A Vernacular of Surveillance: Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus Perform White Authenticity

This article looks at popular visual media in the context of the larger surveillance society in which it occurs. Bringing into conversation scholarship in feminist media studies, surveillance, performance, and critical race studies, the piece offers another way to explore race in popular media and consider the implications of surveillance. The work examines how principles from contexts of surveillance carry over into contexts not under surveillance. The article explores the vernacularization-the process of making things mundane, everyday, unremarkable-of ideas about authenticity and performing, and the implications when it comes to race issues, which are animated in contexts of surveillance, but exceed these and are apparent in contexts not under surveillance. Through a critical examination of Taylor Swift\u27s video Shake it off, and Miley Cyrus\u27s video We Can\u27t Stop, the author argues self-retlexivity marks their performing behavior as distinct from their authentic self, reassuring audiences there is an authentic (white) self under the performance. This authentic self is presented as stable, a core identity most naturally enacted by white bodies, brought into relief by performing otherness

The Surveillance of Women on Reality TV: Watching The Bachelor and The Bachelorette

Rachel E. Dubrofsky examines the reality TV series The Bachelor and The Bachelorette in one of the first book-length feminist analysis of the reality TV genre. The research found in The Surveillance of Women on Reality TV: Watching The Bachelor and The Bachelorette meets the growing need for scholarship on the reality genre. This book asks us to be attentive to how the surveillance context of the program impacts gendered and racialized bodies. Dubrofsky takes up issues that cut across the U.S. cultural landscape: the use of surveillance in the creation of entertainment products, the proliferation of public confession and its configuration as a therapeutic tool, the ways in which women\u27s displays of emotion are shown on television, the changing face of popular feminist discourse (notions of choice and empowerment), and the recentering of whiteness in popular media

The Surveillance of Women on Reality TV: Watching The Bachelor and The Bachelorette

Rachel E. Dubrofsky examines the reality TV series The Bachelor and The Bachelorette in one of the first book-length feminist analysis of the reality TV genre. The research found in The Surveillance of Women on Reality TV: Watching The Bachelor and The Bachelorette meets the growing need for scholarship on the reality genre. This book asks us to be attentive to how the surveillance context of the program impacts gendered and racialized bodies. Dubrofsky takes up issues that cut across the U.S. cultural landscape: the use of surveillance in the creation of entertainment products, the proliferation of public confession and its configuration as a therapeutic tool, the ways in which women\u27s displays of emotion are shown on television, the changing face of popular feminist discourse (notions of choice and empowerment), and the recentering of whiteness in popular media

Fallen Women on Reality TV: A Pornography of Emotion

The display of emotional women is a hallmark of many reality shows. Through the analysis of a woman in the reality TV show The Bachelor, who is originally presented as an attractive romantic prospect, but ultimately revealed as frighteningly over-emotional, the article suggests that this emotional display is akin to the “money shot” in film pornography (shot of the man ejaculating). The argument draws on feminist scholarship in pornography studies to illustrate how the representation of women\u27s emotions—of female bodies unable to contain intense bodily responses—provides the climactic moments of a story about women who fail at love. The work examines what is at stake in this process, asking: what is the threat posed by emotional women and how is this threat situated in a genre that claims access to the “real”

Jewishness, Whiteness, and Blackness on Glee: Singing to the Tune of Postracism

The Fox series Glee, with its self-conscious focus on issues of diversity, is a fitting location to examine ideas about race in a postracial mediascape. Looking at Rachel, who is Jewish, this work explores how the construction of her Jewishness functions to situate her as a disenfranchised ethnic minority with the same status as characters of color, at the same time as it grants her the privileges of whiteness. Examining Mercedes, a black character, the article argues she is only granted access to the privileges of whiteness when whitened. Ironic and self-conscious humor and the trope of the musical number are also integral to the analysis since these frame race issues in a postracial manner, foreclosing possibilities for critical engagement

The Bachelorette\u27s Postfeminist Therapy: Transforming Women for Love

In this chapter, the author looks at how postfeminist imperatives are aligned with therapeutic transformation in recent seasons of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette by conducting a close analysis of the presentation of the “real-life” stars of three seasons (five, six, and seven) of The Bachelorette - respectively, Jillian Harris, Ali Fedotowsky, and Ashley Hebert - and of their first appearances as participants on The Bachelor. The chapter focuses on how they are shown navigating the demands of career and love. It details how claims to emotional health and happiness are constructed within the space of the shows. The chapter explains how these claims animate key feminist concerns about postfeminist tensions between career and love, and the connections made between these tensions and ideas about therapeutic transformation. In many ways, the shows tell a fairly standard postfeminist story about the dangers of career ambition for white heterosexual middle-class women

Surveillance on Reality Television and Facebook: From Authenticity to Flowing Data

Aligning reality TV (RTV) with social networking sites (SNSs) enables the development of a geneology in the use of surveillance for displays of the self. By moving from “older” media such as TV to “newer” such as SNSs, we gain insight into how issues at stake for critical scholars studying surveillance practices shift when the spaces (and practices) of surveillance change. We bring into conversation work in surveillance studies, critical media studies, RTV, and new media, emphasizing the necessity of seeing connections between types of surveilled subjectivity in popular media as these contribute to a larger ethos about surveillance, subjectivity, data, and our engagement with the world. We suggest that Facebook brackets practices for synthesizing the contextualizing