Core Post #5 - Week 8

While exploring Anna McCarthy’s reading, I found her exploration of the neoliberal reliance on trauma and governmentality in our television programming to be quite interesting, especially as we consider how inundated our current televisual landscape is with the expression of hegemonic attitudes/behaviors that apply to the young, millennial, and white viewer. “In short, to see reality television as merely trivial entertainment is to avoid recognizing the degree to which the genre is preoccupied with the government of the self, and how, in that capacity, it demarcates a zone for the production of everyday discourses of citizenship,” (17). McCarthy speaks of these boundaries in a clear way, reinforcing the fact that participation in reality television may lead to rethinking how we place suffering in our civic lives.

Her definition of trauma made for an interesting understanding as well, “Trauma, whether deployed clinically or in cultural critique, names experiences at the limits of rational knowledge and of sovereign selfhood, exposing the challenges that terrifying experience pose for any coherent expression of history, memory, and individual autonomy,” (25). I immediately connected this definition, with the “weird” success of a show like, Beyond Scared Straight. Beyond Scared Straight is was a hourlong series that followed a handful of “at-risk teenagers” as they attend a program, which includes an intensive one-day session in a prison. The subjects of many episodes were Black & Brown kids with “troubled” backgrounds. It is sort of odd that there was a lack of acknowledgement of structural and institutional racism that could have effected these kids behavior, instead they chose to implicitly reconcile these factors by sending these kids to prison for a day “to scare them straight.” While in comparison, fewer white children were featured. If they were, it was more of an outward defiance toward parents and less accusatory in comparison to the Black and Brown kids. Like, seriously, who allowed this show to air?  At the time of this show’s success, it was interesting to watch the audience cheer for the discipline of these kids (shoot, when I was younger I also participated in watching), but to see this show offer the prison industrial complex as a proper avenue for exploring the depths, issues and/or behaviors of young children, especially young kids of color, was particularly alarming. Beyond Scared Straight relates to the sense of citizenship outlined in McCarthy’s argument because it takes the systematic and institutional trauma of folks less fortunate (disabled, of color, poor) and push to “make them over” (in this case, scare the shit out of them) to reenter into civic life.