The Disorder of Things: Hoarding Narratives in Popular Media

Abstract

In recent years, a rise of mediated popular narratives portrays hoarders as disconnected from normal social life. Hoarders, shown as suffering from both pathological practices of overconsumption and from the inability to complete the normative purchasing cycle of disposal and re-consumption, are commonly linked to discourses of addiction. I analyze how these mediated narratives present hoarders in all the spectacular chaos of their isolation, and then therapeutically renormalize them as managed, rational agents of consumption who may rediscover the social. This paper demonstrates how multiple, transgressive behaviors become unified as a disease through the emergence of a narrative convention.