Here comes a lot of judgment: Honey Boo Boo as a site of reclamation and resistance

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JPTV 2 (1) pp. 77–95 Intellect Limited 2014

Journal of Popular Television Volume 2 Number 1

© 2014 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jptv.2.1.77_1

May FriedManRyerson University School of Social Work

Here comes a lot of

judgment: Honey Boo Boo

as a site of reclamation

and resistance

abstract

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (2012−) is a gleeful spectacle of a show, filled with fat bellies, loud bodies, messy food and laughter. As much parody as ‘reality’ TV, the show profiles a southern US family as emblematic ‘rednecks’ and invites viewers to watch, laugh and judge. Yet in the depths of this heavily mediated version of south-ern American family life, there are strong messages about bodies, about class and about motherhood, and the ways that in transgressing dominant discourses, Honey Boo Boo unwittingly moves beyond farce and instead presents a strong critique of normativity. This article seeks to expose the dominant tropes of the show, especially in relation to three areas: class, fat, and maternity. In exposing the messaging of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and the ways that the show’s narrative both main-tains and resists dominant discourses, the show can be seen as an example of resist-ance and reclamation. Drawing on analyses of white trash culture and presentations of fat bodies, as well as the emergent field of freak studies, the article positions Here Comes Honey Boo Boo within a broader analysis of reality TV that suggests a new phase in our consumption of difference and the fluid and disruptive boundaries of the ‘normal’.

Keywords

reality TVmotherhoodfat studiesfreak studies‘white trash’grotesque bodies

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introduction

I initially believed that watching six-year-old Alana Thompson (the epony-mous Honey Boo Boo) and her family was a guilty pleasure, the lowest that popular culture has to offer. Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (2012–2014) is a gleeful spectacle of a television show, filled with fat bellies, loud bodies, messy food and laughter. As much parody as ‘reality’ TV, the American show profiles a southern US family as emblematic ‘rednecks’ and invites viewers to watch, laugh and judge. Yet, in the depths of this heavily mediated version of south-ern American family life, there are strong messages about bodies, about race and class, and about motherhood. In transgressing dominant discourses, these messages move Honey Boo Boo unwittingly from a farce of not-so-normal life to a critique of normativity.

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is a television show that has engendered strong opinions. As one culture columnist states, ‘You know a piece of pop culture is on to something when many agree that it’s signaling the fall of civilization’ (Juzwiak 2012, par. 1). While the mass appeal of the show (watched by between two and four million television viewers and countless others who download it) would suggest that many people appreciate the unpolished candour of the programme, comments on blogs, message boards, tabloids and in other media accounts put forth the view that Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is the epitome of poor taste, heralding the final descent to American popular culture’s literal and figurative bowels (Goodman 2012; Ferguson 2012; McGee 2012). It is initially tempting to dismiss this programme, filled as it is with fart jokes and pigs, as being beneath the threshold of useful critique. When I reveal my desire to take on this programme as a site of earnest academic analysis, I am met with frozen smiles, confusion and dismay. I fear that I am merely extending an analysis to a dubious guilty pleasure, a fear that has entangled television scholars through-out the history of this field (Allen and Hill 2004: 7). Yet a series that provokes such controversy and strong reactions offers an opportunity to grapple with the implications of representation and ‘reality’ and to consider the ways that both the production and consumption of popular culture reflect and contradict society’s views of ‘normal’, ‘Other’ and difference. In order to respond to the impact of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, however, we must begin with an over-view of reality TV and the opportunities and pitfalls therein.

reality tV and tHe spectacular construction oF ‘reality’

Reality television has emerged into a site of solid scholarly analysis. By purporting to present unvarnished ‘truths’, reality TV brings to the fore issues of representation and authenticity. Given that, as Aslama and Pantii maintain, ‘television talk is always part of the broader conversational culture’ (2007: 62), reality TV emerges as a significant site of discourse that amplifies existing tensions and power dynamics. As such, reality TV may provide a useful gauge of culture and stereotype, wrapped in the veneer of entertainment. Certainly, reality television programmes have captivated contemporary audiences, comprising a huge portion of television offerings internationally. Montemurro suggests that ‘[g]iven the popularity of reality television […] the study of how these programs are consumed is essential’ (2008: 98).

To suggest that reality TV demands meaningful analysis, however, is not to valorize this genre. Reality TV maintains deeply sexist tropes, often reify-ing stereotypical masculinities and femininities; many shows centre around hackneyed and heterosexist themes of heterosexual romance (though the

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tabloid fodder which often follows the conclusion to these shows may present a harsher ‘reality’). Likewise the presentation of race in reality television is often deeply flawed, with many racialized contestants being presented in highly stereotypical ways. Bell-Jordan suggests that ‘race continues to be constructed in superficial, reductive, and often hegemonic ways − and this process has increasingly come to define the genre’ (2008: 369). Beyond the presentation of racialized participants, however, reality TV participates in what Dubrofsky and Hardy calls the ‘recentering [of] Whiteness without call-ing explicit attention to this fact’ (2008: 376). Ability, heterosexuality, and youth are likewise equally centred. Reality TV may thus be read as a means of exposing dominant discourses more readily than a presentation of any version of reality. At the same time, as Couldry has skillfully articulated, reality TV maintains the illusion of a level playing field by acting as ‘the secret theatre of neoliberalism’:

These programs are a retelling, in other words, of the American dream wherein any individual can make it big − which usually translates as rich − never mind their initial circumstances. In tune with this ideology, we notice that these shows assiduously avoid raising any larger socio-political issues and instead focus on the personal and individual.

(2008: 13)

If reality TV presents a funhouse mirror of refracted and tarnished realities, it is in this context of inauthenticity and amplified stereotype that we may now examine the bizarre spectre of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. An examination of this show thus extends existing scholarship and analysis about the ways that reality TV may provide an eerily accurate representation of dominant discourses while nonetheless presenting a heavily interrupted view of ‘reality’.

presenting Honey Boo Boo

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (hereafter Honey Boo Boo), like all reality TV, presents a heavily mediated and refracted reality that says as much in what it presents as in what it omits (Montemurro 2008; Couldry 2008). Honey Boo Boo describes life in the rural, southern white family of six-year-old Alana Thompson (the eponymous ‘Honey Boo Boo Child’) and her parents, June Shannon and Mike Thompson (aka ‘Mama’ and ‘Sugar Bear’). Alana’s family also includes her three older sisters from Mama June’s earlier relationships and her infant niece Kaitlyn. While Honey Boo Boo began as a spin-off of the American TLC network’s Toddlers and Tiaras (2009−), in which June’s performance as a pageant mom garnered notoriety and dismay with many and with some (including, famously, radio host Howard Stern) accusing her of child abuse (Brown 2012), it actually spends relatively little time reviewing Alana’s pageant career. Instead, Honey Boo Boo seeks to document the day-to-day experiences of family life in the deep American South, characterized by pockets of extreme poverty; while the show is set in Georgia, the produc-tion seeks to present a type of emblematic ‘Southernness’ that transcends state boundaries. This programme profiles a family, presented as stereotypi-cal ‘white trash’, that is transgressing prevailing body norms, class perform-ances, race identities, and maternal expectations. In its presentation of the radical ‘Other’, the show has led to strong opinions of disgust and dismay, yet, despite all the judgment, so many viewers continue to tune in to watch.

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This article seeks to expose the dominant tropes of the show, especially in relation to the areas of race, class, fat and maternity. Exposing the messaging of Honey Boo Boo reveals the ways that the show’s narrative maintains domi-nant discourses; at the same time, the programme may be seen as a trans-gressive resistance to mainstream judgment of fat bodies, poor people and mothers and a reclamation of redneck subjectivity. Drawing on analyses of white trash culture and presentations of fat bodies, as well as on the emer-gent field of freak studies, the article positions Honey Boo Boo within a broader analysis of reality TV that suggests a new phase in our consumption of differ-ence and the fluid and disruptive boundaries of the ‘normal’.

New freak shows?

Honey Boo Boo is the latest offering of both serialized (or episodic) television and one-time specials presented as entertainment. Abandoning its initial commitment to educational programming, in the last ten years, American broadcaster TLC has cornered the market on a specific sub-genre of real-ity TV that seeks to present dynamic documentary depictions of marginal-ized or unusual American lives. Alongside Honey Boo Boo, TLC’s popular shows include Breaking Amish (2012−2013), documenting the experiences of Amish youth suddenly catapulted into life in New York City; Abby and Brittany (2012−2013) about conjoined twins Abigail and Brittany Hensel as they navigate their college graduation and shift to adult life; and The Little Couple (2009−) about a couple who both have dwarfism. Other shows, such as My Strange Addiction (2010−), profile people addicted to eating cleanser or collecting the hair from the shower drain, while Hoarders (2009−) sensational-izes other addictive behaviours. Beyond these series, there are single-episode ‘documentaries’ such as 600 Pound Mom (2012), and The Man Who Lost His Face (2011), about a Portuguese man who required removal of most of his face because of a massive tumour.

While TLC continues to produce and air shows that document ‘normal’ life, such as What Not To Wear (2003−) and A Baby Story (1998−), as well as endless offerings about wedding dresses, there is nonetheless a creeping trend towards the establishment of the network’s stake in presenting sensa-tionalized difference, and in particular, an increased shift towards voyeuristic consumption of lives that are rarely represented in popular culture. The push towards heavily dramatic reality television is well documented (Andrejevic 2002; Couldry 2008), with stories of difference populating even very formulaic ‘game show’ style television such as Survivor (2000−) and The Bachelor (2002−). For example, single-mother Emily Maynard was profiled on The Bachelor in 2011 and The Bachelorette (2003−) in 2012, in part because of the uniqueness of her story as a tragically bereaved single mother; The Amazing Race (2001−) has had contestants who are amputees and who are Deaf. The popularity of TLCs I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant (2009−) is further evidence of the move towards tabloid style voyeuristic offerings. While this trend towards sensa-tionality is becoming, ironically, commonplace, many TLC shows present a distinct approach by focusing on extreme outliers of faith (in the case of the polygamist Mormans documented on Sister Wives [2010−] or Breaking Amish), mental health (in the case of Hoarders and My Strange Addiction) and, often, physical difference.

TLC is consciously or explicitly replicating prior sites for the consumption of difference, most notably in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century

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freak shows. Thomson suggests that the focal points of many freak shows centred on two major sites: the presentation of ‘foreignness’ and the view-ing of extraordinary bodies (1997: 63). Non-European people were literally collected as by-products of colonialism and shown as artefacts of exotica, with specific moral and cultural expectations tagged to either anomalous or merely unusual bodies. For example, Saarte Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus’, was presented as hypersexual and savage as a result of her bottom, which was perceived as excessively large in comparison to the European women and men who viewed her (Gilman 1985). Likewise, conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker, the original ‘Siamese’ twins, had the sensationality of their conjoinment heightened by a soft focus on their ethnicity (Dreger 2004). In most cases, ethnicity alone did not provide sufficient titillation for the freak show; people with dwarfism and giantism, extremely obese people, amputees and others with ‘extraordinary bodies’, to use Thomson’s (1996, 1997) term, instead filled in the cast of freaks. Ironically, in modern-day reality television, then, we see many of the same conditions and bodies, a similar ‘iconography of otherness’ profiled for consumption (Thomson 1997: 62). The implications of TLC’s resurrection of the freak show motif, long considered abandoned as evidence of extremely poor taste, raises a number of troubling questions. Thomson’s exhaustive account of the history of freak shows considers the ways that difference has always been catalogued and presented for consump-tion by the purported norm (1996, 1997). In the case of Honey Boo Boo, fat, loud bodies are problematically displayed in the context of (equally problem-atically) a snide presentation of white trash culture. Yet, in examining Honey Boo Boo as one example of TLC’s exploitation, a more ambiguous reckoning of difference and freakery may be sought, one that resists easy analyses. These ambiguities are initially seen in the ways the show presents Mama June and family as examples of extraordinary bodies.

Loud fat Leaky bodies

Extreme obesity is a long-running trope of TLC’s single-episode ‘documenta-ries’, perhaps the nadir of which occurred in the production of Half-Ton Killer (2012), which documented the (false) murder confession of 900-pound Mayra Rosales. In the company of extreme bodies such as Rosales, 900 Pound Man: Race Against Time (2013) and 600 Pound Mom, the bodies of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo do not seem especially exceptional. At 300+ pounds, Mama June is presented as unambiguously ‘obese’; daughters Jessica (nicknamed Chubbs) and Lauren (also known as Pumpkin) are shown with bulges wobbling as they run, while six-year-old Alana is seen holding her breath while being stuffed into a too-tight pageant dress. Though dad Sugar Bear is often seen rubbing his pot belly, the show generally focuses on fat in the context of femininity. Yet Honey Boo Boo’s family is not easily categorized as an outlier with respect to weight.

Amid frequent concerns about America as a nation of obese people, with fears about obesity in children over-represented in news reports (Zickovic et al. 2010; McNaughton 2011) and pseudoscientific articles (see Friedman 2004; Flegel et al. 2013 for critical responses to the ‘science’ of obesity), Honey Boo Boo’s family would seem to be decidedly mainstream in their plumpness. The show presents a discourse of fatphobia, however, making frequent and explicit mention of the weight problems of family members and encouraging weight loss (which is unsuccessful) as a plot device. The link, hotly contested by fat activists and critical fat theorists (Bacon and Aphramor 2011; Rothblum

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and Solovay 2009), between size and ill health is taken for granted in the way the family is captured, and the audience is clearly meant to gasp in horror at the physical excesses, the quivering rolls and lumps, of June, Mike and their girls. If the physical dimensions of the cast of Honey Boo Boo do not immedi-ately solidify their presence as freaks, then the revulsion and judgment teased out of the audience ensure that they are nonetheless perceived as abnormal. The abnormality, however, comes in the presentation of the family’s seeming acceptance of their perceived obesity and unhealthiness.

Rather than following the trope of the many diet reality TV shows that emphasize body shame and the myth of successful metamorphosis, Honey Boo Boo portrays different family members revelling in their size and proudly loving their curves. If fat has become normal, self-acceptance (especially by fat people) is profoundly radical; this unusual behaviour is thus shown as evidence of delusional thinking. The audience is therefore encouraged to disdain Honey Boo Boo and her family more for their inability to perceive their bodies as unacceptable, than for those bodies themselves. Ironically, however, in the genre of reality TV, the family is still able to speak for them-selves. When Mama reluctantly agrees to a weight-loss challenge posed by her daughter, Jessica (the only member of the family who seems ambivalent about her weight), she pauses and says ‘I’m pretty happy with myself, but for support for you I’ll do it’. She goes on to say, ‘I embrace my fatness’ (‘This Is My Crazy Family’). These sentiments embody a supportive and present moth-erhood (in June’s capacity to follow her child’s lead) as well as a commitment to self-acceptance and fat activism, yet it is clear in the staging of the show that June’s claims are meant to present her as pitiable and lacking self-aware-ness. When young Alana echoes her mother’s self-love, the show presents her as misguided, a unfortunate child being denied the knowledge that can help her see just how wrong her body is.

The freakery of Honey Boo Boo rests in a shared awareness that is both smug and presumptuous between the producers and the audience; it is a shared awareness about how they/we know the correct ways of looking and behaving better than the family themselves. While the editing of the show focuses on an extreme close-up of the numbers on the scale, however, it cannot override June’s deep self-acceptance. By never deriding herself, June confounds the show’s editors and exposes the fat-shaming discourses that inform the show as externally applied rather than as informed by her own beliefs.

TLC may be correct that, in their approach to self-governance, the women of Honey Boo Boo are outliers. Where the broadcaster errs, however, is in presenting this messaging as negative. Instead, there is room to present Honey Boo Boo as an example of Health At Every Size, a growing international move-ment that seeks to query the ambiguous link between weight and health (Friedman 2004; Bacon and Aphramor 2011; Flegel et al. 2013) and instead focus on healthy living. HAES acknowledges that both fat and thin bodies may be healthy or unhealthy and thus encourages intuitive eating practices, joyful movement and acceptance of bodies of all sizes.

While much is made of the family’s unorthodox food choices, they are regularly shown partaking in joyful activity and maintaining a size-acceptance outlook (Harding and Kirby 2009). While June’s daughters regularly make fun of her fat, they do so playfully and lovingly, and are just as likely to grab a handful of their own flab and use it as a hand puppet. The overall result, TLC might be dismayed to know, is that this viewer at least sees Honey Boo Boo as a beautiful example of the merits of size acceptance and body love. When

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six-year-old Alana says ‘Mama said pretty comes in all different sizes. My size is cute’ (original) (‘I’m Sassified’), I am awestruck by the body positive feminist messaging, and by the degree to which this child is shown embracing a non-normative physique. When June refers to herself as ‘voluptuous’ and ‘beauti-mous’, maintaining her large body as sexy, I want to cheer.

Grotesque bodies

Of course, this feminist reading perhaps says more about my own position-ality as a fat feminist scholar than the show’s intended message or, indeed, the show’s general reception. In Honey Boo Boo, fat is exhibited as part of an overwhelming focus on the family as a group of uncontrolled bodies, with limited to no emphasis on their minds. The family is shown farting, cough-ing, being horny, peeing, in need of a shit, sneezing, drooling, having a food fight, shooting out snot and otherwise excreting every possible substance in front of a viewing audience. The lack of the family’s capacity to control their bodies is offered up as evidence of their coarseness and lack of control more broadly. Yet it is possible, rather than cringing at the screen, that we may read the physical displays of Honey Boo Boo differently.

What is notable here is not that the show’s stars, like all families, like all humans, excrete, but that the show is breaking down the illusion that the bodies existing inside our TVs are pristine and inviolable. The presentation of the coarse bodies we see in Honey Boo Boo has its roots in folk culture (as distinct from high culture) and specifically in the spectacle of the carnival and the grotesque realism described by Mikhail Bakhtin (1968/1984). The carni-val body resists the individualized and contained body and is instead deeply authentic, presenting an embodied subjectivity that is ‘gendered, mutable and perishable’ (Cohen Shabot 2006: 228). Bakhtin suggests that the carnival presents a space where bodies are carnal and visceral, where the messy libidi-nous drippings that are erased from high culture can flourish in low culture. Drawing from Bakhtin, Victoria Pitts writes, ‘The grotesque body is the eating and drinking body, the body of open orifices, the coarse body which yawns, hiccups, nose blows, flatulates, spits, hawks’ (1998: 69). Honey Boo Boo’s family revels in the presentation of the visceral body of low culture, as demon-strated through extended close-ups of June having a sneezing fit or carrying on at length about the appropriateness of farting at the dinner table. In one memorable episode, the camera stays trained for a two-minute close-up of Alana’s face after a drippy sneeze (‘Ah-choo!’). Who is truly offensive in this exchange? Alana, for leaking snot, which is something humans (and espe-cially young children) do? The camera operator for not putting down the lens and offering a tissue? The editor for choosing this close-up instead of a more flattering moment?

In sync with their cheerful size acceptance, the family on Honey Boo Boo is unapologetic about their effluvient, visceral living. Yet the show itself invites comment and judgment, presenting the family as a pantheon of fat fart-ing fools. If, as Elizabeth Stephens suggests, ‘The figure of the freak […] is productively understood as a catalyst for transformations of prevailing bodily norms, rather than as something which unproblematically breaches those norms’ (2005: 5), we may see Honey Boo Boo as both a parody and a site of resistance, a place to simultaneously deride and reclaim the inherent mutiny of the bodies we purportedly control. As viewers, we all shit, eat, sneeze. Children blow snot bubbles and eat food off the dog. The discomfort we feel

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in watching this show comes from realizing that we recognize ourselves in this family, even though they are framed as freaks, which suggests perhaps that we, as an audience, are freakier than we may want to believe.

In order to resist this moment of recognition, Honey Boo Boo is produced in ways that position the bodily authenticity presented therein as part of an identity that is still inherently ‘Other’. This is done by maintaining the explicit, bulging bodies of Honey Boo Boo and family as emblematic of low-class status (and thus also making normative assumptions about audience that presume that families ‘like’ Honey Boo Boo are not the viewers in front of the screen). As Skeggs argues, ‘White working-class women in particular are being marked as the national constitutive limit to propriety – an act which repeats moments of crisis in authority condensed and symbolically figured through the excess of the grotesque, weeping, leaking, excreting bodies of working-class women’ (2005: 968).

Honey Boo Boo suggests to its audience that while we may all have leaky bodies, the specific moistness of this family is evidence of the rough, redneck ways that reinscribe Alana and her family as freaks. This family is not merely made freaky by their size and their snot: instead of acting as a site of recogni-tion, these behaviours are packaged up into a discrete site of Otherness in the performance of Honey Boo Boo as an example of white trash.

CLass aNd poverty

The unsubtle staging of this show takes great pains to ensure that the distinc-tion between high and low culture is obvious. In a very obviously staged moment, June is shown hiring an etiquette expert (purportedly to help with pageant training) to help with the girls’ manners; the expert, daintily sipping tea, is horrified when a child farts at the table. An outdoor Thanksgiving meal culminates in a massive food fight, presented in slow motion with the Hallelujah chorus playing in the background. In the inaugural episode, the family attends the ‘Redneck Games’, involving mud-diving and bobbing for pigs’ feet. Establishing shots focus on their house as run down and their community as not only rural, but poor, with a frequent emphasis on the very close proximity of a freight train line to the edge of the family dwelling. The juxtaposition here between high culture and the rough and ready life of this family is thus used as a means of amplifying the family’s perceived crassness.

References to the family’s poverty are threaded throughout the show. June is shown using coupons very strategically to lower her family’s grocery bill (yet, as in the TLC show Extreme Couponing [2010−], this practice is viewed as its own form of freakery rather than as evidence of estimable frugality). Sites of body difference are also linked to poverty, though these links are rarely made clear. For example, June explains that she never takes her socks off because one of her feet is mangled, which happened when a forklift ran over it while she was working on a factory floor. This workplace injury is presented as comical and June’s daughters gleefully make fun of her ‘forklift foot’, but the premise is nonetheless somehow menacing. When the foot is finally revealed, we are not meant to become outraged that June’s employer did not help her with rehabili-tation; instead, her foot is offered as further evidence of her backwardness. A quick google search of the term ‘forklift foot’ supplies ample evidence that the popular response to this disability is horror rather than compassion.

Poverty also informs the core assessment of whether the show is exploita-tive. This question leads to online message boards being lit up with speculation

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regarding the fees the family makes in consenting to the show. Detractors suggest that accepting money to reveal their lives is further evidence of moral failings while advocates for the family argue that they are receiving a tiny financial incentive compared to the overall profit of the show for the network (Whitney 2012). Honey Boo Boo’s parents have indicated publicly that they are not living off the profits of the show (with the exception of the purchase of a new truck) and are instead putting the money aside for their daughters’ futures (Grossman 2013).

Importantly, the family themselves do not see themselves as poor. When they put on their annual holiday toy drive, June says, ‘Sugar likes to play Santa Claus because we’re giving back to the community, doing something for the community and that’s what we’re all about’. She goes on to explain that there were years in which she could not afford toys for her daughters, so now that they are in a more stable position, she wants to support her commu-nity. At Thanksgiving, June says, ‘I’m thankful for everything else. Because most people don’t have what we have’ (‘A Very Boo Thanksgiving’). When American celebrity Rosie O’Donnell, a committed fan of the show, offered to buy them a new house, June politely declined (though they have agreed that O’Donnell will solicit network support to do a significant renovation of the family home). In part, June purportedly turned down O’Donnell’s offer because ‘the house’s Christmas decorations are apparently a staple for the community’ (Sacks 2012, par. 6).

poVerty and class

If the family members view themselves as upwardly mobile, and are aiming to use their increased financial stability in a community-minded way, how are they being presented as objects of such scorn and revulsion? Their household income may not be as relevant to their display as their packaging as a particu-lar demographic of freaks. Honey Boo Boo seeks to present a particular family, but the fat and farts are part of a commentary about southern US life that focuses on the stereotype of white trash.

While white trash culture is difficult to define (Wilson 2002; Hartigan 1997), there are some agreed upon characteristics. White trash involves poverty but also suggests laziness, offensiveness, poor choices and the types of bodily excesses that characterize June and family. Seen alongside other TLC offer-ings such as My Teen Is Pregnant and So Am I (2012−), the network suggests that character flaws, rather than poverty, are intrinsically linked to class status and that audiences (the presumed ‘us’) can therefore revel in consuming the antics of ‘them’, the people we hope we will never be. Entertainment reporter James Poniewozik states:

I don’t feel sorry for the Thompsons. But for me – for the presumed me, anyway, that some producer anticipated laughing and gasping and tweeting OMG, shaking his head smugly at an America full of people getting pregnant too soon and putting their toddlers on display and stuffing themselves with fried pigskins and wallowing in the bacterial rivers of a ruined landscape? I feel sorry for that guy.

(2012, par. 16, original emphasis)

While Poniewozik may find the family so cheerfully likeable that they can transcend the scorn with which they are presented, millions of words online

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and in tabloids unfortunately disagree, gleefully descending upon the spectre of white trash and unflinchingly watching Honey Boo Boo to point and judge. Skeggs argues, ‘White trash cultures that signify too authentic and too primi-tive (or too noisy and too sexual) can be put to work as a source of realistic and fantastical menace to the middle class’ (2005: 970, original emphasis). This is made especially clear when Honey Boo Boo’s family interacts with outsid-ers (beauticians, wigmakers, waterpark staff and, most notably, the etiquette teacher) who view the family, and their commitment to loud unapologetic living, with a mixture of scorn and fear.

Poniewozik may feel sorry for ‘that guy’, but the show nonetheless partici-pates in a dominant discourse that mocks people who are poor and presents this family, a spectre of white trash, as an intrinsic and immovable source of disgust. This immovability is viewed as either the abnegation or the impossibil-ity of agency on the part of people who are white trash. Wilson suggests that

the term carries a special implication of ‘congenital’ indigence – poverty of the sort that is passed down from generation to generation, and embodies not only a lack of material resources, but an ideologically maintained disbelief in the notion of upward mobility via socially sanc-tioned, work-oriented, avenues.

(2002: 388)

Beyond this inevitable indolence, however, the presentation of ‘white trash’ is also intrinsically about violating the tenets of whiteness.

unpacKing wHiteness

While Honey Boo Boo packages low class for viewer consumption with shots of off-brand margarine and bingo-dabbing frenzies, it is suspiciously silent on the topic of race. Despite (or perhaps because) of its setting in the rural south-ern United States, there is virtually no representation of racialized people (with the notable exception of several black Santa figures in the Christmas special). Without minimizing the privilege their whiteness affords this family, or the impact of their economic and social marginalization, it is nonetheless notable that the specific fact of their whiteness is rarely explicitly commented upon. Yet within this silence, there are powerful messages about normative expectations of whiteness.

White trash must be understood in the context of the racialization of the term, of the ways that those who embody white trash are viewed as funda-mentally transgressing the expectations of whiteness. Hartigan writes:

‘White trash’ derives from a contrastive strategy or rhetorical bound-ary construction by which whites have long demarcated a certain form of racial detritus, composed of other whites who, through their poverty and ungainliness, fit insecurely within the body of whiteness as a hege-monic order of political power and social privilege.

(1997: 319)

Wray expands this idea, suggesting that:

White trash names a kind of disturbing liminality: a monstrous, tran-gressive identity of mutually violating boundary terms, a dangerous

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threshold state of being neither one nor the other. It brings together into a single ontological category that which must be kept apart in order to establish a meaningful and stable symbolic order.

(2006: 2, original emphasis)

Hartigan and Wray argue that white trash is thus offensive in its violation of racialized boundaries and that, by laughing at Honey Boo Boo, we are also tacitly participating in the upholding of problematic racialized presentations of people of colour. As Hartigan suggests, ‘Instances of “white trash” in popular culture objectify how racial and class boundaries are rhetorically established and ideological maintained’ (1997: 319).

It is difficult to imagine a black Honey Boo Boo. A show that profiled an economically disadvantaged black American family with a similar stereotypi-cal lens would be viewed as explicitly racist were June’s farting and Alana’s mud-diving replaced with, for example, a hip hop minstrel show. While there is no shortage of racist reality TV (the absence of racialized contestants on The Bachelor, or the treatment of black people on Survivor are notable examples [Dubrofsky and Hardy 2008; Boylorn 2008]), it is arguable that it is Honey Boo Boo’s whiteness that allows for the show’s particularly vitriolic representa-tion of poverty and low-class status. Hartigan notes, ‘In a political moment where derogatory labels and innuendoes for ethnic groups are being rigor-ously policed in social and institutional exchanges, ‘white trash’ still flies with little self-conscious hesitancy on the part of the user’ (1997: 317). The show suggests that while certain identities are off limits for this type of deri-sive display, it is still fair game to mock poverty. Even within this analysis, however, one wonders whether the show would have showcased June at the stage in her life when she could not afford Christmas presents: real poverty is harder to mock than the contrived lack of classiness found in the show’s pres-entation of white trash.

Interestingly, the presentation of Honey Boo Boo’s family as simultane-ously made up of extraordinary bodies that are nonetheless able enough like-wise contributes to their presentation as objects of scorn. Programmes that have taken up disabled or other explicitly extraordinary bodies, such as those of conjoined twins or people with dwarfism, may have stemmed from a lens that is reminiscent of the freak show, but they still exercise caution in present-ing such individuals as subjects of derision, instead portraying them as objects of fascination. By contrast, the mockery of bodies on Honey Boo Boo is seen as obvious and acceptable, even when it touches on issues of disability. Father Sugar Bear is hospitalized and uses a wheelchair after an accident in an all-terrain vehicle – this is only briefly touched upon; voice-overs and commen-tary from family members and neighbours are edited to suggest this injury as an obvious outcome of the family’s lifestyle. Likewise, daughter Lauren’s fairly serious eye injury that she sustained when she was tossed a set of keys is narrated as evidence of this family’s clumsiness, rather than merely accidental bad luck. Even when the bodies on Honey Boo Boo are altered by poverty-related situations, as in the case of June’s forklift foot, such challenges are presented through laughter and mockery; the injury is thus conveyed as evidence of the family’s poor judgment. These challenges are never portrayed through the more careful lens (albeit one that tends towards problematic valorization of disability as heroic) cast upon other unusual bodies. This divide between objects of fascination and subjects of derision can be traced back to narratives of agency that direct the responsibility for able-bodiedness and

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safety back to the individual. In Honey Boo Boo, the family, and especially the mother June, are seen as responsible for their physical challenges. In stark contrast, the presentations of disabled people (albeit in a problematic, valor-izing way) show them as courageous archetypes.

The label of ‘white trash’ suggests that Honey Boo Boo and her family have no agency. It can be tempting to similarly suggest that they are help-less in choosing the way they are represented on television, thus doubly disenfranchised – sentenced to the inevitability of their trashy status and to its inescapable damning in the public sphere.

Yet such an analysis is a limited retelling, one which doesn’t adequately convey the glee with which Mama and family participate in the construction of their lives. As Michael Chemers writes in regard to freaks, ‘identity may be profitably seen not merely as a straitjacket inherited from a callous, rigid social matrix, but also as a role to be radically played (or played against) in an ever-changing system of representation’ (2005: 2). Perhaps June and the others are not merely TLC’s dupes, but are rather contributing to a self-conscious rejection of the rigid expectations of body size, whiteness and class. When we view Alana cheering on-screen ‘You got to redneckognize!’ we must wonder if, when Chemers wrote that ‘[s]tigma must be staged’ (2005: 2), Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is exactly what he had in mind. This issue of agency, it is impor-tant to note, also plays a critical role in the show’s presentation of maternity.

MotHerHood

While the jury may be out on TLC’s squeamishness around mocking race and disability on reality TV, there is no such confusion when it comes to the network’s capacity to indict motherhood. It does this successfully by focusing on the many perceived failings of June who, in many respects, is much more the star of the show than Honey Boo Boo herself. Through the denouncements of June’s misdeeds and its treatment of motherhood, the show’s focus on fat and class come together. Fundamentally, the class performances and bodily excesses of Honey Boo Boo are all-out indictments against June for being a poor mother.

June is portrayed as someone who is failing to keep her children healthy, happy and socially acceptable, thus blatantly rejecting the tenets of maternal responsibility (Ruddick [1980] 2007). When June’s daughters transgress femi-nine expectations (e.g., by embracing their fatness or admitting to their bodies’ excretions), as the audience we might be persuaded to limit our judgment of the girls but, at the same time, we are meant to lament the mothering that brought them to this place. Likewise, the show’s portrayal of seventeen-year-old Anna’s pregnancy is often presented in relation to June’s own pregnancy with Anna at the age of fifteen. Once again, Anna’s presumed ‘difficulties’ are staged as indelibly a product of June’s haphazard mothering, unsubtly displayed as symptoms of her status as a white trash mom. This haphazard-ness rests in expectations of motherhood that are deeply raced and classed. Culture columnist Michelle Dean articulates this point:

[…] one reason Mama June bugs a certain swath of the populace is because she’s the anti-Brooklyn mom. I’m not sure that ‘organic,’ ‘BPA,’ or ‘Montessori’ are in her vocabulary. She has a deep accent and has probably never read Eat, Pray, Love. Her couch has cup holders and a recliner level in it, the kind of thing Crate and Barrel would never sell.

(2013, par. 2)

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Dean suggests that it is June’s failure at maternal and class mores (and the silent intersection of the two with race) that exposes her to scorn.

June fundamentally fails at intensive mothering (Hays 1998). She does not subsume herself to her children’s wills or ensure that they glimmer like shin-ing pageant trophies as products of her sacrificial mothering (O’Reilly 2004). At the same time, through the lens of feminist motherhood studies, June’s refusal to give up her life as a result of motherhood may exemplify what O’Reilly calls ‘empowered motherhood’, characterized by ‘maternal agency, authority, autonomy, and authenticity’ (2008: 11). Despite all the flamboy-ance of her performance, June’s representation of motherhood portrays a matrifocal narrative that resists the child-centric bias of many other televi-sion mothers (such as Tori Spelling or Kate Gosselin who may perform good motherhood by doting on their children and erasing their own subjectivi-ties) (Tori and Dean: Inn Love, 2007−2012; Jon and Kate Plus 8, 2007−2011) and popular media more generally (such as television commercials and baby-care literature). What June succeeds in doing is balancing her own needs and those of her children, being committed to her family and being clear-sighted about her requirements for self-care.

Drawing from feminist motherhood scholarship (O’Reilly 2004, 2008; Hays 1998), June is arguably a superlative mother, simultaneously content with herself and amusedly concerned with her children. She does not sweat the small stuff, but consistently conveys a strong message of accept-ance, which reaps rewards in her kids’ accepting natures. For example, when Anna’s daughter Kaitlyn is born unexpectedly with six fingers on one hand (in a moment that must have caused TLC producers to swoon with glee at the freaky potential to gain viewership of this non-normative body), June asserts, ‘It’s better to have an extra thumb than no thumb at all… We’ve kind of embraced it and she’s more special to me… it’s no big deal. She’s just special’. Following her mother’s lead, Alana notes, ‘I wish I had an extra finger, then I could grab more cheeseballs’ (‘It Is What It Is’).

Deviating from expectations of southern redneck culture, the show also presents June teaching values of love and acceptance around queer identity. In an early episode, Alana chooses to name her male pet pig ‘Glitzy’ and dresses him up in pageant clothes. She reflects: ‘We’re going to make him a girl pig, so he’s going to be a little gay’. When sister Lauren says, ‘He’s not going to be gay’, Alana solemnly asserts, ‘It can if it wants to. You can’t tell that pig what to do’ (‘Gonna Be a Glitz Pig’). While Alana may be confused about the nuances of gender identity, she is nonetheless presenting a more open-minded and loving approach to gender and sexuality than many chil-dren her age, mimicking her mother’s example of acceptance and support. June’s support of Mike’s gay brother, nicknamed ‘Uncle Poodle’, is a shin-ing example of queer family values presented in a no-nonsense way: in this family, it is taken for granted that queer identity is valued. Defending her uncle, Alana says ‘Ain’t nuthin’ wrong with being a little gay. Everybody’s a little gay’ (‘It Is What It Is’), suggesting an understanding of queer identity that extends beyond binary sexuality or gender. The gay-positive tones have not gone unnoticed. The show was nominated for an award from the Gay Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) for its positive portrayal of the LGBT community (Morrissey 2013).

While the thrust of the show may thus aim to position June as June Cleaver gone wrong, it is perhaps this judgmental representation that makes the show politically radical. In an era where children are unambiguously precious and

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vulnerable, Honey Boo Boo shows tough, rambunctious, resilient young people being cared for by a happy, independent and accountable mother. There are few other places on television that present motherhood in this light, which may account for Honey Boo Boo’s many detractors: motherhood has become a sacred cow (Douglas and Michaels 2004), bathed in a rosy Hallmark light that romanticizes every soiled diaper and gummy smile from each episode of A Baby Story to the overwhelmingly cheery fecundity of Nineteen Kids and Counting! (2008−) star Michelle Dugger. Honey Boo Boo takes that sacred cow and replaces it with a gay pig. It is this commitment to authenticity, especially in a heavily mediated context such as reality TV, that supports an analysis of the show as a site of reclamation and resistance.

conclusions: ‘enFreaKMent’ and ‘rednecKognization’

Within freak studies, much is made of the process of ‘enfreakment’, the means through which a subject goes from merely embodying difference to actually performing the role of freak. In ‘The social construction of freaks’, Robert Bogdan argues that the condition of being a freak is not intrinsic but ‘a way of thinking about and presenting people – a frame of mind and a set of practices’ (1996: 24). Bogdan makes a distinction between ‘born freaks’, those whose bodies or practices are inviolably sites of difference, and ‘self-made freaks’, those with heavy tattoos or ‘novelty acts’ like sword swallowers. Even among people with physical anomalies, however, Bogdan maintains that there is a level of agency in the process of enfreakment, a conscious transformation that would result in someone shifting from merely being, for example, excessively tall, to embodying the spirit of a Giant. It is unassailable that this agency was and is constrained: within the limited choices afforded extraordinary bodies in the era of the old-time freak show, the choice to ‘enfreak’ might be the only realistic possibility afforded to someone cast out of normative society.

In the context of the constraints of the present day, it is an interest-ing question to consider whether the family of Honey Boo Boo ‘chose’ fat, poor or white trash as identities within this mediated and scripted medium; nonetheless, the notion of enfreakment allows for a retelling within which a degree of agency is afforded in the context of constrained choices. In other words: if living with an extraordinary body means unavoidable scrutiny, enfreakment allows for that scrutiny on one’s own terms. Facing the inevi-tability of a characterization of white trash, perhaps June chose to steer her family towards a self-conscious reclamation of redneck identity. The shift from ‘white trash’ to ‘proud redneck’ is documented by Hartigan as one means of resisting judgment (1997). Beyond this specific labelling, however, Honey Boo Boo takes a context of mockery and disdain and instead allows for a self-conscious resistance, an agentic retelling that gives June and her family the reins of enfreakment rather than solely leaving control of their story up to TLC’s producers.

If, as Cohen Shabot suggests with respect to the grotesque body, ‘the excess is that which has to be cleansed or eliminated when we try to over-come difference’ (2006: 231), Honey Boo Boo defiantly revels in that excess, in resisting normative expectations of bodies, of whiteness and of motherhood. Honey Boo Boo showcases the capacity to take a marginalized position and twist its presentation, not necessarily towards a position of privilege, but at least to slyly turn the joke on its head. When June says, ‘You like us or you don’t like us. We just don’t care’, she wrests control of her story back from the

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network and, as a result, provides a much more compelling and ambiguous view of reality and representation.

diFFerence and saMeness, resistance and reclaMation

An examination of the key themes in Honey Boo Boo reveals a tension between difference and sameness. The show is constructed on the premise of the freak show, but with a difference that is sufficiently limited and constrained by agency, to be seen as a chosen difference. It also allows for a mocking presen-tation rather than the reverence routinely reserved for sites of difference such as disability. In this regard, Honey Boo Boo can be understood through both theories of the freak show, which considers the capacity for representation of differences, and theories of the grotesque, which instead reveal the mundan-ity and corporeality of sameness. Honey Boo Boo, then, can be seen as a site of empowerment and resistance in its freaky difference from ‘us’, and as a site of authenticity and reclamation in its visceral capacity to provide a reflection of its viewers.

In carnival, in the freak show, in reality TV, it is tempting to view such a representation as a means of disdaining the people who are described within: the fat farting fool, easily analogized to Honey Boo Boo’s parade of excretions. Yet Bakhtin argues that there is a reclamation in grotesque realism, that what he terms ‘the material bodily principle’ ([1965] 1984: 19) is emancipatory and communal, democratizing in its focus on what all bodies do, in the end. About carnival laughter, Bakhtin states that ‘this laughter is ambivalent; it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time, mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, buries and revives’ ([1965] 1984: 11−12). While it is thus facile to suggest that the Honey Boo Boo’s exhibit of bodily functions is exclusively a reclamation of folk culture, à la Bakhtin, thinking about freaks and carnivals neverthe-less allows for a possible retelling that maintains a level of ambivalence and agency, rather than a simple narrative of a family being presented as America’s Fools. Michael Gardiner suggests that grotesque performance provides ‘a crucial resource through which the popular masses can retain a degree of autonomy from the forces of sociocultural homogenization and centralization’ (2004: 39). In seeing Honey Boo Boo as an authentic experience, the corporeal leaking reality of this family’s bodies, the cheerful challenges of their relative poverty and the exhausting realities of modern motherhood provoke as much of a reaction around difference as they do a reflection of collective experiences that are left out of dominant discourses.

At the same time, especially in light of the deluge of criticism aimed at Honey Boo Boo in popular media and online spaces, it is important that we not paint the positioning of this family in an overly rosy way. I am mind-ful of David Gerber’s response to freak studies: ‘We can see the freak show as both a socially constructed phenomenon of commercial entertainment and a product of unequal social relations, oppression, and exploitation, but we cannot understand it exclusively in either way’ (1996: 39). Reality TV blends the mix of agency and exploitation that Gerber cautions us to heed. Thus, even as I aim to celebrate Honey Boo Boo as a radical counternarrative, I want to do so mindful of the limitations of autonomy and consent, particularly in the context of marginalized identity. The end product is a show that resists easy categorization, that may make us uncomfortable and provide solace and that may position laughing with as simultaneously laughing at. In this respect, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo has the capacity to engender conversation; it can

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present to us a freak show that we need not mindlessly consume but instead can use as a vehicle for discussion about realities and representations, and about sameness and difference.

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teleVision prograMMes

600 Pound Mom (2012, United States: TLC).900 Pound Man: Race Against Time (2013, United States: TLC).A Baby Story (1998−, United States: TLC).Abby and Brittany (2012−2013, United States: TLC).The Amazing Race (2001−, United States: CBS).The Bachelor (2002−, United States: ABC).The Bachelorette (2003−, United States: ABC).Breaking Amish (2012−, United States: TLC).Extreme Couponing (2010−, United States: TLC).I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant (2009−, United States: TLC).Half-Ton Killer (2012, United States: TLC).Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (2012−, United States: TLC). ‘This Is My Crazy Family’ (8 August 2012). ‘Gonna be a Glitz Pig’ (8 August 2012). ‘She Oooo’ed Herself’ (15 August 2012). ‘I’m Sassified!’ (15 August 2012). ‘What is a Door Nut?’ (22 August 2012). ‘A Bunch of Wedgies’ (29 August 2012). ‘Shh! It’s a Wig’ (5 September 2012). ‘Time for Sketti!’ (12 September 2012). ‘Ah-choo!’ (19 September 2012). ‘It Is What It Is’ (26 September 2012). ‘A Very Boo Halloween’ (6 January 2013). ‘A Very Boo Thanksgiving’ (13 January 2013). ‘You Don’t Know Boo!’ (27 January 2013). ‘A Very Boo Christmas’ (10 February 2013).

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Hoarders (2009−, United States: A & E).Jon and Kate Plus 8 (sixth and seven seasons, Kate Plus 8) (2007−2011, United

States: TLC).The Little Couple (2009−, United States: TLC).Nineteen Kids and Counting! (formerly Seventeen Kids and Counting! and Eighteen

Kids and Counting!) (2008−, United States: TLC).The Man Who Lost His Face (2011, United States: TLC).My Strange Addiction (2010−, United States: TLC).My Teen Is Pregnant and So Am I (2012−, United States: TLC).Sister Wives (2010−, United States: TLC).Survivor (2000−, United States: CBS).Toddlers and Tiaras (2009−, United States: TLC).Tori and Dean: Inn Love (third season, Tori and Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood),

(2007−2012, United States: Oxygen).What Not To Wear (2003−, United States: TLC).

suggested citation

Friedman, M. (2014), ‘Here comes a lot of judgment: Honey Boo Boo as a site of reclamation and resistance’, Journal of Popular Television, 2: 1, pp. 77–95, doi: 10.1386/jptv.2.1.77_1

contributor details

May Friedman lives and works in downtown Toronto. She blends parent-ing, teaching, reading and writing with a cheerful commitment to viewing reality TV. Her most recent work includes the monograph, Mommyblogs and the Changing Face of Motherhood and the edited collection Chasing Rainbows: Exploring Gender Fluid Parenting Practices (co-edited with Dr Fiona Green). May is an assistant professor in the Ryerson University School of Social Work.

Contact: School of Social Work, Ryerson University, 350 Victoria St. Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5B 2K3.E-mail: [email protected]

May Friedman has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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heroes and part of the modern social project of the welfare

state after World War II. Establishing themselves artistically

and commercially at the forefront of the genre, Sjöwall and

Wahlöö constructed a model for using the police novel as an

instrument for ideological criticism of the social democratic

government and its welfare state project. With varying

political affiliations, their model has been adapted by authors

such as Leif G. W. Persson, Jan Guillou, Henning Mankell,

Håkan Nesser, Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström, and Stieg

Larsson, and in film series such as Beck and Wallander. The

first book of its kind about Swedish crime fiction, Swedish

Cops is just as thrilling as the novels and films it analyses.

Michael Tapper teaches film at Lund University. He has been a contributor to the Swedish National Encyclopaedia since 1989 and has served as film critic at the daily Sydsvenska Dagbladet in Malmö, Sweden, since 1999.

ISBN 978-1-78320-188-4 £25, $36170x230mme-Book available

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