Reality TV: Its contents and discontents

Abstract

This article offers an overview of major trends in contemporary reality television scholarship, mapped against changes in the content, formats, performance modes and viewer appeal of reality TV itself. It follows the influential scholars of reality television by locating the interest of the genre in its relationship to larger social and political formations, including questions of governmentality and the self, nationhood and globalism, gender and sexuality, class and race, and performance and affect. An argument is made in support of claims that reality TV does not merely represent but also constitutes social categories through their enactment by participants on screen in a way that draws audiences’ affective engagement. Although the hypervisible manifestations of gender, sexuality and race paraded on contemporary reality TV may be questionable, particularly as assessed by recent scholarship on portrayals of black womanhood, it is precisely in the interrogations of its discontents that reality TV proves to be most productive.