640555

research-article2016
ECS0010.1177/1367549416640555European Journal of Cultural StudiesKavka and Weber

european journal of
Introduction

European Journal of Cultural Studies

2017, Vol. 20(1) 3­–9
Introduction: Transnational © The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:
gender cultures and sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1367549416640555
reality TV ecs.sagepub.com

Misha Kavka
University of Auckland, New Zealand

Brenda R Weber
Indiana University Bloomington, USA

Abstract
Having gained a global foothold in popular culture, reality TV offers to explicate,
regulate and manipulate the social scripts we live by. This issue makes the claim that
a transnational approach to reality TV provides a rich context for interrogating the
international variability of gender cultures. As the analyses that are presented in this
Special Issue indicate, while gender formations may operate according to globally
patriarchal scripts, the manifestations, manipulations and resistances to such a script
take locally specific forms, as shaped by the social, political and industrial histories of
each particular place but with broader bearing on more ‘worldwide’ concerns, such
as hegemony, patriarchy and capital.

Keywords
Gender, global patriarchy, local, modernity, neoliberalism, reality television,
sexuality, transnational

Early in the first season of the hit US reality TV programme Duck Dynasty (A&E,
2012-), a show about a family of Louisiana duck-call millionaires who cling proudly to
the ‘redneck’ lifestyle, the elder patriarch of the family turns his attention to gender les-
sons. Alarmed by having discovered his grandson talking to his girlfriend via computer,

Corresponding author:
Misha Kavka, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland 1021, New Zealand.
Email: m.kavka@auckland.ac.nz
4 European Journal of Cultural Studies 20(1)

outdoorsman Phil Robertson seeks to solve the double crisis of technologized and
unmonitored teenage love by taking his grandson squirrel hunting. In this episode, appro-
priately called ‘High-Tech Redneck’ (Season 1, Ep. 3), the squirrel – in its ideal form
flayed and ready to go into a pot – acts as a pedagogical device of regional gender theory.
In need of more squirrels for her fast-disappearing stew, Phil’s wife Miss Kay lays down
the law about a man’s gender duty: ‘You bring home the game or you’re not a man, that’s
what I say’. In response, Phil and his brother Si take the young John Luke into the woods
‘to train him to find him a squirrel-eating woman’, beginning with a life lesson about
women and cosmetics (‘that make-up can cover a lot of evil, my man’). After bagging a
number of squirrels, Phil delivers the final gender lesson in voiceover: ‘If you catch a
squirrel for yo’ woman, yo’ woman will never cut you off – in bed’. Having taught his
grandson and the reality TV audience how to secure squirrel stew, a good woman and
sexual satisfaction in one fell swoop, he then releases the boy from the outdoor class-
room – presumably back to the computer that makes much more sense to a teenager as a
gender communications technology than squirrels, even in the Louisiana swamps.
Duck Dynasty may seem like an odd example with which to broach the topic of trans-
national gender cultures and reality TV, since it is, after all, a product of the largest and
most dominant reality TV market in the world, the United States. Yet, at stake in Duck
Dynasty is how the programme openly positions itself as a regional narrative whose
appeal comes from foregrounding – and, as the squirrel stew indicates, sensationalizing
– local practices. The reappropriation of the term ‘redneck’ for the purposes of entertain-
ment is an obvious act of commodification by both the TV producers and the cast,
reminding us that reality TV peddles in the labour of self-performance as marketable
product. Indeed, this has been a highly successful tactic for the show, whose product tie-
in sales in 2013 were reported to be US$400 million (O’Connor, 2013). As part of this
self-marketing, Duck Dynasty foregrounds regional myths in relation to national speci-
ficity, engaging in a double movement of exoticization and identification that stages
negotiations of class, religion, generation and gender. Such negotiations are not limited
to the carefully edited performances of ‘redneck’ mentality on the show, but also spread
beyond the confines of the programme to the transnational media market, as evidenced
by the fall-out of a GQ interview with Phil Robertson in December 2013 that went viral
because of Robertson’s homophobic comments (Walker, 2013), causing A&E to tempo-
rarily suspend him from the show in a failed effort to prevent a ratings slump.
Although the effects of Robertson’s rant in the pages of GQ were debated mostly in
the US national context, here we want to use the squirrel tale and the homophobic pro-
nouncements of the Louisiana patriarch as the basis for a different kind of lesson: namely,
that the study of transnational media, especially in relation to reality TV, must be
grounded in an engagement with local articulations of broader debates. Such debates
may be tied to the nation, but it is worth acknowledging that the term ‘nation’ itself car-
ries different meanings and investments depending on context. Although the regionalism
of Duck Dynasty is profoundly nationalistic, with the show’s investment in locality indel-
ibly tied to southern American patriotism, in another geopolitical context ‘region’ may
have a very different relation to ‘nation’. Whether in each case regionalism supports,
refines, resists or even ignores nationalism, we are using the term ‘region’ to focus on the
particularities of cultural spaces, as traversed by local histories, through the prism of a
Kavka and Weber 5

transnational media form. This emphasis on the local is nowhere more important than in
the investigation of gender cultures, which of necessity must consider the interrelation
between transferable codes and localized practices.
As the squirrel tale of Duck Dynasty indicates, reality TV is by no means an innocent
bystander to such relationships. Having gained a global foothold in popular culture, real-
ity TV offers to explicate, regulate and manipulate the social scripts we live by. Of these,
gender is a central social framework to reality TV, yet to date, the role of reality TV in
maintaining and manipulating gender configurations has been under-analysed. For the
last decade, scholars have been increasingly fascinated with reality TV as a critical site
of cultural production, and the focal points of such scrutiny have included topics that
intersect with gender studies, such as lifestyle programming, celebrity, makeover cul-
ture, audiences and race and class formations (for exemplary studies in these areas,
respectively, see Biressi and Nunn, 2005; Dubrofsky, 2011; Holmes, 2004; Skeggs and
Wood, 2012; Tyler and Bennett, 2010; Weber, 2009). Yet, sustained scrutiny and aca-
demic study of reality TV’s relation to gender norms, performances and practices is only
now beginning (see Weber, 2014). Moreover, while TV scholars have long been attuned
to the importance of hegemonic producers and global media circulation – not least
because of the centrality of US and UK reality TV to both viewership and scholarship –
there has been limited effort, aside from considerations of format transfer, to understand
the implications of reality TV in terms of the regional, the local and the national. In this
issue, we combine these two perspectives on reality TV, arguing that a transnational
approach to reality TV provides a rich context for interrogating the international variabil-
ity of gender cultures. As the analyses that are presented in this Special Issue indicate,
while gender formations may operate according to a globally patriarchal script, the mani-
festations, manipulations and resistances to such a script take locally specific forms, as
shaped by the social, political and industrial histories of each particular place.
Studying reality TV can often be an exercise in frustration, not only because it is eve-
rywhere (produced in every major media market across the globe) and nowhere (archived
in no specific TV library), but also because its contents mark it as a low-status cultural
form, the ‘bottom feeder’ of the media world.
Yet, the ephemeral qualities of reality TV, paired with its stigmatized status, offer
important information in the study of gender, since gender itself engages with the power
relations that exist between the strong and the subordinate, the high and the low, the
worthy and the worthless. As such, this Special Issue investigates reality TV as a vehicle
of gender articulations, both in terms of how it locates (literally) representations of gen-
der and sexuality and in the way that reality TV is itself a gendered and gendering phe-
nomenon that remaps the contours of hierarchy and value. In its combination of real
people and manufactured experiences, reality TV employs an analytic that speaks vol-
umes about gender in relation to the production of identity, the commodification of self-
hood, the negotiation of familial power relations, the paradigms and performances of
sexuality and the intersection of nationalism, ethnicity, class and capital.
Despite similarities, however, not all formats that fall under the rubric of ‘reality TV’
have the same provenance or history. While TV production in the West has long dabbled
in studio-based talent, dating and quiz shows, morphing only slightly for instance
between Star Search (US synd., 1983–1995) and American Idol (Fox, 2002–2016), other
6 European Journal of Cultural Studies 20(1)

format staples like the family doc and docusoap have their basis in an extended, if under-
mined, observational documentary tradition (Bruzzi, 2000). Likewise, competition
shows in contrived environments trace their shorter history to the appearance of Big
Brother and Survivor at the turn of the millennium (Kavka, 2012) and ‘life intervention’
programmes bring the erstwhile magazine makeover to a wide range of personal, profes-
sional and civic transformations (Ouellette and Hay, 2008). More to the point for our
purposes, not all formats hold the same audience fascination and production arc in trans-
national contexts, with talent shows having had the greatest penetration globally (espe-
cially versions of the Idol series), while many national and regional contexts favour local
variants of the docusoap as well as the micro-domestic pleasures of what is often called
lifestyle programming (Bell and Hollows, 2005). What these diverse reality TV formats
do have in common, we would argue, is the mobilization of culturally specific gender
tropes, especially in formats that place the drama of personal and social relationships at
their centre. Thus, the docusoap, dating and domestic formats highlighted in this issue
destabilize 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 ways in
which international reality TV formats adopt and adapt local features at each specific site
of production in places as diverse as South Africa, Australia, South Asia and continental
Europe, as well as the hegemonic yet regionalized production sites in the United States
and the United Kingdom.
Reality TV works on both global and local levels to establish a presence that is particu-
larly salient and reproducible in transnational and transregional contexts. The aim of this
Special Issue is thus to facilitate a global conversation about gender and reality TV from a
comparative, cross-cultural perspective. We have selected essays that provide a critical
investigation of the intersections between gender as an analytic and configurations of iden-
tity, power and history, as mapped across culture and place and re-engineered by reality TV.
While these articles address reality TV and gender from an international perspective, they
maintain a critical focus on cultural specificity, local histories and the social geographies of
gender, including the expressions and negotiations of ethnic, minoritarian, national and
transnational cultures. By the term transnational, however, we do not mean that this scop-
ing exercise is intended to represent all parts of the globe or to serve as an inclusive survey
of the spread and uptake of reality TV forms. This is clearly not possible in a single volume
or even, quite likely, in a single project. Instead, we have curated a sampling of specific
transnational materials that think about gender, regional specificity and global media flows
in order to provide an opening for further cross-cultural conversations.
All of the essays in this Special Issue work in relation to a transatlantic frame, in that
they deal with symbolic currency set in motion by globally hegemonic producers. The
first three essays of this Special Issue take up the notion of value, as understood in rela-
tion to economic systems like capitalism and neoliberalism and as filtered through gen-
der and sexuality. Each of these essays considers a dynamic of capital in specific relation
to a particular show – the Real Housewives, The Fabulous Beekman Boys and Geordie
Shore, respectively. In so doing, the authors of these essays indicate the very palpable
degree to which reality TV discourses both reflect and help to create the systemic net-
works of value and power that structure capital and other forms of hegemony.
Kavka and Weber 7

Alison Hearn’s ‘Witches and Bitches: Reality Television, Housewifisation, and the
Hidden Abode of Production’ asserts a compelling connection between the abuses of capi-
talism and gender. Starting with the premise that within the capitalist expansion of the
16th and 17th centuries women were disciplined and constructed as ‘real’ housewives
during the brutal transition from feudalism to capitalism, Hearn then turns to the popular
Bravo Real Housewives franchise in particular, and to reality TV production more gener-
ally, to contend that ‘housewives’ are similarly being produced under the sign of entertain-
ment. Their work, in Hearn’s analysis, is revealed to be deeply necessary but structurally
unvalued, and thus is rendered invisible even while being appropriated by others.
In ‘Funny Farm: Sexuality, Neoliberalism and the Refashioning of American
Rural Life’, Colin Johnson’s rumination on the meanings of space finds expression
in his discussion of the sexed and gendered implications of rural landscapes.
Beginning with the forms of representation that use the ubiquity of the American
prairies as metaphor for both fecundity and desiccation, Johnson turns to The
Fabulous Beekman Boys, a reality show that features two gay, urban men dedicated
to making a go of farm life in upstate New York. As Johnson notes, the show puts
these two cosmopolitan modern men, Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell, in what
might otherwise be considered a 19th-century rural space precisely because they so
fully personify a stereotype of gay men who are upper-class professionals, style-
savvy and fashion-forward. The Fabulous Beekman Boys uses Ridge and Kilmer-
Purcell’s gayness in order to refashion farming and American rural life as something
not only modern but neoliberal. Indeed, Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell’s challenges are
relentlessly depicted as individual concerns that might be overcome with determina-
tion, will power and good choices.
In ‘The Politics of Hyperbole on Geordie Shore’, Helen Wood also makes the connec-
tion between spectacle and capital, adeptly illustrating how Geordie Shore, a British
off-shoot of the US Jersey Shore, functions as a national script about class and affective
excess. Wood argues that Geordie Shore’s cast members constitute a very vivid example
of the spectacularization of the working class across TV. In so doing, the show grants
televisual media the opportunity to legitimate fictive forms of identity in order to gener-
ate commercial returns. This dynamic positions the participants on Geordie Shore not so
much as subjects but as objects, since according to the logic of the larger reality TV
script, their ‘arguing, screaming, crying and screwing’ fails the mandate to be self-gov-
erning and self-disciplining citizens. Yet, the cast joins with a number of other abject
reality TV participants and personalities in that their media identities have yielded con-
siderable personal worth. In other words, their leisure, performed for the industry that is
reality TV, constitutes a form of labour, the business of show in a whole new register.
With these arguments about capital and the nature of hegemony as a backdrop, the
second half of the Special Issue turns to the interpersonal domains of love, romance and
family relations, and the identities that such networks fuse. Together, these essays help
chart the spaces of modernity, where private lives are made fully public and where the
goal of selfhood marks the apogee of modern identity. In ‘Adventures in Love, Risk, and
Romance: Navigating Post-Traditional Social Relations on Indian Dating Shows’, Tania
Lewis and Wokar Rigumi analyse reality TV dating shows in India, arguing that a change
in media structures as well as new social relations about love and intimacy announce a
8 European Journal of Cultural Studies 20(1)

series of broader social and cultural shifts associated with (late) modern living in India.
They contend that reality TV – a genre that has flourished with the liberalization of the
Indian economy and the rise of the ‘new’ middle classes – offers particular insights into
‘modernity’, or at least into the shifting and competing ‘multiple modernities’ that char-
acterize the complex and variegated Indian social and cultural landscape.
Alexia Smit’s ‘Forgiving and Forgetting: South African Reality Television,
Fatherhood, and Nation’ tackles modernity from a different nationalistic viewpoint – in
this case, the context of a South African post-apartheid set of social relations that restages
injustice in the form of family narratives that can be more easily assimilated, if not
always more readily dismissed. For Smit, the South African reality programme Forgive
and Forget offers a mediated model for reconciliation, allowing viewers to vicariously
witness the processes of violation and forgiveness between family members that are so
endemic to larger national scripts. Smit contends that these mediated processes are par-
ticularly telling about South African masculinity, since they feature softer and more car-
ing representations of men that depart from the predominant imaginary of the South
African gangster. While on its surface the programme re-tells a familiar narrative of
national reconciliation through family stories, Smit notes the ‘evident tension’ between
the stories of reconciliation and the many contextual, economic and social complexities
of each forgiveness episode. These tensions themselves, she contends, provide a produc-
tive space for reflecting on reconciliation through the lens of the family.
Joanna McIntyre’s ‘Queer Idol: Transgender Subjectivities and Australian Reality
TV’ takes these themes of masculinity and national identity and discusses them in the
Australian context, arguing that in a country that celebrates rugged, ‘blokey’ masculini-
ties, significant and sympathetic portrayals of queer male-to-female transgender indi-
viduals offer an intriguing snapshot of Australian reality TV. McIntyre considers recent
reality TV fare, using Courtney Act as a case study, to argue that these shows present a
queer transgendering that embraces ambiguity by demonstrating the deliberate disrup-
tion and blurring of gender/sex category divisions. In this respect, McIntyre does not
reference transgender as a marker of the sexed body (as people who experience them-
selves and live as the opposite gender to their born body) but as a conceptual category
that rejects both gender binarism and the anatomical bedrock of the body. McIntyre
thereby makes a compelling claim for a queer critique that is organized around a mis-
matching between gender performance and genitals.
To return to the gender lessons of Duck Dynasty, it is not enough to say that regional
or even transnational perspectives are in and of themselves positive or negative.
Transnational media practices, no less than national ones, are frequently embedded in
asymmetries of domination, inequality, sexism and class conflict. Similarly, no matter
how widely reality TV forms travel, their effects are not universal; they can be neither
easily appended to nor dissociated from global capitalist agendas. Rather, the questions
of how such agendas become mobilized and modified is precisely at the heart of this
Special Issue on transnational gender cultures and reality TV.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Kavka and Weber 9

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this
article.

References
Bell D and Hollows J (2005) Ordinary Lifestyles: Popular Media, Consumption and Taste.
Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Biressi A and Nunn H (2005) Reality TV: Realism and Revelation. London and New York:
Wallflower Press.
Bruzzi S (2000) New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge.
Dubrofsky R (2011) The Surveillance of Women on Reality Television: Watching the Bachelor and
the Bachelorette. New York: Lexington Books.
Holmes S (2004) ‘All you’ve got to worry about is having a cup of tea and doing a bit of sunbath-
ing’: Approaching Celebrity in Big Brother. In: Holmes S and Jermyn D (eds) Understanding
Reality Television. London and New York: Routledge, pp.111–135.
Kavka M (2012) Reality TV. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
O’Connor C (2013) Duck Dynasty’s Brand Bonanza: How A&E (and Walmart) Turned Camo
into $400 million merchandise sales. Forbes, 11 November. Available at: http://www.forbes.
com/sites/clareoconnor/2013/11/06/duck-dynastys-brand-bonanza-how-ae-and-walmart-
turned-camo-into-400-million-merchandise-sales/
Ouellette L and Hay J (2008) Better Living through Reality TV. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Skeggs B and Wood H (2012) Reacting to Reality Television: Performance, Audience and Value.
London and New York: Routledge.
Tyler I and Bennett B (2010) ‘Celebrity Chav’: Fame, Femininity, and Social Class. European
Journal of Cultural Studies 13(3): 375–393.
Walker H (2013) ‘Duck Dynasty’ Start Rants against ‘Homosexual Behavior’, ‘Islamists’, and
‘Shintos’ in Epic Interview. TPM Livewire, 18 December. Available at: http://talkingpoints-
memo.com/livewire/duck-dynasty-star-rants-against-homosexual-behavior-islamists-and-
shintos-in-magazine-interview
Weber BR (2009) Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity. Durham, NC and London:
Duke University Press.
Weber BR (ed.) (2014) Reality Gendervision: Sexuality and Gender on Transatlantic Reality
Television. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

Biographical notes
Misha Kavka is Associate Professor of Media, Film and Television at the University of Auckland.
She is the author of Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Reality
TV (Edinburgh UP, 2012), and the co-editor of Gothic New Zealand (Otago UP, 2006) and of
Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century (Columbia UP, 2001). She has published
widely on gender and sexuality in relation to film and television studies.
Brenda R Weber is Professor and Chair of the Department of Gender Studies and Professor in
Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School at Indiana University in Bloomington. She is the
editor of Reality Gendervision: Sexuality and Gender on Transatlantic Reality TV (Duke 2014).
She is the author of Women and Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century: The Transatlantic
Production of Fame and Gender (Ashgate 2012) and Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and
Celebrity (Duke 2009). She is presently working on a monograph on gender, modernity, and
mediated Mormonism called Latter-day Screens (forthcoming with Duke).