The politics of hyperbole on Geordie Shore : Class, gender, youth and excess

Wood, Helen (2017) The politics of hyperbole on Geordie Shore : Class, gender, youth and excess. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 20 (1). pp. 39-55. ISSN 1367-5494

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Abstract

This article discusses MTV’s Geordie Shore against the backcloth of current social conditions for working-class youth. It suggests that the aesthetic, physical and discursive features of excess represent hyperbole, produced from within an affective situation of precariousness and routed through the labour relations of media visibility. Hyper-glamour, hyper-sex and hyper-emotion are responses to the ideologies of the future-projected, self-governing neoliberal subject and to the contemporary gendered contradictions of sexually proclivity and monogamous heteronormativity. By ‘flaunting’ the realities of self-work and making the labour of themselves more/most visible, the participants of Geordie Shore are claiming an animated type of ill/legitimate subjectivity.