3 Keeping Up with the Aspirations: Commercial Family Values and the Kardashian Brand

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. CONTENTS vii
3. Acknowledgments xi
4. Introduction Trash Talk: Gender as an Analytic on Reality Television 1
5. PART I. The Pleasures and Perils in Being Seen
6. 1 The “Pig,” the “Older Woman,” and the “Catfight”: Gender, Celebrity, and Controversy in a Decade of British Reality TV 37
7. 2 Reality TV and the Gendered Politics of Flaunting 54
8. 3 Keeping Up with the Aspirations: Commercial Family Values and the Kardashian Brand 76
9. 4 When America’s Queen of Talk Saved Britain’s Duchess of Pork: Finding Sarah, Oprah Winfrey, and Transatlantic Self-Making 97
10. 5 Wrecked: Programming Celesbian Reality 123
11. PART II. Citizenship, Ethnicity, and (Trans)National Ident
12. 6 Abject Femininity and Compulsory Masculinity on Jersey Shore 149
13. 7 Supersizing the Family: Nation, Gender, and Recession on Reality TV 170
14. 8 “Get More Action” on Gladiatorial Television: Simulation and Masculinity on Deadliest Warrior 192
15. 9 Jade Goody’s Preemptive Hagiography: Neoliberal Citizenship and Reality TV Celebrity 211
16. PART III. Mediated Freak Shows and Cautionary Tales
17. 10 “It’s Not TV, It’s Birth Control”: Reality TV and the “Problem” of Teenage Pregnancy 235
18. 11 Intimating Disaster: Choices, Women, and Hoarding Shows 259
19. 12 Freaky Five-Year- Olds and Mental Mommies: Narratives of Gender, Race, and Class in TLC’s Toddlers & Tiaras 282
20. 13 Legitimate Targets: Reality Television and Large People 299
21. 14 Spectral Men: Femininity, Race, and Traumatic Manhood in the RTV Ghost-Hunter Genre 316
22. Bibliography 341
23. Videography 361
24. Contributors 369
25. Index 373