Mapping Commercialization in Reality Television

Deery, June

doi:10.1002/9781118599594.ch1

Cited by 11 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…The regional theming of Top Chef places the franchise in direct proximity to and intimacy with United States history and identity. The fact that “Top Chef producers command fees of several hundred thousand dollars to locate the next season in a particular city or state” (Deery 2014, 13) suggests both that tourism industries view Top Chef as a viable arena for a location’s branding or rebranding and that Top Chef actively participates in how a region’s history and identity become conceptualized in the popular imaginary. Furthermore, as Oren’s (2013, 32; 2016, 245) work makes clear, cooking competitions serve as a cultural field for contesting and/or reinforcing the meanings of identity, esthetics/taste, and value.…”

Section: Structuring Top Chef: Genre Contestants Regionalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

There’s Certainly a Lot of History Here, But We’re Here to Roast Oysters: Afterlives of Trans-Atlantic Exchange in Top Chef: Charleston

Stowell

2022

Television & New Media

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This article reads the premiere episode of Top Chef’s fourteenth season, Top Chef: Charleston (2016), for its engagement with the history of slavery in the United States, arguing that Top Chef deploys acknowledgments of historical violences for the purpose of concealing those same violences. By analyzing the discursive and visual content of Charleston’s premiere’s elimination challenge, which required two chefs to cook head-to-head at a plantation, this article outlines how race shapes the action of Top Chef both overtly and covertly, emerging as an organizing factor for the program as a whole. Charleston’s premiere episode illuminates how history is repackaged into popular discursive and material formations, while also suggesting the potential for such formations to cohere around race in unexpected and unpredictable ways.

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Section: Structuring Top Chef: Genre Contestants Regionalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

There’s Certainly a Lot of History Here, But We’re Here to Roast Oysters: Afterlives of Trans-Atlantic Exchange in Top Chef: Charleston

Stowell

2022

Television & New Media

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“…According to the media industries scholarship on reality television, the success of the current format depends almost entirely upon its enmeshment with the professionalised social media infrastructures we outline above (e.g. Deery 2014). In this sense RuPaul's Drag Race is a representative case of a broader logic.…”

Section: Enter Rupaul's Drag Race: Drag and Social Media Convergencementioning

confidence: 99%

FromParis is Burningto #dragrace: social media and the celebrification of drag culture

Feldman

Hakim

2020

Celebrity Studies

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This article examines the celebrification of drag culture in the USA, and reflects on social media's role therein. This transformation is contextualised historically by charting the evolution of drag media representation from the subversive drag collectives immortalised in arthouse documentaries like The Cockettes (2002) to the emergence of highly-polished, brand-conscious celebrity drag entrepreneurs propelled to fame by the reality television programme RuPaul's Drag Race (2009-).The success of RuPaul's Drag Race (RPDR) has lent drag unprecedented levels of mainstream visibility. In so doing, we argue that RPDR has facilitated drag culture's move from the fringes to the mainstream, and contributed to drag's celebrification. In the second half of the article, we draw on celebrity studies and self-branding literatures to outline the central role that social media have played in the celebrification of drag culture. We also critique the politics this celebrification props up. Through analysis of queen-generated content on social media platforms, and of RPDR transcripts, we home in on the ethics of drag's celebrificationspecifically the ways it supports homonormative narratives of the 'good queer' (Duggan 2003), and delimits the sorts of queer bodies and politics that are acceptable in the mainstream.

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“…aptly observes that "one of reality television's strongest claims to realism is its representation of the increasingly commercialized nature of everyday life in societies that produce this programming." 29 The form's devotion to workplaces, shopping, makeovers, entrepreneurialism, and especially building personal and family brands, amply attests to its high degree of investment in the personal as commercial. The concern with livelihoods under threat and the need for personal economic resourcefulness has unsurprisingly emerged as a focus of concern in the genre after the financial crisis and Christopher Lockett was among the first to direct scholarly attention to the proliferation of "working men" reality television series in the recession.…”

Section: Male Culinary Performativity Midlife Hipsterism and Post-ramentioning

confidence: 99%

Culinary Entertainment, Creative Labor, and the Reterritorialization of White Masculinity

Negra¹,

Tasker²

2019

JCMS

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This article explores popular cultural themes of masculinity and mobility in the context of post-race and "end of men" discourses. Our attention is focused on sites of everyday culture, taking note of the tropes by which white male authority is fantastically recuperated through culinary entertainment. We read films such as Chef and television reality series such as Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives as sites of a re-terrorialization of white masculinity, exploring the nostalgic resonance of the road-trip and fantasies of mobility and plenty in a social/cultural context of privation and inequality.

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Mapping Commercialization in Reality Television

Cited by 11 publications

References 16 publications

There’s Certainly a Lot of History Here, But We’re Here to Roast Oysters: Afterlives of Trans-Atlantic Exchange in Top Chef: Charleston

There’s Certainly a Lot of History Here, But We’re Here to Roast Oysters: Afterlives of Trans-Atlantic Exchange in Top Chef: Charleston

FromParis is Burningto #dragrace: social media and the celebrification of drag culture

Culinary Entertainment, Creative Labor, and the Reterritorialization of White Masculinity

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