Reality television, affect and intimacy : reality matters / Misha Kavka.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kavka, Misha.

Series:

Language, discourse, society

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Reality television programs--History and criticism.

Reality television programs.

Reality television programs--Social aspects.

Physical Description:

xiv, 191 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Basingstoke [England] ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

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 in Big Brother, arranged marriages in romance reality TV, and gender, race and sexuality in Survivor and Project 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.

Contents:

1 Technologies of Intimacy 1

Television and presence 8

Liveness and the 'electronic community' 13

Mediation, reality, intimacy 20

2 Media and Affect: The Matter of Feeling 26

Theorising affect 29

Mediated personhood: mourning Princess Diana 37

Shame: watching television 45

3 The Mediation of the Public Sphere 49

On the public and publicity 53

On representation and representativity 58

Privacy, intimacy and the family 67

Reconfiguring the public sphere 74

4 Intimate Strangers: Big Brother and the Everyday 78

Space and strangers 83

Intimacy, banality and the 'z-axis' 90

Performance of the everyday: acting up for the camera 96

5 Real-Love TV: Romantic Epistemologies 104

Love and discrimination on Temptation Island 109

Bachelor/ettes and average Joes 113

The televisually arranged marriage 117

If It feels real 122

Performing emotion 127

6 The Public Sphere Queered 130

The trouble with queer 135

Reading television Quer 140

Race, sex and gender in Survivor 147

Reconfiguring the norm: Project Runway 156

Epilogue: Everyday Noise 162.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 166-186) and index.

ISBN:

0230545505

9780230545502

OCLC:

222666486

Online:

Contributor biographical information

Publisher description