The Surveillance of Women on Reality Television: Watching The Bachelor and The Bachelorette (Critical Studies in Television) [Hardcover]

Rachel E. Dubrofsky (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 17, 2011 | ISBN-10: 0739164988 | ISBN-13: 978-0739164983

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's 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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

With brilliant intellectual acuity, feminist scholar Rachel Dubrofsky delivers an insightful and nuanced contribution to the growing literature on reality television. (Ronald L. Jackson II, editor of Critical Studies in Media Communication and author of Scripting the Black Masculine Body in Popular Media )

Dubrofsky's book powerfully illuminates the raced and gendered emotional economy that is the stock and trade of The Bachelor, and the reality TV industry more broadly speaking. No other book reveals the ideological, economic and affective work that race and gender performance do in reality television. Drawing methods from genre and TV studies to critical race studies and political economy, Dubrofsky sheds crucial light on the reality TV enterprise and its gendered and racialized fundamentals. Focusing on the The Bachelor Industry's construction of romantic failure, its injunction to women to be authentically real and its mobilization of the therapeutics of surveillance, Dubrofsky reveals the ways of seeing gender, race and sexuality that structure current reality TV production: from the deployment of surveillance in the female TV confessional to the emotional "money shot" to the re-centering of white heterosexual femininity via the marginalization of women of colour. The Surveillance of Women on Reality Television is a compelling read. It makes an important contribution to feminist media studies and is a highly teachable book. (Carrie A. Rentschler, McGill University )

The Bachelor seems like a simple game show; season after season, women and men are just “looking for love.” Rachel Dubrofsky accepts the offer to attend ABC’s bachelor party and, with great analytic dexterity, critiques reality television’s guilty pleasures, asking how its stories actively construct raced and gendered bodies. Without suggesting we give our pleasure up, she insists we engage the work The Bachelor Industry does and the way it produces citizens. Dubrofsky ably demonstrates that the quest for love is a story that cannot be told outside of existing logics of whiteness, femininity, and romance. (Michele Byers, Saint Mary's University )

About the Author

Rachel E. Dubrofsky is assistant professor in the Department of Communication at University of South Florida.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 174 pages
• Publisher: Lexington Books (June 17, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0739164988
• ISBN-13: 978-0739164983
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 0.7 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,319,285 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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