This book examines queer visibility in reality television, which is arguably the most prolific space of gay, lesbian, transgender and otherwise queer media representation. It explores almost two decades of reality programming, from Big Brother to I Am Cait, American Idol to RuPaul’s Drag Race, arguing that the specific conventions of reality TV—its intimacy and emotion, its investments in celebrity and the ideal of authenticity—have inextricably shaped the ways in which queer people have become visible in reality shows. By challenging popular judgements on reality shows as damaging spaces of queer representation, this book argues that reality TV has pioneered a unique form of queer-inclusive broadcasting, where a desire for authenticity, rather than being heterosexual, is the norm. Across all chapters, this book investigates how reality TV’s celebration of ‘compulsory authenticity’ has circulated ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ ways of being queer, demonstrating how possibilities for queer visibility are shaped by broader anxieties and around selfhood, identity and the real in contemporary cultural life.

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. Offering a rare, autobiographical, and behind-the-scenes peek behind Big Brother's theatrical 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 identities of racial and sexual minorities. Using autoethnography, textual analysis, and spectator commentary as research, Inside Reality TV 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.

This essay collection focuses on the gendered dimensions of reality television in both the United States and Great Britain. Through close readings of a wide range of reality programming, from Finding Sarah and Sister Wives to Ghost Adventures and Deadliest Warrior, the contributors think through questions of femininity and masculinity, as they relate to the intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality. They connect the genre's combination of real people and surreal experiences, of authenticity and artifice, to the production of identity and norms of citizenship, the commodification of selfhood, and the naturalization of regimes of power. Whether assessing the Kardashian family brand, portrayals of hoarders, or big-family programs such as 19 Kids and Counting, the contributors analyze reality television as a relevant site for the production and performance of gender. In the process, they illuminate the larger neoliberal and postfeminist contexts in which reality TV is produced, promoted, watched, and experienced. Contributors. David Greven, Dana Heller, Su Holmes, Deborah Jermyn, Misha Kavka, Amanda Ann Klein, Susan Lepselter, Diane Negra, Laurie Ouellette, Gareth Palmer, Kirsten Pike, Maria Pramaggiore, Kimberly Springer, Rebecca Stephens, Lindsay Steenberg, Brenda R. Weber

This book examines queer characters in popular American television, demonstrating how entertainment can educate audiences about LGBT identities and social issues like homophobia and transphobia. Through case studies of musical soap operas (Glee and Empire), reality shows (RuPaul’s Drag Race, The Prancing Elites Project and I Am Cait) and “quality” dramas (Looking, Transparent and Sense8), it argues that entertainment elements such as music, humour, storytelling and melodrama function as pedagogical tools, inviting viewers to empathise with and understand queer characters. Each chapter focuses on a particular programme, looking at what it teaches—its representation of queerness—and how it teaches this—its pedagogy. Situating the programmes in their broader historical context, this study also shows how these televisual texts exemplify a specific moment in American television.

Winner of the 2013 SCMS Best Edited Collection Award For decades, television scholars have viewed global television through the lens of cultural imperialism, focusing primarily on programs produced by US and UK markets and exported to foreign markets. Global Television Formats revolutionizes television studies by de-provincializing its approach to media globalization. It re-examines dominant approaches and their legacies of global/local and center/periphery, and offers new directions for understanding television’s contemporary incarnations. The chapters in this collection take up the format phenomena from around the globe, including the Middle East, Western and Eastern Europe, South and West Africa, South and East Asia, Australia and New Zealand, North America, South America, and the Caribbean. Contributors address both little known examples and massive global hits ranging from the Idol franchise around the world, to telenovelas, dance competitions, sports programming, reality TV, quiz shows, sitcoms and more. Looking to global television formats as vital for various cultural meanings, relationships, and structures, this collection shows how formats can further our understanding of television and the culture of globalization at large.

Mainstreaming Gays discusses a key transitional period linking the eras of legacy and streaming, analyzing how queer production and interaction that had earlier occurred outside the mainstream was transformed by multiple converging trends: the emergence of digital media, the rising influence of fan cultures, and increasing interest in LGBTQ content within commercial media. The U.S. networks Bravo and Logo broke new ground in the early 2000s and 2010s with their channel programming, as well as bringing in a new cohort of LGBTQ digital content creators, providing unprecedented opportunities for independent queer producers, and hosting distinctive spaces for queer interaction online centered on pop culture and politics rather than dating. These developments constituted the ground from which recent developments for LGBTQ content and queer sociality online have emerged. Mainstreaming Gays is critical reading for those interested in media production, fandom, subcultures, and LGBTQ digital media.

Offering a critical introduction into LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) transnational identity in the media, this book examines performances and representations within documentary and fiction oriented texts. An interdisciplinary approach is put forward, revealing new potentials for non western queer identity.

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?

Tracing the history of reality TV from Candid Camera to The Osbournes, Understanding Reality Television examines a range of programmes which claim to depict 'real life'.

The 2010s have seen an explosion in popularity of Chinese television featuring same-sex intimacies, LGBTQ-identified celebrities, and explicitly homoerotic storylines even as state regulations on “vulgar” and “immoral” content grow more prominent. This emerging “queer TV China” culture has generated diverse, cyber, and transcultural queer fan communities. Yet these seemingly progressive televisual productions and practices are caught between multilayered sociocultural and political-economic forces and interests. Taking “queer” as a verb, an adjective, and a noun, this volume counters the Western-centric conception of homosexuality as the only way to understand nonnormative identities and same-sex desire in the Chinese and Sinophone worlds. It proposes an analytical framework of “queer/ing TV China” to explore the power of various TV genres and narratives, censorial practices, and fandoms in queer desire-voicing and subject formation within a largely heteropatriarchal society. Through examining nine cases contesting the ideals of gender, sexuality, Chineseness, and TV production and consumption, the book also reveals the generative, negotiative ways in which queerness works productively within and against mainstream, seemingly heterosexual-oriented, televisual industries and fan spaces. “This cornucopia of fresh and original essays opens our eyes to the burgeoning queer television culture thriving beneath official media crackdowns in China. As diverse as the phenomenon it analyses, Queer TV China is the spark that will ignite a prairie fire of future scholarship.” —Chris Berry, Professor of Film Studies, King’s College London “This timely volume explores the various possibilities and nuances of queerness in Chinese TV and fannish culture. Challenging the dichotomy of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ representations of gender and sexual minorities, Queer TV China argues for a multilayered and queer-informed understanding of the production, consumption, censorship, and recreation of Chinese television today.” —Geng Song, Associate Professor and Director of Translation Program, University of Hong Kong