The Art of Consumption

Capitalist Excess and Individual Psychosis in Hoarders

Bibliographic Data

ID8895986
AuthorsCharmaine Eddy (corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume44
Issue1
Pages1-24
Publication date2014-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCanadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X
PublisherUniversity of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.3138/cras.2014.003
OpenAlexW2143430264
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited20

This article examines the relationship between concepts of the object, patterns of consumption, and the turn to the real in the reality television series Hoarders. Linking proper object consumption to a process of home make-over and self-transformation, psychologists in the series discipline hoarders to produce waste by compelling them to apply an evaluative hierarchy to objects and to confess to their psychopathology. In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007–8, Hoarders episodes offer implicit allegories of national economic problems as the result of corrupt patterns of consumption and individual psychic aberrations. Once individual behaviour is realigned with normative practices of consumer capitalism, viewers are led to believe, these individuals can be brought back into (and presumably repair) the economic national fold

Business · Capitalism · Consumption (sociology · Economics · Hierarchy · Market economy · Normative · Object (grammar · Political science · Politics · Psychiatry · Psychic · Psychopathology · Social science · Sociology · Artificial Intelligence · Body Image and Dysmorphia Studies · Computer Science · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · Law · Nostalgia and Consumer Behavior · Psychology · Social Psychology

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