Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy Reality Matters

by Kavka, Misha

• ISBN13: 9780230545502
• ISBN10: 0230545505
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-12-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy shifts current discussions of media and reality from the informative to the affective, from knowledge to feelings. In reality television, Misha Kavka argues, everyday 'reality' is the ground for an experience of immediacy, or televisual intimacy, that is self-evidently mediated and performed. The book explores this paradox by conceptualising the relation between affect and media. For Kavka, affect matters because the feelings generated across the screen are real in a material way. Investigating such concepts as publicity and privacy in reality TV families, performance technologies inBig Brother, arranged marriages in romance reality TV, and gender, race and sexuality inSurvivorandProject Runway, she argues that affect is the core reality of a public sphere that is reconfigured by its viewing patterns. Renewing attention to the complexities of affective intimacies, this book offers the rich realities of feeling as a critical alternative to traditional communication models.

Author Biography

MISHA KAVKA teaches in the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is the co-editor of two books, Feminist Consequences (2001) and Gothic NZ: The Darker Side of Kiwi Culture (2006), and has published numerous articles on reality television, gothic film and feminist theory.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Preface	p. x
Technologies of Intimacy	p. 1
Television and presence	p. 8
Liveness and the 'electronic community'	p. 13
Mediation, reality, intimacy	p. 20
Media and Affect: The Matter of Feeling	p. 26
Theorising affect	p. 29
Mediated personhood: mourning Princess Diana	p. 37
Shame: watching television	p. 45
The Mediation of the Public Sphere	p. 49
On the public and publicity	p. 53
On representation and representativity	p. 58
Privacy, intimacy and the family	p. 67
Reconfiguring the public sphere	p. 74
Intimate Strangers: Big Brother and the Everyday	p. 78
Space and strangers	p. 83
Intimacy, banality and the 'z-axis'	p. 90
Performance of the everyday: acting up for the camera	p. 96
Real-Love TV: Romantic Epistemologies	p. 104
Love and discrimination on Temptation Island	p. 109
Bachelor/ettes and average Joes	p. 113
The televisually arranged marriage	p. 117
If It feels real	p. 122
Performing emotion	p. 127
The Public Sphere Queered	p. 130
The trouble with queer	p. 135
Reading television Quer	p. 140
Race, sex and gender in Survivor	p. 147
Reconfiguring the norm: Project Runway	p. 156
Epilogue: Everyday Noise	p. 162
Notes	p. 166
Bibliography	p. 177
Index	p. 187
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