WARNER, Helen

They’ll make you believe in love’: Gender Politics and Narratives of Fame in E!’s ‘Reality Star Sitcoms’

 

From its inception in 1990, the cable network, E! Entertainment Television was designed to ‘take the People magazine and Entertainment Tonight concept to the video max with 24 hours of gossip, celebrity interviews and entertainment-industry news’ (Gerard 1990). However, in recent years, the channel has become increasingly known for its original programming in the form of reality television. Shows such as Keeping up with the Kardashians (and its various spinoffs), Kendra, Married to Rock and Ice Loves Coco currently dominate prime time. These shows can be viewed as ‘reality star sitcoms’ as defined by Gillan (2004) insofar as they combine ‘Reality TV surveillance filming …[and] the sitcom’s focus on internal family roles… [with an] emphasis on the interplay between everyday social roles and star personalities’ (Gillan, 2004: 54). Consequently, E! Entertainment Television plays an important role in shaping the contours of contemporary celebrity culture and the celebrity couple.

This paper identifies and explores several recurrent themes which emerge within a selection of E! reality star sitcoms. These include; tensions between the public and the private; the construction of fame narratives (and its ideological implications for contemporary celebrity culture); and finally the preoccupation with ‘appropriate’, or perhaps more accurately ‘inappropriate’ models of femininity.

Building on the work of feminist critics, this paper engages with broader issues related to gender politics, postfeminism, and celebrity culture and argues that these representations of contemporary celebrity couples serve to reinforce normative concepts of gender which structure attitudes towards femininity and feminism.

 

Dr. Helen Warner is a Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies in the School of Political, Social and International Studies, University of East Anglia.

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