‘Authentic’ men and ‘angry’ women: Trump, reality TV, and gendered constructions of business and politics

Following Donald Trump’s rise from NBC’s The Apprentice (2004–2015) to President of the United States (2017), this chapter revisits my work on the business entertainment format (Kelly and Boyle, Telev New Media 12(3):228–247, 2011; Boyle and Kelly, The television entrepreneurs: social change and public understanding of business. Routledge, London, 2012) to reflect on the relationship between reality television, (self)entrepreneurship, and politics. I begin with an overview of the ways in which reality TV has impacted representations of business and politics onscreen. I then examine gendered constructions of ‘authentic’ men and ‘angry’ women before highlighting how regular television exposure has been converted into broader political capital around the world. Despite Trump’s embrace of Twitter through his late-night tweets, this chapter argues for the continued centrality of television in shaping understandings of Trump and political culture within a ‘post-TV’ age

The Bachelor: Whiteness in the Harem

This examination of the representation of whiteness and women of color in the reality-based television series The Bachelor shows how the series is “raced.” It is a context in which only white people find romantic partners, a process that women of color work to facilitate. The Westernized trope of the Eastern harem structures The Bachelor, duplicating in the series the imperialist, Orientalist, and oppressive racist premises of the harem trope