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Women and Reality TV in Everyday Life: Toward a Political Economy of Bodies

Stern, Danielle M.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1177094639

Abstract Details

2007, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, Telecommunications (Communication).
By moving beyond the representation of “women” in specific texts and locating the body as a critical site of meaning in a hybrid televisual genre—narrative reality television—this dissertation challenges assumptions about production, text, audience, and researcher. Drawing from existing theories of the body and political economy in the feminist and critical rhetoric literature and using MTV’s popular long-running program The Real World as a case study, this dissertation examines the interrelationship of the construction and consumption of bodies in an increasingly surveillance-based, commercial, hybrid media culture. Twenty college-aged women viewers of The Real World wrote brief journal entries to episodes of the program prior to participating in individual interviews. Additionally, the researcher conducted interviews with four creative directors of the program. Finally, the interviews informed a rhetorical analysis of the 25 episodes of the seventeenth season of The Real World set in Key West, which aired from February to August 2006. Three general themes of women’s bodies on The Real World emerged from the concurrent methods: 1) the constructed nature of bodies in crisis, 2) the heteronormative double bind of college female bodies expected to party hard yet retain their dignity, and 3) the impact of these bodies and other Real World features on viewers’ daily lives whereby, despite their often fabricated nature, narrative bodies on The Real World are ostensibly real for viewers. The author positions a conception of material, commodity bodies in hybrid television within the profit-motivated, macro-institution of television production and celebrity worship, as well as the micro-structures of peer relationships and meaning negotiation. Representations and interpretations of bodies as conflicted and starved for attention move beyond theoretical assumptions of bodies as power to bodies as sites of learning for real world relational exchanges within popular culture. Because the macro-structures and micro-practices of production happen simultaneously within a larger schema of cultural production that goes beyond the daily routines of creating a reality TV program, scholars should continue to link the capital with the cultural and reevaluate our roles as critics and interpreters of meaning.
Norma Pecora (Advisor)
216 p.
women; reality television; production research; audience studies; feminist theory; critical rhetoric

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Stern, D. M. (2007). Women and Reality TV in Everyday Life: Toward a Political Economy of Bodies [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1177094639

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Stern, Danielle. Women and Reality TV in Everyday Life: Toward a Political Economy of Bodies. 2007. Ohio University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1177094639.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Stern, Danielle. "Women and Reality TV in Everyday Life: Toward a Political Economy of Bodies." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio University, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1177094639

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ohiou1177094639
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This open access ETD is published by Ohio University and OhioLINK.