Real Housewives Research Articles

The Real Housewives, gendered affluence, and the rise of the docusoap

In this paper we position gendered affluence as a representational trend in dramatic comedies (e.g., Sex and the City [SATC]) and docusoaps (e.g., The Real Housewives [TRH]) that coalesces around themes like hyper-femininity, nouveau riche values, and conspicuous lifestyle. Through our analysis we suggest that institutional practices (identity politics, cybernetic commodification, and post-feminist technological interactivity) situated in a neoliberal context and a remediated environment enable the systematic reproduction of gendered affluence in the broader landscape of women’s television. The process of remediation is used as a lens to examine how the docusoap differs from (the immediacy of mediated self-performance) and resembles (the hypermediacy of mediated irony and post-feminist interactivity) the fictional portrayals of gendered affluence found in dramatic comedies like SATC. Our case analysis of TRH demonstrates the specific way non-fictional portrayals of gendered affluence are transforming genre (via an ethos of affluence and a consumerist ethic) and artfully maintaining the status quo in terms of gendered, raced, and classed intersections. Ultimately we argue that the docusoap is accomplishing this in a remediated environment that promotes a neoliberal agenda via affective engagement grounded in mediated self-performance and rational disengagement grounded in mediated irony.

Critique Has Its Uses

Critique Has Its Uses Lee Konstantinou (bio) Is Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) fake news? I haven’t been able to stop asking myself this question since the election of Donald Trump in November. Whitehead’s novel is, after all, constructed around an historical falsehood. As a kid, the author reports, he thought that the Underground Railroad was a literal subway slaves used to escape to the North. Many children who learn about the Railroad make the same mistake (as did Porsha Stewart in an episode of The Real Housewives of Atlanta). Taking his former confusion as a point of departure, Whitehead literalizes the metaphor. His protagonist Cora escapes from slavery in Georgia on an underground steam-powered locomotive. Fleeing the slave-catcher Ridgeway, she traverses a variety of states, each of which skews from the historical record in more or less dramatic ways. “Every state is different,” one character in the novel suggests. “Each one a state of possibility.” Historically informed readers will note that Whitehead’s novel incorporates anachronistic references to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Nazism, as well as twenty-first-century modes of oppression (such as stop and frisk and mass incarceration) into his vision of the 1850s. My opening question is, of course, ridiculous. After all, everyone knows (or at least all literary critics know) that we don’t turn to fiction for a strictly factual report about the world. Philosophers and narrative theorists have long cautioned against asking whether fictional utterances are true or false. These are exactly the wrong questions to ask; the truth of fiction—whether in the mode of realism, magic realism, or science fiction—is in no case reducible to the truth status of its individual sentences. Meanwhile, almost everyone knows (and not just literary critics, this time) what fake news is. For the Macedonian teenagers in Veles who disseminated it, its purpose was to make them money. For those of us who consume it, fake news reinforces our political biases; it promises comfort, titillation, shock, delight. It helps us feel as if we’re reading the news—we are, after all, starved for real news—without having to confront the unwanted narratives of official media. The difference couldn’t be any clearer. On the one hand, Whitehead offers a fantastic world whose distance from our own is carefully staged as fiction, and which is meant to be interpreted as different from the historical record. On the other hand, disseminators of fake news offer an alternative world of ersatz facts designed to go viral on Facebook, which is meant to be mistaken, even if only briefly, for truth. And yet this distinction doesn’t wholly satisfy me. As a novel about slavery, The Underground Railroad arguably has a special place in US literature and culture. In the absence of more significant memorials or reparations, the neo-slave narrative has for decades been a major political staging ground upon which we have reenacted and reconsidered the history and consequences of our nation’s founding sin. And for a long time, Whitehead has resisted stepping onto this staging ground. His previous novels have addressed race, as many critics have noted, more obliquely. Indeed, I would venture an even stronger claim. Whitehead didn’t only avoid writing about slavery; his early fiction sought to resist the literary equivalent of what in the realm of criticism has come to be called the historicist-contextualist paradigm. As Mitchum Huehls argues, Whitehead has long approached race in a way that resists “representational forms of meaning-making.” That is, the novelist has rejected the view that how we represent race determines (or is, in an uncomplicated way, equivalent to) how race is lived. I read the author’s The Intuitionist (1999) as a satire of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). In her slim but influential book, Morrison argues that the American literary canon must be reread in light of what she terms a disavowed “Africanist presence.” Drawing on a powerful tradition of African American literary criticism, Morrison transforms the paint factory scene of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) into a critical credo. Playing in the Dark is...

Witches and bitches: Reality television, housewifization and the new hidden abode of production

The governance of affect by capital has seen its ideological legitimation and emblematic site of production in the mainstream television industry, specifically reality television programs, as they provide templates for affective self-presentation to the public at large. As even a cursory glance at most reality television production demonstrates, it is most often women’s bodies and self-concepts that bear the burden of signifying and legitimating the message of this new economic formation: ‘conform to our template, be seen, and build a reputation!’ This article will focus on the Real Housewives franchise, which along with its network Bravo is credited with saving the fortunes of NBC, as the paradigmatic example of these new narrative trends and business models. It will interrogate the historical resonances and discontinuities between the economy of affective visibility now apparent on reality television and its modes of production and the origins of the ‘real’ housewife in early capitalism. At this time, women’s skills, bodies and reproductive capacities were violently restructured; forbidden from earning a wage or having money, women’s work inside and outside the home was simultaneously appropriated and concealed. As reality television inaugurates new kinds of labor and value creation in the 21st century, it does so in ways that are deeply gendered or ‘housewifized’; reality television’s forms of hidden, precarious, and unregulated labour recall the appropriation and denigration of the value of women’s work by systems of capitalist expansion in the 16th and 17th centuries.

How Do the “Real Housewives” Get to History Class? A Multimodal Twist on a Project

How Do the “Real Housewives” Get to History Class? A Multimodal Twist on a Project

Book Review: Branded Women in U.S. Television: When People Become Corporations, by Peter Bjelskou

Branded Women in U.S. Television: When People Become Corporations. Peter Bjelskou. New York, New York: Lexington Books, 2015. 146 pp. $75 hbk.The empirical nucleus of Bjelskou's study is Bravo TV's Real Housewives of New York City (RHONY), one iteration of reality show franchise that began in Orange County, California, in 2006, and spread to six other cities. Bravo, a leader in cable TV's lifestyle showcasing, is an apt forum for author's meditations on conflation of product promotion and entertainment.Viewers of show will be well familiar with its wealthy housewife protagonists. Bjelskou explores development of women's brands, emphasizing focus on their bodies as vehicles they discipline and control to achieve financial success and fame. Skinnygirl Bethenny Frankel is poster woman for reality TV success with her empire of books, talk show, skincare line, and more. Non-viewers will nonetheless find this textual analysis provides insightful commentary on reality TV and contemporary media culture.By investigating individual personalities from show-and particular circumstances that presumably ushered way to their brands-Bjelskou describes how each presents herself and how her behavior fits into larger category of branding at work in media universe. These women have joined a swarm of Bravolebrities and, clearly, are not traditional iterations of term. Celebrity is a major subject here, especially its current run of democratization, engendering, author posits, unrealistic expectations, and entitlements. Wealthy lifestyles are implied to be attainable via array of commodities presented, so that reality TV is complicit in the neoliberal Promised Land, as Bjelskou writes in his introduction, where wealth and fame are available to all who desire them. Race and class-in RHONY's case, quite pronouncedly, White and monied-dominate these narratives.TV is increasingly fictionalized, as author notes, but whereas a drama like 1980s' Dynasty is aspirational perhaps but more pointedly escapist, RHONY and its reality ilk are self-referential to an equally extreme degree. Because we see process of these women making successes of themselves-whereas Dynasty's Carringtons were offered up as an already completed project-the desired message delivered by housewives is that it is possible for viewer to emulate them, approximating manner of a self-help program. It is reminiscent of that other guidebook from 1995 bestseller, The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing Heart of Mr. Right, which also inundated women with behavior directives, that is, Do this and you will be successful like me. Both resources are strongly and purposefully biased and easily become a target of vitriol or comedy. With regard to extremes, Bjelskou also spends some warranted attention on levels and uses of camp in RHONY. In so doing, he compares its aesthetic values with other shows like Sex and City, Queer Eye for Straight Guy (an early RHONY progenitor on Bravo), and Desperate Housewives (of which RHONY is an ironic comment). …

The Effects of Watching Real Housewives of Atlanta on Attitudes about Sexuality and Relationships

The purpose of the study is to investigate the influence of watching reality television on attitudes about gender, sexuality, and relationships. We focus on Real Housewives of Atlanta series which features an all–African American cast of upper middle and upper class women. Based on surveys with a national sample, we find that although most viewers do not report being directly influenced by watching Real Housewives of Atlanta , many convey modeling and an indirect internalization of sexual scripts shown and that many viewers admired the sexual confidence portrayed by the women on the show.

“I'm Very Rich, Bitch!”: The Melodramatic Money Shot and the Excess of Racialized Gendered Affect in the Real Housewives Docusoaps

This article examines Bravo's Real Housewives franchise (2006–) to theorize the aesthetic, affective, and performance qualities of docusoap televisuality. It argues that the franchise functions through a financial and affective economy of “money shots,” or moments of predictably unpredictable antisocial affective engagement among cast members. These scenes generate a thrilling anxiety that encourages serialized watching and potentially endless interpretation by viewers, creating a ratings economy out of an affective one. Through a reading of The Real Housewives of Atlanta (2008–), this article demonstrates how the program's interest in staging the excess of racialized gender is structured through a white racial imaginary, which is contested by cast members in each season's reunion episode. The article ends with a consideration of the way in which queer of color camp affectively reimagines the thrilling anxiety of these money shots through humor.

Banking on Females: Bravo's Commodification of the Female Audience

Airing to more than 94 million subscribers in the United States alone, Bravo has made a name for itself as a successful cable network. With popular programs such as The Real Housewives and Top Chef, Bravo has attracted a predominantly female, upscale audience that has garnered much media attention. Using Bravo as a case study in popular culture, this article utilizes feminist political economy to explore how Bravo connects with—and commodifies—its female audience. In so doing, it is argued that through Bravo's Affluencer campaign and online initiatives, as well as through Women@NBCU, Bravo and parent company NBC-Comcast turn the audience into a product unto itself, and invite females to participate in their own commodification and the commodification of others.

Intergenerational Engagement with Hip Hop: Parents as Mediators of African American Adolescent Consumption of Popular Culture

Now imagine there's a shorty, maybe five maybe four. Ridin' 'round with his mama listening to the radio. And a song comes on and a not far off from being born, doesn't know the difference between right and wrong. Now ain't trying to make it too complex, but let's just say shorty has an undeveloped context about the perception of women these days. His mama sings along and this what she says, Niggas, I'm a bad bitch, and I'm bad bitch. Something that's far above average and maybe other rhyming words like cabbage and savage and baby carriage and other things that match it. Couple of things are happenin' here, first he's relatin' the word bitch with his mama-comma, and because she's relatin' to herself, his most important source of help and mental health, he may skew respect for dishonor.-Lupe Fiasco Bitch Bad (Waco, Jordan, Giannos, & Boyd, 2012)The study reported in this article addressed the socialization messages African American female adolescents receive, the hip hop cultural movement as an educative site, and the role of parents and educators in countering the dominant scripts and facilitating media literacy among these young women. first hip hop generation, born between 1965 and 1984, have entered adulthood and middle age and now have children impacted by musical content and imagery that influenced them (Kitwana, 2003). Today, young people all over the world are identifying with and using popular culture to define themselves, for many of them, the adults in their lives are as well.Based on the (mis) representations of Black women and girls in the media, the author co-created a media literacy group and designed a pedagogical intervention to deconstruct media messages of Black women and their meanings. work with this group was intentional in historicizing stereotypes about Black women and encouraging Black adolescent females to (re)define Black girlhood for themselves. In addition to fostering a reaffirming space for Black girls to create or maintain, a positive self-identity, the author also sought to explore the intergenerational engagement with hip hop occurring in the household of the girls, based on dialogue conducted in the media literacy group. By exploring relationship dynamics and level of dialogue with these girls and their parents, the findings contribute to the literature on Black family socialization. This research also adds to the literature that examines students' out-of-school time, and the environmental and social determinants of academic success.THE HIP HOP CULTURAL MOVEMENTA revolution in youth culture was launched through the evolution of hip hop and effects youth's multiple identities. Television, another form of popular culture, has nudged its way into this space as well. Aisha Durham (2010) referred to the music in hip hop and its imagery as hip-hop media. There are several television shows, on a variety of networks, in which hip hop is the basis. VH1's & Hip Hop-New York, with spin-off, Chrissy & Mr. Jones, as well as & Hip Hop-Atlanta, with a spin-off in the making based on a controversial couple, Stevie J and Joseline Hernandez. Additionally, several hip-hop artists have created television shows: rap mogul Sean Diddy Combs' Making the Band and Who Wants to Work for Diddy, William Flavor Flav Drayton's Flavor of and subsequent spin-off shows I Love New York and Chance of Love, RunDMC artist Reverend Joseph Run Simmons' Run's House, rapper Clifford T.I. Harris' Family Hustle, rapper Jayceon The Game Taylor's Marrying the Game and Bravo channel's The Real Housewives of Atlanta. Hip hop continues its reach into film with three films, 8 Mile, Hustle and Flow, and Get Rich or Die Tryin', all receiving Academy Award nominations. 8 Mile, starring White rapper Eminem, received the Academy Award for Best Original Song for Lose Yourself from the movie soundtrack. song was also nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song. …

“Quality” Reality and the Bravo Media Reality Series

This essay attempts to break down a binary opposition between “quality TV” and reality TV, which is usually set up along an axis of distinction based on aesthetic value. That is: HBO dramas are art; reality TV shows are trash. As Misha Kavka writes, “Because reality television is seen as a dumbed-down media form with a low entry threshold for participants, its diminished cultural value rubs off on participants' claim to fame, while its reputation for creating D-list celebrities confirms reality TV's low cultural value.” While this is true of reality TV in general, this article suggests that, with the proliferation of reality shows, we now have a taste hierarchy within reality TV. The Bravo cable channel in the US—now called Bravo Media as it expands to multiple platforms—has pioneered the high-end reality series, working within two genres (whose names I borrow from the New York Times Magazine): competition series, such as Project Runway (2004–) and Top Chef (2006–), and docudramas, such as Flipping Out (2007–), The Rachel Zoe Project (2008–), the Million Dollar Listing franchise (2006–), the Real Housewives franchise (2006–), and many others. Bravo seems to exemplify the perfect fit between a niche audience and a boutique show. In addition, the article suggests that the audience is already embedded in the show through affective economies, product placement, extradiegetic activities like blogging, and a more intimate relationship with television executives than ever before. Bravo Media points to the pleasure of being totally commodified, but this pleasure is certainly not for everyone.

How television shapes our worldview: media representations of social trends and change

1. Introduction Deborah A. Macey, Kathleen M. Ryan and Noah J. Springer Section I: Not Necessarily the News 2. A Bigger Screen for a Narrower View Jack A. Barwind, Philip J. Salem, and Robert D. Gratz 3. Measuring the Messenger: Analyzing Bias in Presidential Election Return Coverage Kahtleen M. Ryan, Lane Clegg, and Joy C. Mapaye 4. Television, Islam, and the Invisible: Narratives on Terrorism and Immigration Tim Karis Section II: Boy (and Girl) Meets World 5. Dreams Were Your Ticket Out: How Mass Media's Teachers Constructed One Educator's Identity Edward A. Janak 6. Defying Gravity: Fox's Glee Provides a Forum for Queer Teen Representation Katherine J. Lehman 7. Friendship and the Single Girl: What We Learned about Feminism and Friendship from Sitcom Women in the 1960s and 1970s Cindy Conaway and Peggy Tally Section III: America's Most Wanted 8. Epic Failures: Media Framing and the Ethics of Scapegoating in Baseball Chandler Harris and Lauren Lemley 9. Eyewitnesses to TV Versions of Reality: Relationship between Exposure to TV Crime Dramas and Perceptions of the Criminal Justice System Susan H. Sarapin and Glenn G. Sparks 10. Paramilitary Patriots of the Cold War: Women, Weapons, and Private Warriors in A-Team and Airwolf Charity Fox Section IV: More You Know 11. Lisa and Phoebe, Lone Vegetarian Icons: At Odds with Television's Carnonormativity Carrie Packwood Freeman 12. Television and the Environment: More Screen-Less Green Jennifer Ellen Good 13. From Welby to McDreamy: What TV Teaches Us About Doctors, Patients, and the Health Care System Katherine A. Foss Section V: Voice 14. Made Impossible by Viewers Like You: Politics and Poetics of Native American Voices in US Public Television Leighton C. Peterson 15. Black, Money: African American Audiences on Real Housewives of Atlanta Gretta Moody 16. He Who has the Gold Makes the Rules: Tyler Perry Presents The Tyler Perry Way Danielle E. Williams 17. Viewing 90210 from 12203: Affluent TV Teens Influence a Cohort of Middle Class Women Michelle Napierski-Prancl Section VI: Futurama 18. Construction of Taste: Television and American Home Decor Styles I. Akira and Larry Ossei-Mensah 19. Bordertown: Manufacturing Mexicanness in Reality Television Ariadne Alejandra Gonzalez 20. Cyborgs in the Newsroom: Databases, Cynicism and Political Irony in Daily Show Noah J. Springer

We all want to be big stars: The desire for fame and the draw to The Real Housewives

Abstract This study analyses eighteen in-depth interviews with adults in the Midwest who watch Bravo’s reality (RTV) docusoap franchise Real Housewives. Shifting the gaze away from RTV effects and towards the proliferation of RTV, RTV stars (celetoids) and what Graeme Turner calls the ‘demotic turn’, this study examines the show’s appeal and whether a latent desire for celetoid-type fame exists among the main viewer groups analysed here (straight women and gay men). A desire for fame appears to be present among the men in this study, and younger men tended to conceive celetoid-type fame as desirable. This study also finds that men and women gravitate towards different character types. Straight women appear less intensely drawn to Real Housewives than gay men, both in terms of buying Real Housewives products and attempting to connect with the women on the show via Twitter. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the profusion of RTV, the demotic turn and celetoids factor into new desires among regular people for celetoid-type fame. This study also adds to recent research that shows that a desire to be famous is now characteristic of younger generations.

Class and productive avoidance in The Real Housewives reunions

This paper considers the relationship between topic avoidance, talk, and class in reality television. I analyze interactions in reunion episodes of The Real Housewives, a reality television series that since 2006 has followed casts of women in metropolitan locales around America, focusing on their affluent lifestyles. Reunion shows bring cast members together to discuss the previous season׳s episodes, providing space to talk about what happened and confront each other over unresolved issues. Because disclosure is normative in the reunion context, the casting of topics as “taboo” for discussion is interactionally salient and productive. My analysis shows that topic avoidance is triggered not by a set of categorically taboo topics, but rather by topics that momentarily threaten Housewives׳ enactment of culturally elite identities. Avoidance serves to protect their public images as both materially endowed—having status—and well-behaved—having class. I identify and illustrate three types of avoidance stance, which differ in the role alignments through which participants are positioned. These stances can function to limit the discussion of information threatening to one׳s own material status, to preserve one׳s own image as “classy,” and to introduce threatening information about another׳s status or class. Ultimately, avoidance stances are a way for Housewives to negotiate the tension between being on a reality television show, which requires openness and disclosure, and being evaluated as culturally elite, which requires behavioral restraint regarding talk about self and others.

Black Women Working Together: Jazz, Gender, and the Politics of Validation

In essay Black Women and Music: A Historical Legacy of Struggle (2001), Angela Davis chronicles cultural and historic trajectory black women musicians have advanced through music in their transition from free people to enslaved persons to free but oppressed people in relation to context of their lives in Africa and America. While Davis situates her discussion in how black women have used spirituals and blues as a means of developing social and political consciousness, her theoretical scope could easily be enlarged to include other forms of black music, most notably jazz. One of arguments Davis raises concerns common reading of black women's relationships with each other in larger scope of popular culture. These relationships are often framed as competitive and antagonistic. Rarely has complex and layered engagement between black women been acknowledged. In recent years, popular culture has perpetuated trope of competitiveness, hostility, and violence between black women through social networks (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) and reality television (e.g., Basketball Wives, Real Housewives of Atlanta). These depictions have been used to stereotype black women, discredit their viability in certain social environments, and reject them as intellectual beings. But close examination of social and familial relationships between women exposes a complex culture of engagement and socialization. These relationships are at times defined by layered and multifarious praxes through which collectives of black women have engaged in self-definition; created systems of knowledge that provided skills to navigate political, social, and economic spheres; and formed safe that have supported their process of brokering power. Why has this competitive narrative permeated popular culture and our readings of how black women engage with another? One reason is that this narrative has been defined by emotional responses generated from engagement between black and women in public and private spheres. The supposed lack of good black who can sustain good relationships with good black women serves as undercurrent for competitive and sometimes toxic relationships between black women. This is furthered with proliferation of mythology of strong black woman and her engagement with weak black men and supposed subversion of social and power structures that define masculinity. These ideological beliefs raise a number of questions when considered in relation to interactions between black women and in larger contexts of popular culture. How has competitive narrative framed how black women musicians are read and defined within popular culture history and criticism? To understand this we must interrogate how narrative of competition and engagement of black women musicians have been documented in historiography of jazz. The narrative of competitive personality or inability to get along among black women musicians has become paramount to mythologies that have shaped public understandings of culture of jazz. (1) It is often used as of rationales for why women are disruptive to work being done in spaces where jazz is created. The prevailing thought is that competitiveness that women exhibit in these spaces is that is destructive rather than productive to working environment. The male competitive spirit in jazz, however, is essence of creative energy generated. It is the necessary constant, for it produces cultural hallmarks, real-time moments of genius and frames infinite nature of possibility that occurs when work together even when poised or posed in competitive stances. When this type of analysis is extended to women musicians, it is often subverted from its role as tool of empowerment that helps develop her individual musical voice to where she is forced into battle to be one female creative voice that survives and earns a place in historical narrative. …

Real Housewives with Real Problems?

Real Housewives with Real Problems?

Realism’s Housewives

Realism’s Housewives Emma Lieber (bio) There’s something going on with women on television these days. As the TV critics have noticed, shows about the lives of women have been proliferating over the past few years: the fall 2011 lineup featured several such debuting sitcoms (Whitney, New Girl, and Two Broke Girls), and that spring saw the airing of Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls, a sly, self-mocking portrait of twenty-something girlfriends muddling their way through life in New York City (clearly a challenge to Sex and the City, though Dunham’s vision is very much her own). The fall 2012 lineup added to the roster The Mindy Project (about a gynecologist with a barren romantic life), and this year’s mid-season listings gave us the premieres of Red Widow (featuring a housewife forced to carry out the mob work of her late husband) and The Carrie Diaries (a Sex and the City prequel). And though Carrie Bradshaw’s show itself, certainly one of the mothers of these more recent additions, went off the air almost a decade ago, various other women-centered shows (The Good Wife, Gossip Girl, and Desperate Housewives among them) are now well into their mature years. In a rather literal enactment of this general phenomenon, Two Broke Girls has recently displaced Two and a Half Men, taking over the time slot previously occupied by that show. At least since the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, and with series such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, Maude, and Golden Girls, prime time television has frequently featured female protagonists in starring roles, with plot lines centered on the difficulties of balancing career and family and the intensity and sustaining power of female friendships. The female-centered series currently dominating the listings undoubtedly focus on, and gain narrative momentum from, similar issues; and yet it would be a stretch to call them unambiguously feminist. The sexual emancipation advocated by the Sex and the City characters consisted in large part of a rather untroubled acceptance and appropriation of a woman’s status as sexual object, and many subsequent shows seem to be similarly walking a fine line between celebrating the robustness of their heroines’ interior lives and revealing their bodies for all to see. They are also, for the most part, distinctly apolitical. Perhaps the avatar of these developments—and also, I should admit here, the focus of my own personal preoccupation with these television products—is Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise, whose loosely ordered programs took their inspiration from ABC’s Desperate Housewives but are vastly more successful than those of their scripted predecessor. There have been seven Real Housewives series, with the original (Real Housewives of Orange County) soon to begin its eighth [End Page 113] season, as well as spinoffs such as Bethenny Ever After, Don’t Be Tardy, and Vanderpump Rules. Reportedly a half-billion-dollar enterprise, these programs combine in one irresistible confection the appeal of female-focused narratives and the current mega-phenomenon of reality television, and the episodes have attracted as many as 2.9 million viewers, most of them representatives of the target demographic of women in the eighteen to forty-nine age range (especially the median age range of thirty-somethings, my own peers). In one way or another, all of the female-focused shows currently dominating our television listings are voyeuristic, if not frankly titillating (the narrative potential exhibited by a title like Two Broke Girls even verges on the pornographic, though certainly the show itself, which airs on CBS, will likely never go there). But with the Real Housewives our scopophilic impulses are only enhanced by the knowledge that we are peeking in on the lives of non-actors, and in this sense it is perhaps the “Real” of the title that accounts for a certain intensification, in these shows, of the ubiquitous allure of the female element. The appeal of Real Housewives is somewhat paradoxical, though, since for all of the thrill of the forbidden that swirls around these productions, their narrative arcs are relatively tame, or at least predictable, focusing on the trials and tribulations of marriage, motherhood...

The “Rich Bitch”

This project offers the opportunity to examine the ways in which normative conceptions of class and gender cohere to produce an archetypal, trans-historical villain, what we term “the rich bitch.” In this essay, we employ the concept of irony to analyze how Bravo's The Real Housewives of New York City creates rich women as objects of cultural derision, well-heeled jesters in a populist court. The show primes its savvy, upscale audience to judge the extravagance of female scapegoats harshly in tough economic times. The housewives' class and gender flops are inter-related on the show. The lure of class status produces inconsiderate mothers. Ultimately, The Real Housewives of New York City uses irony to produce a provocative, post-feminist drama about rich women too crass to be classy, too superficial to be nurturing, and too self-obsessed to be caring.

The Housewives' Guide to Better Living: Promoting Consumption on Bravo's The Real Housewives

This article applies feminist political economy to Bravo's hit reality program, The Real Housewives. Research illustrates how the show “sells” consumerism within programming, and how fans utilize Bravo's website to respond to the program's proconsumerist messages. Exploring how fans seek participation in—or rejection of—consumerism, research suggests that fans are actively negotiating the meaning and value of the consumerism propagated by the show. Although online comments illustrate acceptance of consumerism, these comments exist alongside a questioning of the housewives' spending habits and misappropriated values. The ideological functions of designating women as shoppers and perpetuating the notion that spending equals happiness conceal the underlying structural flaws within the patriarchal capitalist market, including the failure to create equal opportunities for wage earning for women. Le guide pour mieux vivre des Housewives: la promotion de la consommation dans l’emission The Real Housewives de la chaine Bravo Cet article applique l’economie politique feministe a l’emission de telerealitea succes The Real Housewives, sur la chaine Bravo. La litterature illustre comment l’emission « vend » la consommation dans sa programmation et comment les fans utilisent le site Web de Bravo pour reagir aux messages pro-consommation de l’emission. Par l’exploration des manieres dont les fans cherchent a participer a (ou a rejeter) la societe de consommation, l’etude suggere que les fans negocient activement le sens et la valeur de la consommation. Alors que les commentaires en ligne illustrent l’acceptation de la societe de consommation, ces commentaires coexistent avec une remise en question des habitudes de depense des Housewives et leurs valeurs detournees. Les fonctions ideologiques d’une designation des femmes comme acheteuses et de la perpetuation de la notion selon laquelle depenser mene au bonheur masque les defauts structurels au sein du marche capitaliste patriarcal, incluant l’incapacitea creer des occasions egales de salaire pour les femmes. Mots cles : etudes mediatiques feministes, economie politique de la communication, television Hausfrauentipps fur ein besseres Leben: Die Lobpreisung des Konsum im Reality-TV-Programm des Senders Bravo Dieser Artikel appliziert die feministische politische Okonomie auf das erfolgreiche Reality-Programm ,,The Real Housewives“ des Senders Bravo. Die Untersuchung zeigt, wie die Show Konsumdenken in seinem Programm ,,verkauft“ und wie die Fans die Bravo-Webseite benutzen, um auf diese Pro-Konsumdenken-Botschaften zu reagieren. Indem wir untersuchen, wie Fans versuchen, an diesem Pro-Konsumdenken teilzuhaben oder dieses abzulehnen, zeigen wir, dass Fans die Bedeutung und den Wert von Konsumdenken aktiv aushandeln. Wahrend die Online-Kommentare die Akzeptanz des Konsumdenkens demonstrieren, existieren diese Kommentare neben anderen, die die Kaufgewohnheiten und unangemessene Werte der Hausfrauen hinterfragen. Die ideologische Funktion, Frauen als Einkauferinnen darzustellen und die Vorstellung zu verfestigen, dass Geld ausgeben Glucklichsein bedeutet, verschleiern die verborgenen strukturellen Makel des patriarchalischen kapitalistischen Marktes, was das Versagen einschliest, gleiche Verdienstmoglichkeiten fur Frauen zu schaffen. Schlusselbegriffe: feministische Medienstudien, politische Okonomie der Kommunikation, Fernsehen La Guia de las Amas de Casa para Vivir Mejor: Promoviendo el Consumo de Las Amas de Casa Reales de Bravo Resumen: Este ensayo aplica la economia politica feminista del exito del programa de realidad de Bravo, Las Amas de Casas Reales. La investigacion ilustra como el show “vende” consumismo mediante su programacion, y como los fanaticos utilizan el sitio de Internet de Bravo para responder a los mensajes a favor del consumismo del programa. Explorando como los fanaticos buscan participacion en el— o rechazo al—consumismo, la investigacion sugiere que los fanaticos negocian activamente el significado y el valor del consumismo. Mientras que los comentarios online ilustran aceptacion del consumismo, estos comentarios existen a la par del cuestionamiento a los habitos de gastos de las Amas de casa y los valores malversados. Las funciones ideologicas que designan a las mujeres como compradoras y perpetuan la nocion que el gasto se equipara a la felicidad, ocultan las estructuras defectuosas subyacentes dentro del mercado capitalista de patriarcado, incluyendo el fracaso para crear oportunidades de igualdad para el sueldo ganado por las mujeres. Palabras claves: Estudios feministas de los medios, Economia politica de comunicacion, Television

Power, Feminisms, and Coalitional Agency: Inviting and Enacting Difficult Dialogues

Discussions of or feminism have populated the pages of media journals for some time now as voices of feminism's Third Wave, as well as some from the Second, have proclaimed that feminism is no longer needed; at the very least, women should stop talking about oppression and engage their own power. With Hillary Clinton's near miss as the democratic presidential nominee, and Sarah Palin's unexpected GOP vice presidential nomination, surely those voices seem rational. Yet, as New York Times columnist, Judith Warner writes, it a coincidence that the bubbling idiocy of and the City, the movie, exploded upon the cultural scene at the exact same time that Hillary Clinton's candidacy imploded? (1) Warner goes on to argue that, while the likes of Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda garner championing as post-feminist archetypes, woman-hating such as the kind Clinton experienced for the year of her campaign, continues unchallenged. To the skeptic of the continued existence of misogyny, the Sex and the City women, the Real Housewives of New York, Atlanta, Orange County, and any number of other post-feminist characters in U.S. media provide apparently convincing evidence. Hillary Clinton, skeptics argue, brought her own demise, and the real women (housewives or not) living a life of sex and the city are evidence that feminism has done its job. However, we are reminded of 1988, when a small group of feminists in communication studies hosted a special issue of Women's Studies in Communication. These scholars asked questions and posed thoughts about the nature and state of feminist communication scholarship. Although these feminists may not have represented the diversity of feminist scholarship in communication at the time, there is little doubt that that issue, along with collections such as Lana Rakow's Women Making Meaning (2) helped to characterize the direction that feminist communication scholarship would take for the next several years. Considering the conservative political and cultural milieu that existed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as the considerable feminist backlash of the time, the necessity of such work is easily seen. In many ways, we are at a similar place some twenty years later. Yet, recent discussions over feminism in communication studies reflect tensions and dichotomies that leave many feminists uneasy or misunderstood, others silenced, and no small measure of us uncertain about whether we can have productive conversations about our differences. We believe, however, that conversations about what our feminisms are, how we define them, and how they move us forward in the world are among the most important feminist conversations that we could have. Knowing at our cores, that the personal remains profoundly political, we have a personal interest in the myriad material impacts that power feminism has on feminisms and feminists in communication and also on the world outside of academia. Though we both come from very different social locations, we share similar feminist standpoints in that we are passionate about making a space for difficult conversations about feminisms, that power feminism does not feel like feminism to either one of us, but that those who find a home there are due respect and space to articulate that position. Moreover, due to the prevalence of power and post feminist ways of thinking in popular culture as well as many academic circles, we desired a forum to consider the many sides of contemporary power feminist debates and to demonstrate what we consider the high stakes they possess for progressive politics and theory. As versions of post and power feminism are advocated and embraced in mainstream media, as well as in public and academic conversations, we find ourselves reflecting on Helene A. Shugart, Catherine Egley Waggoner, and D. Lynn OBrien Hallstein's 2001 work on appropriation. (3) Is feminism, we wonder, when sifted through a power feminist lens, being appropriated, commodified, reinscribed, and 'sold back' to us? …

Exposing the Ruling Class in the United States Using Television and Documentary Film

Exposing the Ruling Class in the United States Using Television and Documentary Film Pepi Leistyna (bio) Graduate students in my Cross-Cultural Perspectives class at the University of Massachusetts Boston, which has a predominantly working-class student population, usually do not know what I mean by "ruling class" when I talk about power politics in the United States. Some are suspicious or hostile—who are these people? And of course most share in the ignorance or denial of class that is widespread in the United States. I address the issue directly, and find television and film a big help. In class, I explore with students how elites built class power from the outset on indentured servitude, slavery, and genocide, and how their successors benefited from ideologies such as that of the "American dream" and the myth of meritocracy. We explore U.S. arrangements of ownership, distribution of goods and services, and regulation of institutions, and consider how capitalism relies on the formative power of culture to maintain its logic and practices, and make them seem natural. I use a simple grid to aid in understanding class. Economic class pertains to one's income and especially to wealth or capital. Cultural class has to do with taste, education, and lifestyle. And political class concerns the power that individuals and groups have to control the workplace and the larger social order. To examine economic class we look at distribution of wealth, using the U.S. Census (http://www.census.gov) and research by organizations like the Economic Policy Institute (www.epi.org), with a particular focus on its annual publication The State of Working America. Realities of inequality and power (e.g., how the rich and their allies have remade the tax system since 1970 to strengthen class hierarchy) emerge from discussion of the numbers. Films and documentaries help bring those realities to life. We view Michael Moore's 1989 film Roger & Me, which clearly illustrates the economic power of the rich in Flint, Michigan, over the working class and working poor in the community, in an economic depression after the local collapse of General Motors. To explore cultural class, we view PBS's 1999 documentary People Like Us: Social Class in America, which looks closely at the lifestyles that differentiate one class from another. I sometimes contribute personal stories, for instance how while I was growing up I learned about the rich as a caddy at the local country club as well as through TV shows like Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest, and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. [End Page 12] Thinking about how these shows affected me at a young age, I decided in one class to have students form small groups and select a show on television about the rich and analyze it. As TV has recently been obsessed with the upper-class, in particular reality TV, I offered the following list: Beverly Hills 90210, The OC, Lipstick Jungle, Gossip Girl, My Super Sweet Sixteen, Cribs, Dirty Sexy Money, Privileged, Watching Rich People, Exiled, The Riches, The Hills, The Real Housewives of Orange County (and of New York), Entourage, Brothers and Sisters, The Simple Life, Secret Millionaire, Big Shots, Rich Girls, Cane, Keeping up with the Kardashians, Laguna Beach, Newport Harbor: The Real Orange County, Arrested Development, Family Jewels, Meet the Osbournes, and any soap opera of their choice. I also recommended the 2003 HBO documentary Born Rich, in which Jamie Johnson, the 22-year-old heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, interviews his wealthy friends, including the offspring of the Trumps, Bloombergs, and Vanderbilts. They candidly talk about their privilege and about the ups and downs of being loaded. The following week, each group presented its findings. They commented that the best road to wealth is the old trusty route of inheriting it. They also talked about the general dysfunction of wealthy people in these shows as being "self-obsessed," "materialistic," "shallow," and "full of deceit." As one put it, "In these shows, the upper class is portrayed as dishonest, manipulative, and devoid of family values." But what the students also noticed was that while there is a great deal of focus on economic and cultural class in...