PBS, NPR and Honey Boo Boo

This week my PBS viewings included Art21: Balance, Makers: Women Who Make America Part One: Awakening and Global Voices: Not Another World, in conjunction with NPR coverage of the Olympics, Italian drug raids in Brooklyn, concerns about over the counter painkillers, and male vs. women enrollment statistics in Obamacare. Art 21: Balance, spoke particularly to my creative interests, showcasing various artists who ventured out into desolate dessert grounds to perfect their modern line and symmetry techniques, Makers: Women Who Make America documented the post-1950 early feminist/Women’s Movement during which women secured their rights apart from domesticity as equal members of the workplace and the scripted drama Global Voices: Not Another World explored the intimate conversations of a Middle Eastern group of female family members as they discussed the cultural expectations and prospects of marriage for the youngest female member of the family, Lama. I found that Art21: Balance related most closely to Bordieu’s “The Aesthetic Sense as the Sense of Distinction” and that Makers: Women Who Make America Part One and Global Voices: Not Another World communicated the messages explored through Tyler’s “Chav Mum Chav Scum” and Holohan’s “We’re A Normal Family: Representing The Mundane in Channel 4’s The Family.”

In watching Art 21: Balance I observed each artist at work, their paints and easels in hand as they sat within their landscape environments and commented on their aesthetic preferences, allowing me to explore questions after reading Bordieu’s “The Aesthetic Sense as the Sense of Distinction,” of what distinguishes the artist from all others, if there is a real technique in understanding art or if artistic interpretation become a matter of taste, if understanding art signifies taste, and if artists become privileged and distinguished from other social groups in their choosing to make aestheticized objects as a means of economic stability. In viewing Makers: Women Who Make America Part One: Awakening and Global Voices: Not Another World I recognized issues prevalent within both the articles for this week and our viewing of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo: Season Three Episode Three as well as our earlier discussions on The Ali G Show and whether Sasha Baron Cohen’s depiction of a “white trash” gangster was warranted for his appropriation or to be labeled as comedically offensive.

The feminist framework set in Makers: Women Who Make America proved to counter the vilified opinions of those who in Tyler’s “Chav Mum Chav Scum” defined chav women through negative “urban dictionary” jargon and developed caricature-like representations of the chav woman in the news and in entertainment as Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard. Cohen’s Ali G character very much appeared to me as a male version of Vicky Pollard, and these two fabricated characters that were created to mock or even mark a lower-class member of English society through inducing laughter forced me to question to what extent and for what purpose. In “Chav Mum Chav Scum” Tyler writes, “Laughter is often at the expense of another, and when we laugh we effectively fix the other, as the object of comedy. Laughter moves us both literally and figuratively we are averted, moved away from the thing, the object or figure we laugh at. In the case of laughter at those of a lower class, laugher is boundary forming. It creates distance between them and us, asserting moral judgments and a superior class position” (25). As both The Ali G Show and Little Britain have come to represent a genre of televised comedy in the UK, we are left to question whether both shows function to parody society’s stereotyping of such figures or if they in fact join in the stereotyping of these figures. Although not a documentary or reality program, PBS’s Global Voices: Not Another World addressed the demonstration of family interactions, specifically among women, which brought me to my interpretation of Honey Boo Boo and its relation to Holohan’s “We’re A Very Normal Family.” Although Global Voices: Not Another World represents a Middle Eastern family in a cultural and socially relevant context as they discuss the impending cultural importance of marriage for the youngest female character, Honey Boo Boo showcases what could be termed as an American “redneck” family in their most intimate and unfiltered states, not necessarily addressing social issues of importance in each episode, but repetitively bringing attention to the representation of the family as a spectacle. In her article Holohan writes, “What was private and not, therefore, for public display- namely intimate family life- has now become the subject of everyday television. It is the very explosion of the family which has enabled this spectacularization of the family to take place” (28). I found that Honey Boo Boo developed a parodied image of a family through the use of repetition, the exhaustion of the vulgar or inappropriate behaviors of each character and the mockery of the characters in their responses. In one particular scene, Pumpkin is being interviewed about the meaning of an RV, during which she mispronounces and incorrectly defines what a recreational vehicle is. Her words are subtitled and the show deliberately points out her wrongness, accompanying her words with an awkward pause and goofy music to blatantly point out her lack of knowledge. I believe that the show is very much like The Ali G Show and Little Britain in their portrayal of the chav archetype, developing a parody of a Southern family as a class and taste that is to be distinguished from and consumed by its viewers.