01 MW4 CAC 12249 TRUETT MU-115
This course examines the cultural politics of reality television with a focus on how these wildly successful shows, often perceived as guilty pleasures, have in fact been responsible for mediating important conversations around issues of identity, particularly race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. This course will provide a survey of reality TV as simultaneously an artifact and an archive of pop culture and mainstream politics. We will start with the “first” reality TV show An American Family, which aired in 1971, and examine the emergence of reality TV from more artistic genres of documentary and cinéma vérité, with particular emphasis on the Zimmerli Art Museum’s special exhibition Andy Warhol: On Repeat and associated public programming that may include guest lectures and performances. We will analyze the advent of so-called unscripted television of the 1990s and early 2000s, including shows like The Real World, Queer Eye, Jersey Shore, and Survivor alongside more contemporary shows like Keeping Up with the Kardashians, RuPaul’s Drag Race, The Real Housewives, and Love Is Blind. We will also consider contemporary art that has focused on the aesthetics of reality TV, including Julio Torres’s Fantasmas, Fake Friends’s This American Wife, and Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal.
In this course, students will develop practical skills of research and methodology; alongside viewings of shows and readings from theorists of queerness, race, feminism, and media, students will develop individual research projects about specific shows throughout the term, culminating in a symposium during which students will deliver their brief presentations.