In Desperate Need (of a Makeover): The Neoliberal Project, the Design Expert, and the Post-Katrina Social Body in Distress

Abstract

In its emphasis on reduced state obligations, the logic of the marketplace, entrepreneurship, and the destruction of social safety nets, neoliberalism provides not only a significant content element of makeover practices, but it also enhances the ideological values connected to transformation and care of the self where “wellness” and image function as critical commodities. Nowhere is this more evident than in those episodes of makeover television that sweep in where disaster has struck. Admittedly, makeover TV’s sense of what constitutes catastrophe conflates the quotidian (aging, bodily dissatisfaction) with the seemingly pathological (hypertension, style ignorance, clutter obsession) and the exceptional (disfigurement, divorce, disaster) so that it might label any number of situations from “letting oneself go,” to living in disarray, to surviving cancer as the requisite terms that mandate a makeover. Television’s fascination with hyperbolic tales of woe is, of course, nothing new, yet, the proliferation of makeover-themed programming in the early 2ooos marks this mode of representation as different both in scope and impact.¹

The care of human lives and happiness and not their destruction is the first and only object of good government.

Thomas Jefferson, as read by Brad Pitt, e2