Turning trash into treasure
Creators: name: Leavey, Sean T.
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2018

description: In the wake of the Great Recession (2007-2009), a subgenre of reality television (RTV) surfaced that focused on buying and selling old and used things, largely antiques and collectibles, at auctions, pawn shops, flea markets and other secondary market sites. This subgenre, which I have termed Trash and Treasure TV, included programs such as American Pickers (2010- present), Storage Wars (2010-present) and Flea Market Flip (2012-present), and emerged at the exact moment when people needed to cope with the consequences of the financial downturn. Following media theorists Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, Trash and Treasure TV is positioned here as a technique of governmentality that provided viewers with “how-to guides” for learning to participate in the secondary market. This included modeling and direct instruction intended to teach audiences the cognitive and affective skills and practices necessary to be successful entrepreneurs. Given the dismantling of the welfare state and its social safety nets, RTV acted as a form of neoliberal governance meant to produce entrepreneurial subjects capable of navigating the contemporary economic landscape. Having gathered data from interviews with 44 secondary market participants, 75 hours of field observation, and a textual analysis of the initial seasons of the programs named above, my research is the first to combine interpretive and ethnographic methods to study this RTV subgenre.     These methods revealed that although participants were critical of Trash and Treasure TV, they were also informed, inspired and entertained by the programs to varying degrees. I found that contrary to RTV’s “free market” portrayals, the local secondary market operated as a hierarchy in which those starting out with the most social and economic resources held a powerful competitive advantage over others. Additionally, the local marketplace did not exist in a vacuum, but within a post-Recession environment in which taste and consumption patterns had changed due to generational shifts. This diminished the value of objects and the prevalence of practices such as collecting. Significantly, I found that Trash and Treasure TV’s representation of secondary markets centered on the leisure activities and tastes of white, middle-class men trading in high-value objects. In turn, impoverished people, women, and other minoritized populations whom I observed buying and selling everyday items in the types of secondary market spaces depicted on the shows, were largely omitted. This allowed me to locate the limits of RTV as a technique of media governance in its inability to reach groups who were more concerned with survival than “treasure hunting.” Moreover, viewer-participants noted how an influx of newcomers inspired by these TV programs had been disruptive to markets rather than invigorating, which caused competition for objects to grow and prices to rise. Overall, using post-Recession New Jersey as a stage, this project examined the intersections of media culture, entrepreneurialism, material culture and economic precarity in the early 21st century.