Class, labour, & popular culture: reading Raymond Williams & Angela McRobbie through reality makeover TV

These essays are meant as my own preparation and supplemental synopsis for my students. Last essay in this series.

Popular culture has always been a contested space where struggles over class, gender, and labour are played out. From 1950s cultural theory to 21st-century critiques of post-feminism, scholars have sought to understand how culture is both ordinary and political, shaping identities while also reflecting broader social inequalities. Two figures in cultural studies — Raymond Williams and Angela McRobbie — provide powerful frameworks for examining these tensions.

Williams’s landmark essay Culture Is Ordinary (1958) challenged elitist views of culture by insisting that working-class traditions and everyday practices are as meaningful as canonical “high culture.” Decades later, McRobbie’s Post-Feminism and Popular Culture (2004) argued that media in the neoliberal era recodes feminism as consumer choice, often concealing persistent inequalities.

When applied together, these frameworks illuminate the cultural politics of reality makeover television, where working-class people are reshaped through style, taste, and labour into models of aspirational consumption. Programs like What Not to Wear, Queer Eye, and Love…