Working Gender/Fading Taxonomies (Critical Essay‪)‬

[1] The public rehearsal of making over goes back to 1979, the moment when post-war housing began to fall apart and when This Old House, the WGBH home restoration program, was first aired. Making over was never simply the humble process of rescuing, repairing, updating, and revivifying shabby structures or tasteless decors. It has always been at least ostensibly about a spectacularized metamorphosis from one status or condition to another, as the temporal ellipses intrinsic to television documentary focus the series towards results. In a segment's few short weeks, the old barn was transformed into a lovely country retreat, or the 1750 colonial with a rotted foundation and sloping floors was returned to its enlightenment grandeur with a fine door detail and its original mustard hue. Intermediary stages, selected often as opportunistic platforms for instruction or unsubtle product endorsements, mark the key frame moments of the metamorphosis, providing discretionary stages from which progress can be gauged and before-and-after can be appreciated. [2] The marvelous effect of metamorphic spectacle would seem to have been somewhat mitigated by the imaging of all of that work, the mess, the tools, the planning, the informative presentations of innovative building materials, the reminders of fiscal responsibility, and the down-to-earth flannel-shirt tool-belt competence of carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and home improvement entrepreneurs. Although metamorphosis is the governing paradigm of the makeover and rapid change its magic, the real spectacle of home improvement--and for that matter any other documentary of transformation such as cooking shows, redecoration attempts, motorcycle and car building dramas, The Joy of Painting, and even close-ups of the mortuary--is the spectacle of work itself. The promise of metamorphosis is an alluring pretext for the pageant of how things go together, the spectacle of making, the predictability of structure, and the calming hypnosis of competence. This recent, mediatized, commodified spectacle of work is different from more traditional ideas of the relation between citizens and labor in which subjects are identified in relation to their occupations as well as the class and social stratum associated with labor itself. This spectacle of work produces an illusion of mastery hand-in-hand with an illusion of subjective mobility. With work, we can be anything we want.