between discourses of exclusion and inclusion. The key argument is that working-class people are now portrayed through ‘a moral underclass discourse’ in which the working class is devalued and delegitimized, and given moral blame for their own structural situation. This discussion is based on a multimodal critical discourse analysis of participants who appear to be ‘ordinary’ working-class people in Ullared, a docu-soap that follows the goings-on at, and in the vicinity of a popular, rural low-cost outlet (called Gekås). Hence it puts participants' consumption and consumer behaviour in the foreground, and these activities are ridiculed through a mode of production best described as the ‘middle-class gaze’. Ordinary participants are presented as flawed or pathological consumers and become signifiers of a morally flawed lifestyle.

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