Reality TV Genres

Abstract

Since reality TV (RTV) emerged in the late 20th century, an array of subgenres has appeared that have focused on nearly all aspects of life, ranging from finding love, to attaining one's ideal aesthetic body, to generating an income. Beyond its “entertainment” value, RTV should be understood as a technology of intervention and representation that produces subjects and subjectivities through broadcasting ideologies, circulating discourses, and transmitting affects. This entry reviews the literature that has focused on RTV's treatment of gender and establish general categories for organizing programs into broad subgenres. These subgenres are discussed in the contexts of neoliberalism, postfeminism, postracism, and the crisis of masculinity, as the driving logics of contemporary cultures and societies around the world.