ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the labor of lifestyle enacted on popular nonfiction and reality formats within the conditions of work in postindustrial capitalist societies. Lifestyle programs legitimate this arrangement by gendering expertise and aligning women's path to self-actualization with assumed domestic and caretaking duties. Many instructional lifestyle programs promise to help women manage a second shift of labor in the home with greater style and efficiency. Programs revolving around the skills and routines of stylists, designers and top chefs take TV viewers behind the scenes of glamorized lifestyle industries. These programs highlight the mediation of meanings, tastes, aspirations, beauty norms and brands, and narrate the route to success in occupations where workers are motivated by creativity and "passion", and work is often indistinguishable from leisure. Reality television reproduces creative industries discourse by presenting service-oriented aesthetic labor as a reward onto itself.
