Picking through history: ‘Mantiques’ and masculinity in artifactual entertainment

Abstract

Traveling the back roads of the United States, the stars of American Pickers hunt for antiques in rural junkyards, dilapidated barns and shuttered small town storefronts. The series is part of a branding and programming strategy that History Channel executives call ‘artifactual entertainment’, a category that is generically related to a recent spate of macho, blue-collar reality television hits. Rather than engaging in the feminine therapeutic discourses of makeover specialists, the stars of American Pickers style themselves as archeologists on the hunt for ‘mantiques’ – masculine antiques. This article explores how this masculinization is enacted in conjunction with the archaeological discourse surrounding the hunt for relics of America’s bygone industrial past. In doing so, I consider how the hit series negotiates anxieties about the feminization of work and paradoxically celebrates the postmodern neoliberal economy, even as it seems to lament the disappearance of more ‘authentic’ and independent ways of life.