Reality Television and All Things Basic

In ¿Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema¿ (1975), feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey argues that ¿the cinema poses questions of the ways the unconscious (formed by the dominant order) structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking,¿ (804-805), conceptualizing what has become ubiquitously known as ¿the male gaze.¿ Mulvey's theory of the male gaze in film centers on two processes, the pleasures produced through objectification and those produced through identification. Feminists of color who study the politics of popular media have critiqued as well as expanded on Mulvey's notion of the male gaze, including bell hook's articulation of an oppositional gaze¿a critical gaze¿a possible site of resistance for colonized black people.Within the last two decades, reality television has become a staple of popular culture in the U.S., a key component of the representational politics of audiovisual media. Thinking the processes of objectification and identification more expansively and privileging bell hook¿s formulation of critical spectatorship, what types of pleasures are produced through the addition of the category ¿reality?¿ How does this relate to our understandings of racialized gender in the U.S.? Is reality television ¿this generation¿s¿ soap opera, a feminized genre of (melo)drama? And does this form of reality simply reproduce the heteronormative order, or can this form of media ever subvert normative prescriptions regarding gender, age, race, class, and sex(uality)?