Gender Bifurcation in the Recession Economy: Extreme Couponing and Gold Rush Alaska

Purnima Bose and Laura E. Lyons have noted that interventions in response to the global financial crisis have tended to buttress “existing social inequalities by propping up institutions that benefit the wealthy and which precipitated the financial crisis in the first place.”¹ To this I would add that “coping” and “recovery” rhetorics in the recession often suppress postfeminist fortification of split realms of male public enterprise and female domesticity.

My goal here is to investigate some of the ways that recession-era representational culture (in the specific form of two reality-television series) activates particular vocabularies of gender while suppressing others. Mindful of Lauren Berlant’s theorization of the death of the “good life” in America, I suggest that spectacles of (largely white) working-class enterprise function as a form of closely controlled ideological engagement with the exhaustion of aspirationalism and the stressed status of economic mythologies. Arguing that the recession has weighed heavily on the aspirationalism that customarily prevails in US representations, I analyze the staging of gendered modes of adaptation and enterprise in the first seasons of Extreme Couponing (TLC, 2010–), and Gold Rush Alaska (Discovery, 2010–).²

These cable series retain femininity as fundamentally domestic and recuperate masculinity as a state of territorial expansion while promulgating ideologically “safe” modes of entrepreneurialism that conform to hegemonic gender codes. Ambivalently responsive to the resource gluttony of US consumer culture, they stage the promise and the frustration of a feminized thrift and a masculinized risk taking. Extreme Couponing’s female focus is hinted at in its tag as a “recessionista series,”³ whereas the premise of Gold Rush Alaska is succinctly described in the credit sequence voiceover as follows: “Six recession-hit patriots from Oregon become greenhorn gold miners and head north to dig for gold and save themselves from financial ruin.” Another element shared by these series is their sense of localism and regionalism, which plays out against a backdrop of social isolation, with Gold Rush Alaska clearly trading on Alaska’s enhanced post-Palin status as virtuous frontier and breeding ground for authentic Americanness. Depictions of this kind, despite some ersatz formulations of teamwork, privilege resolutely individualist and private modes of recession response, and accordingly they help us to better understand why the collectivist movements associated with previous eras of economic duress seem not to be gaining traction in the so-called Great Recession.

In Extreme Couponing we see that recessionary popular culture has latched onto the commodification of domestic femininities in ways continuous with but also distinct from previous eras. Female thrift “works” for an era of adjusted economic realities, it seems, with female consumer resourcefulness becoming a new theme on many fronts. A number of the series’ profile subjects are women who have lost a male breadwinner’s salary (either through unemployment or divorce); they are invariably such assiduous and adept coupon clippers that they can get large amounts of groceries for free. These women are seen as stepping into the income breach without deviating from their domestic roles, and the series sustains a mixed discourse of praise and pathologization around figures inscribed on the one hand as bravura postfeminist housekeepers and on the other hand as intense overconsumers who speak with a worrying casualness about “stockpiling.”

As I have suggested, then, the series emerges out of a broader recessionary discursive field in which female thrift is being revalorized. Crafting, recycling, home cooking, and other domestic activities linked to “downsizing” and “making do” have acquired a raised public profile, sometimes in tandem with the emergence of celebrity figures like Ree Drummond, whose blog The Pioneer Woman, a chronicle of daily ranch life in Oklahoma, became widely read among US women and has given rise to a multimedia empire of cookbooks, a memoir slated for film development, and a Food Network series. Such developments seem indicative of the repositioning of the retreatist woman in a newly pragmatic recession context.⁴ Couponing, of course, meshes with the repositioning of female consumerism out of registers of frivolity to registers of seriousness. At the same time, it often retains a strong...