Honey Boo Boo’s Misrepresented Normalcy

Having grown up in a rural, working-class community, I found the tone of Honey Boo Boo to be one of blatant prejudice rather than harmless fun. After watching the season two premiere, “Mo' Butter, Mo' Better,”* I was most fascinated by the way the show frames its subjects as disgusting and grotesque figures, when in reality, they not that far from being a normal American family.

There is no denying that the Thompsons are poor and somewhat ignorant. Despite my determination to consider the family objectively, I was thrown off by June’s inability to remember the second half of the phrase “Do as I say, not as I do.”

But these facts are not inherently damnable, despite the show’s concerted effort to highlight and exploit any activity or statement that falls outside the middle-class respectability (hard work, thrift, sobriety, modesty, and so forth). Indeed, according to the Bourdieu's chart, “Mo’ Butter, Mo’ Better” deliberately centers the episode around elements that are least appealing to middle-class aestheticism.  The family guts a pig killed by traffic, the equivalent of a trip to a butcher’s stall. A fifteen-year-old mother is shown, having been a pregnant woman (also at the bottom of Bourdieu’s chart) until the end of the previous season. The wrestling among the siblings is essentially a “tramp’s quarrel,” and their trip to a violent wrestling match involves the display of several wounded men.

While the producers were obviously not using Bourdieu’s chart as a rubric for the episode, they do attempt to vilify the family in several obvious ways. The kids create a “redneck Slip-n-Slide” with butter (something I would have loved to attempt in my own childhood), while accompanied by a thumping score including blatting tubas, which sonically insists on the idiocy of the children’s actions. At the beginning of another scene, the camera zooms in on empty plastic bottle lying in a muddy puddle before panning to family’s home, implicitly associating the family with trash. And apparently, TLC released scratch and sniff cards to coincide with this episode, reducing the family to producers of smelly objects.

What is most frustrating, for me at least, is that I don’t believe that the viewing public is inherently disposed to recoil from such scenes. While the hillbilly may be the American equivalent of the UK’s “chav” figure, it is not as uniformly despised. Americans take pride in the working man, the average Joe who shows up in an ad for the Ford F150, or who stops by the bar for a beer in Cheers. Winter’s Bone (2010) takes a very similar situation to Honey Boo Boo – a poor family with little education in a rural community scraping to get by – and treats it with dignity.

I therefore think the most disturbing aspect of Honey Boo Boo is not the shenanigans of its subjects, but the deliberate discrimination on the part of the production team and TLC. It is the framing of the show as "bad taste" that makes it so, not the family itself.

*Sorry that this is a different episode than the one Emily gave us; I wrote most of this before Emily posted it, so I figured it’d be a waste to toss what I had.