What Would You Do to be Famous?: Looking at Black Mirror and Starry Eyes by Elizabeth Kiy
I’ll just say it, reality TV scares me. It has so much potential to affect the way we live and look at ourselves by showing us how other people live. It can chip away at our idea of strong womanhood by highlighting the successes only of the beautiful, compliant and willing to backstab.
Keeping up with the Kardashians: Looking at Kim Kardashian’s Naked Body by Sarah Smyth
Kardashian quite literally embodies the complex construction of the female body as something to be looked at. And with her body being so readily, excessively, and continually put on show, can we help but do anything but look?
MasterChef and Internalized Misogyny by Robin Hitchcock
Examining my sexist reaction to this season of MasterChef made me realize the pervasive role of gender expectations in the series. MasterChef distinguishes itself from other cooking reality competition shows by focusing on “home cooks” without any formal training.
Reality TV’s Antecedents: PBS, POV, and Barbara Kopple by Ren Jender
A channel that has been delivering a less tempered version of “reality” TV for many decades is PBS, most consistently and interestingly for over 25 years on POV, which showcases independent documentaries with limited theatrical runs (and many of those films are available online to watch as well). In its history POV has put its spotlight on trans* and queer people, people of color, and people with disabilities often in work directed by people who are from those communities (which is not usually the case in other “reality” programming).
Finding Faith and Feminism in The Sisterhood: Becoming Nuns by Max Thornton
Nuns are often unsung activists, and convents are underexamined as feminist spaces. In medieval Christendom, entering a convent might be the only way for a woman to have control over her body, her choices, and her reproduction; and, as reproductive rights come under increasingly virulent attack in the US, it could be interesting to consider how a convent might still be that space today.
Playing with Fire: “Compulsory Heterosexuality” in The Hunger Games by Colleen Clemons
While my conversations with my friends’ 12-year-old daughters about the trilogy always began with “Team Peeta!” or “Team Gale!” our conversations in the classroom focused on the scholarship of female collectives and violent resistance; we didn’t need Gale and Peeta as fodder for conversation. But on the last day of class, I introduced Adrienne Rich’s idea of compulsory heterosexuality to complicate the larger conversation in which readers—and viewers—find themselves forced to choose a camp, just as Katniss is forced to do.