Author: Ragan Fox Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351660136 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
In the summer of 2010, Ragan Fox was one of twelve people selected to participate in the twelfth season of CBS's reality program Big Brother. The show heightens everyday life performance to a theatrical state where houseguests’ performances, no matter how humdrum, are turned into televisual entertainment and commodity. Offering a rare, autobigographical, and behind-the-scenes peek behind Big Brother's curtain, Fox provides a scholarly account of the show's casting procedures, secret soundstage interactions, and viewer involvement, while investigating how the program's producers, fans, and players theatrically render indentities of racial and sexual minorities. Using autoethnography, textual analysis, and spectator commentary as research, Fox reflects on and critiques how identity is constructed on reality television, and the various ways in which people from historically oppressed groups are depicted in mass media.
Author: Ruth A. Deller Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing ISBN: 1839090235 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 150
Book Description
Reality television is shown worldwide, features people from all walks of life and covers everything from romance to religion. It has not only changed television, but every other area of the media. So why has reality TV become such a huge phenomenon, and what is its future in an age of streaming and social media?
Author: Danielle J. Lindemann, PhD Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN: 0374720967 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 166
Book Description
Named a Best Nonfiction Book of 2022 by Esquire A sociological study of reality TV that explores its rise as a culture-dominating medium—and what the genre reveals about our attitudes toward race, gender, class, and sexuality What do we see when we watch reality television? In True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us, the sociologist and TV-lover Danielle J. Lindemann takes a long, hard look in the “funhouse mirror” of this genre. From the first episodes of The Real World to countless rose ceremonies to the White House, reality TV has not just remade our entertainment and cultural landscape (which it undeniably has). Reality TV, Lindemann argues, uniquely reflects our everyday experiences and social topography back to us. Applying scholarly research—including studies of inequality, culture, and deviance—to specific shows, Lindemann layers sharp insights with social theory, humor, pop cultural references, and anecdotes from her own life to show us who we really are. By taking reality TV seriously, True Story argues, we can better understand key institutions (like families, schools, and prisons) and broad social constructs (such as gender, race, class, and sexuality). From The Bachelor to Real Housewives to COPS and more (so much more!), reality programming unveils the major circuits of power that organize our lives—and the extent to which our own realities are, in fact, socially constructed. Whether we’re watching conniving Survivor contestants or three-year-old beauty queens, these “guilty pleasures” underscore how conservative our society remains, and how steadfastly we cling to our notions about who or what counts as legitimate or “real.” At once an entertaining chronicle of reality TV obsession and a pioneering work of sociology, True Story holds up a mirror to our society: the reflection may not always be pretty—but we can’t look away.
Author: David S. Escoffery Publisher: McFarland ISBN: 147660228X Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
American viewers are attracted to what they see as the non-scripted, unpredictable freshness of reality television. But although the episodes may not be scripted, the shows are constructed within a deliberately designed framework, reflecting societal values. The political, economic and personal issues of reality TV are in many ways simply an exaggerated version of everyday life, allowing us to identify (perhaps more closely than we care to admit) with the characters onscreen. With 16 essays from scholars around the world, this volume discusses the notion of representation in reality television. It explores how both audiences and producers negotiate the gulf between representations and truth in reality shows such as Survivor, The Apprentice, Big Brother, The Nanny, American Idol, Extreme Makeover, Joe Millionaire and The Amazing Race. Various identity categories and character types found in these shows are discussed and the accuracy of their television portrayal examined. Dealing with the concept of reality, audience reception, gender roles, minority portrayal and power issues, the book provides an in-depth look at what we see, or think we see, in "reality" TV. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
Author: Rachel E. Dubrofsky Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 0739169254 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 164
Book Description
Rachel E. Dubrofsky examines the reality TV series The Bachelor and The Bachelorette in one of the first book-length feminist analysis of the reality TV genre. The research found in The Surveillance of Women on Reality TV: Watching The Bachelor and The Bachelorette meets the growing need for scholarship on the reality genre. This book asks us to be attentive to how the surveillance context of the program impacts gendered and racialized bodies. Dubrofsky takes up issues that cut across the U.S. cultural landscape: the use of surveillance in the creation of entertainment products, the proliferation of public confession and its configuration as a therapeutic tool, the ways in which women's displays of emotion are shown on television, the changing face of popular feminist discourse (notions of choice and empowerment), and the recentering of whiteness in popular media.
Author: Pilar Garces-Conejos Blitvich Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137313463 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 188
Book Description
This is the first book to examine the discourse of reality television. Chapters provide rigorous case studies of the discourse practices that characterise a wide range of generic and linguistic/cultural contexts, including dating shows in China and Spain, docudramas in Argentina and New Zealand, and talent shows in the UK and USA.
Author: Lucas Mann Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0525435549 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 274
Book Description
From the national bestselling author of Lord Fear and Class A comes "a tender, humane, comic, brainy, unsettling achievement” (Paul Lisicky, author of The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship) about what it means to live an authentic life and what it means to love a person. In Lucas Mann's trademark vein—fiercely intelligent, self-deprecating, brilliantly observed, idiosyncratic, personal, funny, and infuriating—Captive Audience is an appreciation of reality television wrapped inside a love letter to his wife, with whom he shares the guilty pleasure of watching "real" people bare their souls in search of celebrity. Captive Audience resides at the intersection of popular culture with the personal; the exhibitionist impulse, with the schadenfreude of the vicarious, and in confronting some of our most suspect impulses reveals surprising connections and the meaning of an authentic life.
Author: Susan Murray Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 0814757340 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 387
Book Description
A collection of essays, which provide a comprehensive picture of how and why the genre of reality television emerged, what it means, how it differs from earlier television programming, and how it engages societies, industries, and individuals.
Author: Anita Biressi Publisher: Wallflower Press ISBN: 9781904764045 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 198
Book Description
"Through detailed case studies this book breaks new ground by linking together two major themes: the production of realism and its relationship to revelation. It addresses 'truth telling', confession and the production of knowledges about the self and its place in the world".--BOOKJACKET.