Witches and bitches: Reality television, housewifization and the new hidden abode of production
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The governance of affect by capital has seen its ideological legitimation and emblematic site of production in the mainstream television industry, specifically reality television programs, as they provide templates for affective self-presentation to the public at large. As even a cursory glance at most reality television production demonstrates, it is most often women’s bodies and self-concepts that bear the burden of signifying and legitimating the message of this new economic formation: ‘conform to our template, be seen, and build a reputation!’ This article will focus on the Real Housewives franchise, which along with its network Bravo is credited with saving the fortunes of NBC, as the paradigmatic example of these new narrative trends and business models. It will interrogate the historical resonances and discontinuities between the economy of affective visibility now apparent on reality television and its modes of production and the origins of the ‘real’ housewife in early capitalism. At this time, women’s skills, bodies and reproductive capacities were violently restructured; forbidden from earning a wage or having money, women’s work inside and outside the home was simultaneously appropriated and concealed. As reality television inaugurates new kinds of labor and value creation in the 21st century, it does so in ways that are deeply gendered or ‘housewifized’; reality television’s forms of hidden, precarious, and unregulated labour recall the appropriation and denigration of the value of women’s work by systems of capitalist expansion in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it