Kim Toffoletti (2014) Baudrillard, Postfeminism and the Image Makeover, Cultural

Politics 10(1): 105-119.

Abstract: Baudrillard’s claim that we inhabit a transaesthetic and integral reality raises

significant questions for feminists seeking to analyze how women are represented within

western media through the neo-liberal guises of empowerment and choice. These questions

relate to the impossibility of differentiating between feminist and anti-feminist themes amidst

the implosive forces of a virtualized significatory and political economy. In order to map

what a feminist-Baudrillardian approach to postfeminist media images might look like, this

essay engages with current feminist theorizing about the postfeminist condition via the

example of the UK reality makeover program How to Look Good Naked. In my analysis of

this series, Baudrillard’s radical approach to the world ‘as is’ illuminates some of the

challenges an economy of exclusive positivity raises for the task of critical feminist inquiry.

Keywords: postfeminism, Baudrillard, makeover, reality television, simulation

Introduction

The cultural rhetoric of postfeminism has become a pervasive feature of gender identities and

relations in the contemporary west. It has been critiqued by Angela McRobbie as a ‘kind of

anti-feminism, which is reliant, paradoxically, on an assumption that feminism has been

taken into account’ (McRobbie 2009: 130). McRobbie situates the emergence of

postfeminism within the context of broader shifts in the global economy and labour markets,

in which subjects increasingly articulate forms of mobile selfhood in order to succeed under

the conditions of the free-market (McRobbie 2009). The continual re-making of the self and

heightened emphasis on individual responsibility under neo-liberalism has specific effects on

both female subjectivity and feminist theory and praxis. Particularly in the sphere of media

production is postfeminism and its effects manifest and blatant. Television programming,

film, magazines and websites, particularly those texts directed toward the female consumer,

espouse women’s empowerment whilst simultaneously deriding feminism as outdated and

irrelevant. This postfeminist media climate, as feminist critic Rosalind Gill observes, is

characterized by a set of contradictory discourses that express both feminist and anti-feminist

themes (Gill 2007: 149).

How to theorize the multitudinous messages that cohere around representations of the

feminine, which have become so pervasive within our hyperaccelerated and unrelenting

media-ted experience as to obliterate any clear frame of reference determining what might be

feminist, anti-feminist or otherwise? In this essay, I turn to the writings of Jean Baudrillard in

order to think through some of the complexities of the postfeminist moment and its effects on

how both contemporary femininity and feminism itself might be understood. Baudrillard’s

claim that we inhabit a transaesthetic, hyperreal and integral reality raises significant

questions for feminists seeking to analyze how women are commonly represented within

western media through the neo-liberal guises of empowerment and choice. These questions

relate to the impossibility of differentiating between feminist and anti-feminist themes amidst

the implosive forces of a virtualized significatory and political economy. By bringing

Baudrillard into dialogue with feminist critics of contemporary popular culture, this essay

contemplates the limits of a postfeminist media climate when the signs of sexism and

inequality have been irrevocably severed from the referent ‘woman’, and women are recast as

empowered subjects.

In order to map what a feminist-Baudrillardian approach to postfeminist media images might

look like, I turn to the example of the UK reality makeover program How to Look Good

Naked – a show that aims to celebrate ‘real’ female bodies and ‘authentic’ femininity by

transforming participants who are unhappy about their bodies into self-confident women.

Makeover programs like How to Look Good Naked are symptomatic of the inexorable

recycling of feminist themes within popular media culture, leading us to the current

postfeminist condition where feminism, in a paradoxical maneuver, is both erased and

omnipresent. Through a reading of this text, I explore the possibility that the postfeminist

condition is a symptom of what Baudrillard calls ‘integral reality’, manifesting from an

increased pervasiveness of, and immersion within, a feminist rhetoric of female

empowerment, freedom and choice. That postfeminism may itself be an effect of fourth-order

simulation has gone unconsidered in accounts of its materialization, where it has commonly

been conceptualized in historical terms as the period after feminism’s demise, or theoretically

as the development of a new type of feminism (see Bullen et.al. 2011: 503-4). Taking an

alternative view, Baudrillard’s ideas have the potential to generate insights about the state of

contemporary feminism when feminism itself has become a self-referring sign. His

theoretical approach draws attention to what is at stake for women and feminism in a

postfeminist economy generated by the accumulation and acceleration of signs – an economy

of sign exchange with profound impacts on our social experience and understanding of

gender relations.

Makeover culture and the postfeminist subject

Over the past decade feminist scholars of media and popular culture have observed new

versions of female subjectivity being articulated in commercial texts such as magazines, TV,

advertising, film and online (Gill 2007, Harris 2004, McRobbie 2009). Though not

exclusively confined to English-speaking countries, the rendering of ‘new femininities’ (Gill

and Scharff 2011: 2) has predominantly been examined in the context of western media,

which commonly emphasizes individualization, choice, sexualization and a preoccupation

with the body and consumer culture. Perhaps nowhere is this postfeminist sensibility better

witnessed than the reality makeover television genre, a subset of lifestyle media which

incorporates the individual quest for self-improvement with the refashioning of bodily

appearance and commodity consumption (Raisborough 2011). In McRobbie’s words, the

makeover format involves ‘the transformation of self with the help of experts, in the hope, or

expectation of improvement of status and life chances through the acquisition of forms of

cultural and social capital’ (McRobbie 2009: 128). Feminist critique has approached the

makeover phenomenon primarily in terms of the impact of neo-liberalism, the free market

and individualization on female subjects and the accordant expectations and responsibilities

for women to invoke successful femininities that transcend class, race and gender obstacles

within this paradigm (McRobbie 2009, Ringrose and Walkerdine 2008). They observe that

the articulation of successful feminine subjectivities increasingly relies on continuous,

labour-intensive, practices of self-betterment, transformation and management of the body

via consumption (Gill 2007, Heyes 2007, Jones 2008). Crucially, as Stephanie Genz points

out, it is insufficient to view this kind of ‘body work’ as a form of female oppression, in

which women are manipulated into conforming to a patriarchally-inscribed beauty ideal. For

her,

the postfeminist feminine body questions the causal link between beauty, oppression,

and inauthenticity by highlighting a paradoxical form of female/feminine embodiment

that is experienced as ‘authentic’ while being (self) created. In effect, authenticity

emerges as a new discursive ideal in postfeminist media culture that stresses the

possibility of self-realization in the absence of essentialist conceptualizations of the

self (Genz 2011: 125).

It is those paradoxes and slippages between the ‘real’ and ‘unreal’, the ‘authentic’ and the

‘inauthentic’ in a postfeminist media culture, as noted by Genz, which are of particular

interest to this inquiry.

Unlike existing feminist scholarship, it is not my intention here to determine the extent to

which self-transformation has become a cultural imperative for women, or how practices of

cosmetic enhancement and body work can be enabling or oppressive for particular women.

Without denying the value of such a critique, I adopt a different approach, looking to

Baudrillard’s notion of integral reality to think through the complexities of a postfeminist

media culture where the very aspects of women’s oppression critiqued by liberal and radical

feminism (including beauty as a measure of feminine success – see Genz 2011: 123-4)

become not only naturalized by the makeover paradigm, but the makeover paradigm comes to

mirror feminist discourses of self-determination, rights, freedom and choice (discourses

present in both second wave and contemporary feminisms, as noted by Lazar 2011: 38). In

other words, I contemplate the limits of a postfeminist media culture in which feminism itself

becomes a self-referring sign. As a means of engaging in these debates, I look to the self-

improvement program How to Look Good Naked within the context of an image-saturated

culture. This particular proponent of the makeover genre warrants attention because it is

premised on depicting and celebrating ‘real women’, thereby appearing to offer an antidote to

contemporaneous makeover shows and media images of women more generally that are said

to promote unrealistic beauty ideals (Tankard Reist 2009). Furthermore, in its attempts to

appeal to ‘real women’ everywhere by profiling women of varying ages, classes, ethnicities,

and abilities – the program appears to trade on a notion of universal female solidarity forged

in a shared struggle against an oppressive beauty industry. In claiming to offer genuine

representations of contemporary femininity, How to Look Good Naked belongs to the order of

the hyperreal, securing our perception that real women exist in a context where it has become

impossible to definitively determine what constitutes an authentic rendition of the female

body. Tied to this promotion of the authentic female body is the mobilization of feminist

themes in How to Look Good Naked as a means to generate a perceived reality about female

emancipation in contemporary western culture.

How to Look Good Naked

Premiering on the UK Channel 4 network in 2006 (and in its sixth series at the time of

writing), the British reality television makeover program How to Look Good Naked is a

successful proponent of the self-improvement genre. Its success has seen it translated into

numerous international versions in countries such as France, Israel, Czecheslovakia and

Sweden, with the debut of the US adaptation being the most-watched program for its

network, Lifestyle Television (Morgenstein 2008). Compared to other English-speaking

reality makeover shows where participants undergo surgical enhancements to transform the

self (such as Extreme Makeover, The Swan, and 10 Years Younger), How to Look Good

Naked is unique because it does not medically alter participants’ bodies or faces to meet

cultural ideals of slenderness and attractiveness. Nor does it require participants to lose

weight (like The Biggest Loser, Celebrity Fit Club or You are what you Eat). It pitches itself

somewhat differently from other non-surgical makeover hits like What not to Wear, which

teaches women to dress in ways that improve their looks and boost their confidence. By

placing an ‘emphasis on feminine authenticity, rather than physical beauty’ (Genz 2011:128),

How to Look Good Naked seeks to effect a psychological transformation of the self, relying

on women taking off their clothing to overcome their bodily insecurities.

Described on its website as ‘the inspirational fashion series that shows women how to look

fantastic with their clothes on or off no matter what their body shape – and all without a

surgeon's scalpel in sight...’ (Channel 4 2012), How to Look Good Naked emphasizes

learning to love one’s body regardless of size or age. In lieu of physically altering the female

corpus, the show is directed towards making adjustments to women’s negative self-

perceptions as a means to attain success and happiness. It achieves this by subjecting

participants to a series of tasks aimed at transforming their feelings of physical inadequacy so

they feel good about themselves (wanting to ‘feel good about myself’ is a common refrain

amongst participants when discussing their motivations). These tasks include posing for a

nude ‘glamour’ photo shoot, parading in sexy lingerie down a catwalk, and appearing semi-

naked on a giant billboard. The energetic male presenter, celebrity stylist Gok Wan, often

refers to himself as being ‘on a mission’ to change women’s negative body image, touting

phrases such as ‘girls, what’s wrong with you? You need to start loving what you’ve got’,

‘show us some flesh, girlfriend’ and ‘confidence is key’. Each participant, who is commonly

referred to by Wan as ‘my girl’, is taught that the consumption of products and procedures

aimed at pampering and indulging the body (pedicures, day spas, eyebrow shaping) promotes

self-acceptance. Interspersed amongst the tasks that structure the program format (a format

with occasional derivations across the various series), are short segments dispensing advice

on all manner of beauty related issues – pop polls on effective face creams, tips on

exfoliation, flattering skirt styles for pear shaped women, to name a few.

The disappearance of feminism

With its emphasis on celebrating real female bodies, boosting women’s confidence, and

encouraging individuals to make the most of what they have got, How to Look Good Naked

positions itself against popular media representations accused of depicting unrealistic

feminine beauty ideals, thereby seemingly aligning itself with a pro-woman agenda. In effect,

the social change impetus grounding a feminist politic is recast as a narrative of individual

female transformation. In particular, the rhetoric of self love and finding one’s authentic self

(sexually and socially) that typifies How to Look Good Naked echoes feminist consciousness-

raising efforts of the second wave that opposed ‘false’ male-determined standards of female

attractiveness (Ganz 2011: 123). Yet many of the features that characterize the program, such

as the sexualization of the subject, heteronormative femininity and a focus on appearances,

are the subject of ongoing feminist interrogation and critique. How to Look Good Naked thus

demonstrates a key feature of a postfeminist sensibility, described by Gill as emphasizing ‘the

contradictory nature of postfeminist discourses and the entanglement of both feminist and

anti-feminist themes within them’ (Gill 2007: 149). In this statement Gill alludes to the

difficulty of judging which images might count as feminist (and accordingly which fall into

the anti-feminist camp) within a postfeminist media landscape. The issue at stake, it would

appear, hinges on whether it is possible to clearly delineate between a ‘feminist’ or ‘anti-

feminist’ theme, image or action. How might feminist media studies scholars approach a

program like How to Look Good Naked, which does not label itself as feminist, but replicates

the promotion feminist values such as bodily autonomy and self-determined sexual

subjectivity?

In observing that actions considered by some feminists to be oppressive to women (like

gratuitous displays of the naked female body) become celebrated as signs of women’s

agency, I’m not suggesting that the media construct an ‘illusion’ of women’s empowerment

that masks a quantifiable or absolute ‘truth’ about gender inequality. Taking this stance

would be to misunderstand the present cultural condition as described by Baudrillard where

signs hide nothing, but become our reality. This comes about, he argues, when signs can no

longer be distinguished from the reality they are supposed to represent (Baudrillard 1994: 6).

Liberated from material referents, signs can only reference themselves, resulting in ‘the

implosion of one pole into another, the short circuit between poles of every differential

system of meaning, the effacement of terms and of distinct oppositions, and thus that of the

medium and the real’ (Baudrillard 2007: 104). In a world that is increasingly virtualized, it is

the play of signs that influences the nature of social experience, including gender relations,

over and above the reality once understood to precede representation. This insight is central

to contemplating the current predicament of feminist theory and activism – how to speak

about feminist agendas or values when ‘the effacement of terms and of distinct oppositions’

leads to anything being potentially labeled feminist?

In a postfeminist media climate where sexual objectification is recast as a form of female

agency and the ‘right to choose’ (regardless of whether this choice is breast-feeding or breast

implants) equates to women’s empowerment, differentiating with any confidence between

feminist and anti-feminist themes becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible.

Baudrillard has spoken about art in this way, observing that contemporary art references past

styles and other aesthetic forms to the point where it has come to look like everything else,

making it impossible to determine what art is (Baudrillard 2005a: 18). Mass culture texts like

graffiti, advertizing and comic strips are now part of the art canon. Everyday objects like cars

and beds, even urinals (as per Duchamp), have been labelled ‘art’. Cows in formaldehyde,

garbage bags full of waste, people snoring – all examples of art that destabilize the system of

value through which to discern the art object from the biological organism, consumer detritus

or daily life. When art become indistinguishable from the world it inhabits, Baudrillard

claims, it ceases to be art in the way we once knew it. While art, it seems, is everywhere and

anything potentially can be art, at the same time, its liberation from a narrow field of meaning

fosters its erasure.

We might extend this proposition to say that feminism, too, has become ubiquitous to the

point where it is both everywhere and nowhere. When anything can be considered feminist,

the term becomes emptied of meaning, and accordingly, disappears. That is, feminism evades

being neatly defined or classified according to traditional political, economic or cultural

categorizations. Let me be clear that feminism ‘disappears’ not because people don’t believe

in it (certainly there are many people who do, this author included), or because gender

equality has been achieved, but because its excessive proliferation under postfeminism results

in there being too much of it. Or more specifically, the fundamental feminist principle of

female emancipation, as articulated through discourses of gender rights, freedoms and

choices, has become the overarching rhetoric of postfeminist culture: it contaminates all

images, actions, signs and discourses. In making this observation, I am in no way asserting

that there is no need for feminist theorizing and politics, or that it is redundant. Rather, the

erasure I am talking about, following Baudrillard, refers to our collective inability to

coherently define or confidently determine the parameters of feminism within a political and

cultural economy that has become virtualized.

In other words, feminism becomes caught up in the play of signs and appearances

characteristic of ‘immanent reversal’ whereby, in a society of simulation, things become their

opposite. Douglas Kellner explains it as follows:

…the liberation championed in the 1960s was to become a voluntary form of

servitude; sovereignty has passed from the side of the subject to the object; and

revolution and emancipation had turned into their opposites, snaring one more and

more in the logic of the system, thus trapping individuals in an order of simulation

and virtuality (Kellner 2009: 23-4).

Under these conditions, how might we understand what feminism is, what female

emancipation looks like, how women’s rights might be characterized? The remainder of this

essay is devoted to further considering these questions through an examination of the

makeover show How to Look Good Naked. I demonstrate how, in coming to resemble, if not

naturalize, a feminist critique that opposes beauty ideals, How to Look Good Naked

exemplifies the illusory character of emancipatory politics. This is the state of affairs that

contemporary feminism must contend with in the postfeminist era.

The body and integral reality

Mark Poster has identified the makeover reality TV genre as a form of hyperreality, whereby

the intimacies of a participant’s physical and personal transformation is consumed by viewers

at a level of detail far greater than if it were being witnessed by the participant’s own inner

circle of family and friends, and most likely, the participant herself (Poster 2009: 93). Every

curve and crevice of the body is scrutinized for imperfections, each procedure painstakingly

documented, and the psychological fragilities of the participants exposed to a huge television

audience. It is this excess of reality that generates an experience of the female condition (both

psychical and physical) that is more real than reality itself (Baudrillard 1994: 1).

Extending beyond Poster’s analysis of makeover TV in relation to hyperreality, I propose that

How to Look Good Naked crosses over into the realm of integral reality – a system typified

by the virtual and the hyperreal whereby reality comes to be experienced in immersive,

immanent and instant encounters (Baudrillard 2005b). This is evidenced in one of the show’s

trademark features, where the work undertaken to alter the self becomes the focus of the

narrative, which Raisborough deems a type of ‘enhanced visibility’ (2011: 51). In one

segment of the program the participant is asked to compare her figure to that of other women.

This task stems from the participant having identified an area of her body she particularly

dislikes (such as her tummy, hips or breasts), which the host seeks to convince her is not as

big as she thinks it is. The woman’s test is to estimate the size of her offending body part and

place herself within a line-up of near-naked women (who are arranged from smallest to

largest) relative to what she perceives to be the size of the particular region in question. She

invariably thinks that the area of her body she dislikes is much larger than it actually is,

allowing the host to affirm the participant’s ‘normal’ female body shape and highlight her

‘skewed’ perception of herself. By comparing her body to those of other regular women

(rather than the idealized bodies of fashion models, which are deemed by the presenter to be

the source of many women’s body torment) she comes to see herself as less inferior or flawed

than she originally believed herself to be.

The task described above is emblematic of the way that How to Look Good Naked gets up

close and personal to document the process of transformation from insecure and unhappy

participant to self-confident woman. In giving us a detailed view of ordinary women’s

bodies, the show’s apparent liberatory agenda to free women from the strictures of corporeal

conformity seems uncannily complicit with the exploitative practices it declares to counter.

We are told by the host that many of the participants hide their bodies from those with whom

they are most intimate – their husbands and boyfriends – so insecure are they about their

appearance. How to Look Good Naked grants us more access to these women’s bodies than

their own lovers. As the camera pans across the line-up of fleshy women, zeroing in to give

us close ups of rolling bellies, rounded thighs and broad bottoms, the viewer gets the sense of

being immersed within an abundance of body parts. The entire surface of the female form

comes under the camera’s gaze, so that body hair, mottled pigmentation, birthmarks and

varicose veins are all projected onto the screen.

Not only are a variety of women’s bodies lined-up for visual consumption, but the audience

becomes privy to the kind of emotional and physical work required to achieve happiness and

success. The personal angst, trauma and uncertainty the participant harbors about her body is

no longer a private concern or a shameful secret, but in a gesture of ‘forced visibility’ is

illuminated for everyone to see and participate in (Baudrillard 2003: 174). These intimate

psychological revelations mirror the display of the female corpus; both mind and body are

overexposed in a way that confuses any clear the distinction between the image and everyday

experience, or the audience and the event. Baudrillard tells us that reality TV functions as a

kind of ultra-reality in which viewers are granted access to emotions and reactions that once

would have remained in the private realm (Baudrillard 2008: 26). Now they are laid bare for

all to see. As a result, audiences can no longer definitively separate themselves from what is

on the screen as they come to recognize themselves as potential candidates for the makeover

experience.

Through its mode of heightened physical and psychological visibility How to Look Good

Naked enacts an integral reality of the fourth order, in that the once hidden dimensions of

these women’s lives – their personal thoughts, feeling and emotions, as well as body parts

once deemed private – are made immediately accessible and knowable to the general public.

Rather than portraying or responding to women’s bodily anxieties, these images become

embedded or integrated into a broader consumer strategy to simulate women’s emancipation

and liberation.

How to Look Good Naked upholds the illusion of reality by depicting a variety of female

bodies – rakish senior citizens, stout teenagers, post-partum mothers with flat chests – which

come across as truer renditions of womanhood than the standardized, airbrushed female

bodies that are said to pervade popular culture more generally. Yet the ‘real’ bodies promoted

by How to Look Good Naked are as much a simulation as the ‘fake’ ones witnessed in plastic

surgery proponents of the makeover genre. This is because, if we are to follow Baudrillard,

any meaning that How to Look Good Naked generates about the female body in the twenty-

first century can only occur within a network of sign exchange (Baudrillard 1993a: 7).

When compared to the surgically enhanced bodies of programs like 10 Years Younger and the

models gracing the pages of fashion magazines, How to Look Good Naked simultaneously

fosters the perception that an authentic femininity exists amidst the cacophony of simulated

images of perfectible womanhood, and that this authentic self is possible for anyone to

achieve. It does not necessitate a radical transformation of the body via dieting or plastic

surgery. Seemingly all women, regardless of social position, can be liberated from restricting

gender expectations by taking control of their bodies and empowering themselves. This task

may appear easy in the context of postfeminism, where the acceleration of signs in an image-

saturated environment results in the distinction between what is feminist and what isn’t

becoming increasingly unstable, so that almost any gesture can circulate as a sign of women’s

equality. Yet at the same time, the project of self-betterment is an ongoing task, demanding

the consumption of increasing amounts of information, data, signs and procedures to

continually re-create and improve one’s body, and accordingly, oneself (Genz 2011: 130).

Baudrillard’s writings on the body spark some interesting points of connection with feminist

analyses of makeover culture that theorize the body in terms of self-management and image

creation. Both recognize a shift in how the body is understood and experienced, from being

conceived as mere flesh or labour power to being a consumer object to be managed,

improved and worked on (Baudrillard 1998: 129ff). In his later work, Baudrillard’s emphasis

on how the transformative body is produced and experienced as a sign appear to pre-empt

feminist critiques of the body in makeover culture. This virtualized body, Baudrillard

explains,

…is the body as destiny, which has to be exorcized at all costs – through the

appropriation of the body as projection of self, the individual appropriation of desire,

of one’s appearance, one’s image: cosmetic surgery on all fronts. If the body is no

longer a site of otherness but of identification, then we have urgently to become

reconciled with it, repair it, perfect it, turn it into an ideal object (Baudrillard 2008:

125).

Zygmunt Bauman’s claim in Consuming Life (2007: 98) that the consumer/subject is

constantly on the move, endlessly making and remaking the self with no end point in mind (a

concept taken up by the feminist makeover critics Jones 2008 and Raisborough 2011) echoes

the endless circulation that characterizes Baudrillard’s hyperreal state, where the acceleration

and proliferation of signs makes no logical connections, follows no discernible order and

result in no knowable or final outcome. It is in the amplification and acceleration of signs of

the body that it comes to be produced and also ‘disappear’. For these reasons, How to Look

Good Naked cannot offer a critique of, or variation on, other postfeminist media texts despite

claiming to celebrate different body types. Instead it only offers us more of the same.

Our preoccupation with difference, Baudrillard tells us, emerges from an extermination of

otherness and dual relations borne from ‘the rise of individual values’ (Baudrillard 2008:

115). He says,

The liquidation of the Other is accompanied by an artificial synthesis of otherness – a

radical cosmetic surgery of which cosmetic surgery on faces and bodies is merely a

symptom. For the crime is perfect only when even the traces of the destruction of the

Other have disappeared (Baudrillard 2008: 115).

This proclamation has particular resonance in the context of this study, alluding to the loss of

criteria through which femininity might be determined and the mechanisms deployed to

secure it. The dilemma of difference for feminism, as Grace has observed, resides in the

denial of negativity when ‘differences become fully positivised as signs…differences are no

longer subordinate to equivalence; being the same isn’t better! Being “different” is just as

good! In fact the more value associated with difference, the better’ (Grace 2000: 84). How to

Look Good Naked would appear to be symptomatic of this loss of the Other. In highlighting

women’s difference from men (by encouraging women to embrace their femininity and enjoy

being ‘girly’), and celebrating the differences between women (by portraying a range of

female body types and women of varying life circumstances), it obscures the fact that any

form of reversal, exchange, or singularity is no longer possible in a hyperreal state.

The cult of the image and symbolic violence

A giant billboard of a woman in her underwear occupies a prominent place atop the buildings

of a non-descript English town center. This is not, as one might expect, the latest Victoria’s

Secret ad campaign, but an unglamorous depiction of an ‘everywoman’ in an old pair of

knickers and ill-fitting bra. She is, of course, a participant in How to Look Good Naked and

this public revelation is one of the challenges she must face on her quest to becoming a better

self. Each wrinkle, stretch mark, lump and bump that the woman despises is amplified and

available for public consumption. Host Gok Wan, who is accompanied by the mortified

participant, proceeds to ask passers-by their thoughts on her figure and receives affirming

replies. This activity is meant to convince the participant that she is attractive and desirable,

despite her misgivings about her body. Whilst being intended to encourage the woman to see

her body positively in the way others do, the process involves a degree of public humiliation

for the woman, problematizing the premise of the program to foster female empowerment.

In her analysis of the makeover genre McRobbie views this kind of female ritual humiliation

as a form of symbolic violence against women, whereby the management and critique of

women’s bodies functions as a mechanism of social control that relies on the co-opting of its

victims, whom she claims are predominantly working class women seeking the help of

experts (McRobbie 2009: 140). Via the theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler,

McRobbie illuminates how the shaming tactics and personal insults upon which such

programs rely extend beyond the individual to become an acceptable form of humiliation on

the basis of class. She argues that it is through the makeover genre that a particular

‘movement of women’ is produced – namely, lower and working class women whom the

hosts deem outdated, unkempt, inadequate and who ‘show themselves willing to undergo

change, so that they more confidently and efficiently take up their places in the emergent

labour markets which need their participation, and which will also provide them with

disposable incomes so that they can consume more products and services over a lifetime’

(McRobbie 2009: 145). The purported aim of makeover television to empower women via

self-improvement, McRobbie claims, instead serves to reinforce capitalist imperatives, class

stratification and gender inequalities.

McRobbie does not use the word ‘symbolic’ in the way Baudrillard would to characterize the

period prior to universal or generalized value systems. She understands it in the Lacanian

sense, as part of the order of signification through which cultural meaning is produced. Thus

McRobbie employs the term ‘symbolic violence’ to describe the mechanism by which class

distinction is maintained (after Bourdieu) when abuses directed at women undergoing

television makeovers (abuses that she believes are commonly dismissed as ironic or

harmless) become accepted and used in wider societal discourse to slur working class

women. By understanding symbolic violence to occur at the level of signification, McRobbie

forecloses on the possibility that this violence may be of another register. To what extent

might the violence of makeover culture McRobbie identifies be suggestive of the obscenity of

visual representation itself? A ‘violence of the degree zero’ that results from an excess of

signification that attempts to secure meaning and consolidate our reality (Baudrillard 1990:

27)?

Just as Baudrillard deems pornography obscene because its telescopic rendering of genitals

and sexual activities obliterate any sense of mystery associated with the sex act, makeover

TV can be said to function along the same lines. In the case of pornography, it is not the

gratuitous representation of naked bodies that Baudrillard finds obscene – rather, ‘what is

obscene about this world is that nothing is left to appearances, or to chance. Everything is a

visible, necessary sign’ (Baudrillard 1990: 34). The billboard featuring a female participant in

her underwear, as mentioned previously, gives us the body up close. It does not matter that

the woman is not fully naked – the intimacy of the body is displayed in the hyperreal

illumination of every curve, hair, wrinkle, fold of skin – seemingly every pore is enlarged and

able to be scrutinized. This excess of reality generates the semblance of authenticity

associated with reality TV. Regardless of whether the bodies in question are undergoing

plastic surgery or appear ‘au natural’, makeover TV simulates an authentic femininity in the

form of women striving to realize their true self through personal and/or physical

transformation and betterment.

Baudrillard provokes us to consider postfeminist media artifacts in different terms to

McRobbie’s critical logic. In contrast to McRobbie’s usage, the symbolic violence

Baudrillard speaks about is a consequence of excluding the symbolic register –the violation

occurs because we attempt to secure reality through the actualization of the gendered, raced,

classed subject/body. The proliferation of ‘authentic’ or ‘real’ female bodies in How to Look

Good Naked operates as a form of violence, in that women’s social and personal liberation

has no coherent meaning when any action performed by the female body can be potentially

rendered emancipatory within the spectre of simulation. Baudrillard alerts us to the

possibility that, in a culture of integral reality or fourth order simulation, images do

something other than produce meaning about class norms and gender expectations in the way

McRobbie’s critique of makeover TV suggests. Through Baudrillard, McRobbie’s

proposition can be extended to acknowledge that the symbolic violence of the postfeminist

text is tied to the changing purpose of the image and its value – it can no longer represent

authentic femininity, real bodies, or pro-feminist attitudes but can only play at

communicating meaning around these terms. Any message about women’s empowerment,

autonomy or choice that How to Look Good Naked seeks to promote through the makeover

process is made meaningless when seemingly anything (in this case, appearing semi-naked

on a billboard) – becomes a sign of female empowerment.

Transaesthetic beauty

In discussions of makeover reality TV ‘image’ not only refers to a representational form but

can be understood in terms of the presentation of the self. How to Look Good Naked alludes

to the fractal nature of gendered identity when one’s self-image is in a process of ongoing

transformation. This process of self-fashioning is hardly new (see Greenblatt 2005), yet it

increasingly involves the consumption of an ephemeral configuration of signs and practices.

While creating a new image is the aim of the makeover transformation, what this new image

should be is not clearly defined in How to Look Good Naked. Despite the formulaic nature of

the show surprising little emphasis is placed on participants to meet a socially desirable body

type or fashion style. The women involved are not expected to lose weight, get hair

extensions or breast augmentations. Instead of transforming the physical self to look younger

and skinnier, the emphasis in How to Look Good Naked is on feeling more confident and sexy

through changing one’s attitude. The point to be made here is not that How to Look Good

Naked offers a better or more progressive alternative to other makeover shows. As is the case

throughout the self-improvement genre, looking fabulous is directly connected to feeling

fabulous, even if, in the case of How to Look Good Naked, there is no standardized feminine

type to be emulated. Rather, this promotion of all styles, figures, ages and sizes gestures

toward the phenomenon Baudrillard has identified as a ‘trans’ state, when ‘everything

aestheticizes itself’ (Baudrillard 1992: 10).

For Baudrillard, a ‘trans’ state of affairs signals the obliteration of categories brought about

by the saturation of the world by signs and images with no definitive point of reference from

which their value or meaning can be easily mapped (Baudrillard 1993b: 5). In this context,

valuation of any kind is impossible – the abolition of the co-ordinates through which we once

determined the beautiful from the ugly, the true from the false and the good from the bad,

now frees these concepts from their origins. No longer can we speak with any authority about

feminine beauty ideals or desirable female bodies when the distinguishing features to which

these ideas were once tethered have been replaced by the ethos that ‘everyone can be

beautiful’. Under this regime, any body can be fashionable, beautiful and sexy, not just those

who are slender, youthful and have flawless faces. The notion that all bodies have become

aestheticized is apparent in the range of reality TV shows fixated on a variety of bodies – fat

bodies and anorexic bodies (Supersize vs Superskinny), elderly bodies (Sunset Daze),

children’s bodies (Toddles and Tiaras) and maternal bodies (16 and Pregnant). Indeed, the

latest series of How to Look Good Naked (subtitled…With a Difference) draws the disabled

body into the transaesthetic sphere, giving these women the ‘right’ to circulate within the

inexorable circuits of media and communication. This potentiality for all bodies to be made

into signs for consumption is also strikingly apparent in the catwalk show that concludes each

episode of How to Look Good Naked. As a way of testing whether the participant has taken

on board the lessons of body confidence taught over the course of the program she is asked to

model in a runway parade and appear in lingerie. Despite the initial reservations expressed by

nearly all of the show’s participants, invariably the women agree to partake in the exercise,

hence proving to the audience, the presenter and themselves that they have successfully learnt

‘how to look good naked’. It would appear that regardless of whether the participant is fat,

short, old, thin, ugly, plain or tall, she can achieve model status.

Baudrillard’s notion of the transaesthetic should not be construed as offering some sort of

liberation for women from the confines of a patriarchal beauty ideal. The transaesthetic

instead generates a situation whereby the potentiality of being ‘on show’ cannot be escaped

or opted out of. This generalized aestheticization, Baudrillard tell us, leads to a situation

whereby ‘all forms of culture – not excluding anti-cultural ones – are promoted and all

models of representation and anti-representation are taken on board’ (Baudrillard 1993b: 16).

There is an extent to which Baudrillard’s proclamations intersect with feminist critiques of

makeover culture, which identify the all-encompassing reach of self-improvement rhetoric.

Baudrillard goes even further, however, in observing that there is no site from which to resist,

reject or counter the accumulated positivity of value that cannot be exchanged or reversed

(Baudrillard 1993b: 15).

Even though How To Look Good Naked repeatedly denounces conformity to a standardized

female body type, this is not to imply that the women who participate in the series (and its

viewers) are somehow liberated from the sphere of beauty and appearances. Rather, more

than ever, all bodies are co-opted into this scheme. Regardless of whether a participant

deliberately or unwittingly challenges familiar parameters of feminine attractiveness, we can

no longer say with any certainty that, for example, the tattooed, overweight or old are exempt

from being or becoming beautiful. The project of self-betterment, coupled with the

transaestheticization of beauty, shifts the stakes of the game – beauty isn’t measured by a

narrow standard only few can meet but has become something that is found everywhere and

in everyone. Certainly, we can point to women who appear to reject the stereotypical look

associated with heterosexual femininity and the ongoing maintenance it requires. Yet non-

participation quickly becomes absorbed into a sign itself. Take for example, women who do

not remove their body hair. While sporting hairy legs might seem a radical act of resistance

against the culturally desirable smooth and hairless female body (certainly, there is no

ambivalence in Gok Wan’s assertion that ‘waxing is essential if you want to look good in the

buff’), this anti-cultural sentiment is another modality in the fashion system, where signs play

off against each other (Baudrillard 1993a: 98). Hairy legs have even entered the style realm,

as witnessed in 2010 when American fashion retailer J.Crew included in its collection a pair

of tights that made the wearer look as though their legs were covered in a fine black fuzz.

While this look was perhaps inadvertent, it nonetheless gestures toward hairly-leggedness

being made over into a fashion item.

Conclusion

Using the TV makeover show How To Look Good Naked as an example, this essay has

contemplated how gestures of female emancipation at the site of the body, and their cultural

imagining in the media, can only simulate liberation, according to Baudrillard (1993b: 3),

providing us with the illusion of female empowerment thought the guise of individual

choices, rights and freedoms. In this schema gender equality remains, as always, elusive.

There is no denying that How to Look Good Naked, despite its espousal of curvaceous and/or

larger body types, requires the female subject to partake in the ongoing project of body

maintenance via commercial procedures such as hair removal, hair styling and make-up, as

well as the consumption of fashion (body shaping underwear regularly features as a desirable

non-surgical body enhancement). While the program teaches women to accept, if not

embrace, supposed physical imperfections like stretch marks, saggy breasts and fat bottoms,

this acceptance hinges on working toward an authentic self, which is primarily acquired via

consumer choices. The presenter sums it up this way: ‘ladies, if you want to look good naked

you need to learn to love your body, including all your flaws. But you can build your

confidence by learning to disguise those imperfections and in the process feel better about

baring all’. In taking a Baudrillardian approach to this phenomenon I have sought to extend

feminist critiques of the makeover regime that view it as a product of neo-liberal, capitalist

imperatives (McRobbie 2009, Ringrose and Walkerdine 2008), or as a mode of regulating the

subject via the self-disciplining of the body (Heyes 2007, Jones 2008).

Victoria Grace, arguably the pre-eminent feminist scholar working in the field of Baudrillard

Studies today, has advocated for ‘the importance of identifying those aspects of Baudrillard’s

oeuvre that extend, deepen and challenge the feminist project(s) of our time and place, and at

the same time examining those blind spots to see where a feminist analysis of them leads’

(Grace 2008: 348). In keeping with this vision, this essay has used Baudrillard’s ideas to

consider the paradox whereby those things once considered anti-feminist become

championed as feminist within a postfeminist media culture. I align my analysis with that of

other feminist media studies scholars who indentify this contradictory logic to be a pervasive

feature of the contemporary gender order in western culture, evidenced by women demanding

the right to have plastic surgery, to choose the life of a stay-at-home housewife or to freely

express their sexual selves by appearing in amateur online porn. In turning to Baudrillard to

reflect on this state of affairs, I do not wish to suggest that Baudrillard can definitively

‘answer’ this problem for feminism, or that his ideas expose some flaw in feminist analyses

of media culture. Indeed, Baudrillard’s way of theorizing the world eschews such a critical

stance. Rather, his writings on transaesthetics, simulation and the hyperreal shed light on this

particular cultural moment, offering feminist media theory an alternative way of

conceptualizing the loss of criteria symptomatic of postfeminism, as well as its effects. In this

regard postfeminism itself appears as an effect of integral reality, in that the exclusive

positivity of sign exchange results in feminism being simultaneously everywhere and

nowhere.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank The Five College Women’s Studies Research Center (MA, USA) for hosting

me as a research associate during the development of this article. Thanks also to the

anonymous reviewers for their considered feedback.

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