Abstract

This article will argue that Wife Swap and other ‘reality’ television formats can be seen as part of a wider project: a bourgeois project that, on the one hand, is preoccupied with self-improvement and the accrual of just the right forms of cultural, symbolic and economic capital, and on the other, defines itself in opposition to an imagined working-class project of disinvestment of the self. This article argues for the existence of a middle-class gaze in the production of ‘reality’ television shows in general and in Wife Swap in particular and examines the complex and inextricable links between the middle-class gaze and gender.