Unruly bodies, unruly homes: how housing represents class in Australian television

The culture of homeownership has long been perpetuated in both fiction and non-fiction television texts. The owner-occupier dwelling is a familiar and potent symbol of middle-class stability, the object and goal of a work ethic and the representation of upward mobility. For the past two decades media scholars have argued that depictions of housing function as a disciplinary technology, serving to encourage the buy-in of neoliberal values by a productive and capital-orientated populace. Whilst many texts demonstrate a guide for living, representing the ideal middle class to (presumably) an aspirant audience, others represent the inverse order, conveying the unruly domestic space as symptomatic of their inhabitants living outside of contemporary values. Using primarily Foucauldian theory and drawing on recent work that explores both class and media cultures in Australia, this chapter provides an overview of how the representation of housing signifies class difference in the Australian context.