Written by James N. Gilmore
This semester in the Collaborative, we are trying something new and launching this blog, Culture Critically. This is our first series. As is the tradition of the Collaborative, students decide together what they want to write about and explore together. This semester, we are fortunate to have three excellent students: Malaysia Barr, Eliza Moore, and Marie Quaranta. You’ll be reading sole-authored writing from them as well as a collaboratively-written summary at the end of this series.
These students were initially drawn to questions of reality television, and to what degree reality television was engaging explicitly with major sociopolitical concerns of this present moment. Each student identified a television show that mattered to them: Marie selected Big Brother because she has long been interested in the interplay between the “live feeds” of the house and the heavily produced episodes that shape how contestants are understood. Malaysia selected Love and HipHop: Atlanta because of the ways it projects itself for a diverse audience based largely in the intricacies of black lived experience; in this way, it is unlike many more popular or mainstream shows in that it willingly confronts major sociopolitical issues like the killing of black men by the police. Eliza selected Gilmore Girls to move us away from just focusing on reality television and to consider more traditional television programming, as well; in particular, she examined the 2016 sequel miniseries A Year in the Life for the ways it ‘holds over’ the colorblind ideology of the 1990s and early 2000s and makes the show feel socially asynchronous to contemporary conversations.
In mapping out and writing these respective papers, I was motivated to consult Laurie Ouellette and James Hay’s excellent book Better Living with Reality Television. Their work on the educative and public functions of reality television has been meaningful to how I teach this genre in multiple courses, and it felt useful to think about how reality’s civic functions also entail the obfuscation of particular politics both within the show and against the contextual circumstances of a program’s production and broadcast. We decided the best strategy for our posts was to use close reading of key moments and sequences from the series we selected, and to bolster those close analyses with some consideration of reception, which entails a mixture of news reports and social media chatter. This discourse was treated as largely secondary, as a means to support the analysis developed of the programming itself.
The contributions to this series all come from a desire to frame how “being apolitical” is itself a political choice, a decision not to engage in prevalent issues that shape the daily practices of many viewers of these programs. Be it in the ways Gilmore Girls centers white women or the ways Big Brother’s producers try to rehabilitate racist contestants through editing, the elision of politics has consequences for how. It is not—and, certainly, never has been—possible to disarticulate politics from entertainment, from consumption, and from daily life, a lesson that has been key to cultural studies’ commitments to mapping cultural politics.
The posts in this series offer some provisional analysis and pathways for considering how we might use carefully attenuated textual analysis to examine the distinct ways politics both appears in and disappears from television programming. We are pleased to present this work and hope you will enjoy reading it.
