Gender Cultures and Reality TV

Reality TV has gained a global foothold in popular culture, offering to explicate, regulate, and manipulate the social scripts we live by. Of these, no social framework is more central to reality TV than gender, yet sustained scrutiny of reality TV’s relation to gender norms, performances and practices has barely begun. In the last decade, formats such as Wife Swap, Temptation Island, Extreme Makeover, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, There’s Something About Miriam, Supernanny and Bridezillas have placed a spotlight on contemporary gender identities and social relations. These formats, like many others, destabilise gender categories even as they insist upon and often consolidate gender as a structuring logic of real-world social relations. At the same time, reality TV reminds us that gender is neither a singular nor a universal category, as demonstrated by the way in which international reality TV formats adopt local features at each culturally specific site of production. 

The aim of this symposium is to take advantage of our Asia-Pacific location by raising questions about gender and reality TV from a comparative, cross-cultural perspective. We are particularly interested in critical investigations of the intersections between gender, culture and place as engineered by reality television. While papers addressing reality television and gender from an international perspective are most welcome, we hope to maintain a critical focus on cultural specificity and the social geographies of gender, including the expressions and negotiations of indigenous, minoritarian, national and transnational cultures.

Confirmed Speakers:     

Frances Bonner, University of Queensland 
Tania Lewis, RMIT 
Zala Volcic, University of Queensland

Brenda Weber, Indiana University