Please join the working group, “Getting Real: The Cultural Politics of Reality TV," for an outdoor reception to kick off this first-of-its-kind working group and series of public events.
About the working group: Together we seek to survey reality tv as simultaneously an artifact and an archive of pop culture and mainstream politics (consider, for example, the crossover of Real Housewives of New Jersey’s Teresa Giudice and the former president on The Apprentice). As an area of academic study, reality television not only offers a lens through which to examine contemporary constructions of identity but also illuminates defining cultural narratives of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. We plan to explore topics such as: immigration, transnational migration, and passport privilege in discussion of 90 Day Fiancé; class, gender, and racial identity across Real Housewives franchises; the commitment to and fracture of a butch Americana in HGTV home renovation shows; the mainstream discussion of noncomforming gender and sexual identities on RuPaul’s Drag Race and Queer Eye; the orchestrated clashing of ideologies and worldviews on shows like Big Brother and Trading Spaces; and the spectacularized presentation of regional U.S. cultures on Jersey Shore and Duck Dynasty. Due to the meteoric rise of popularity of reality television and a plethora of programming across all major networks, we think an interdisciplinary scholarly investigation of these cultural phenomena is particularly timely. This working group advances a critical inquiry into reality television and pop culture as well as the affective forms of pleasure and entertainment that are cultivated in viewers like ourselves and our prospective collaborators. Perhaps most importantly, then, this working group project is exploratory, intellectually curious, joyful in nature.
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality; the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture; the Department of Cinema and Media Studies; and the English Department.
Subsequent meetings in autumn quarter will be held over Zoom.
Date: October 12, 2021
Time: 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Date: October 12, 2021
Time: 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM