Snog, Marry or Avoid? Class, taste and the making of selfhood in makeover televison

Abstract

‘Snog, Marry or Avoid?: Class, taste and the labour of selfhood in makeover television’, is an exploration of the way social stratification is visited on individual and collective corporeality, externalised through the mechanics of taste and regulated within the makeover television genre. Research for this thesis has been primarily informed by the theory of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who, in the latter half of the twentieth century, aimed to expose the role of culture as implicated in the functioning of power within capitalist societies. Bourdieu’s work reminds us that social stratification is inevitably inscribed on corporeality, through the structure of habitus and its relation to capital. This thesis demonstrates how class often informs the subtext of makeover television – as middle-class tastes are held as the key to affecting legitimate selfhood – yet social difference is subsumed in the ideology of individualism. These concepts are developed with reference to Snog Marry Avoid? (2008--), a British ‘make-under’ series that subtly works to equate middle-class taste with a ‘natural’, desirable state of being. Through examination of this text, questions are raised about the arbitrariness of ‘good’ taste, the durability of habitus and how these constructs inhibit social mobility and interpersonal success. Ultimately, this thesis figures as an indictment of the way (classed) bodies are devalued by discourses of self-legitimation.