Reality Television

Dissertation (Ph.D.) — University of Illinois at Chicago, 2020.
Real Housewives (RH) is a global reality television franchise comprised of seven series in the United States. Dedicated to showcasing highly-feminized women, wealth, and materialism, RH gained prominence throughout the Great Recession. Since RH reached phenomenal status in popular culture at a time of economic insecurity and class resentment, I wondered what it might be communicating about class in the U.S. This research is grounded by a three-pronged approach to media, which includes textual analysis of media content, discussion of production, and audience reception (Kellner, 2011).

Dissertation (Ph.D.) — University of California, Los Angeles, 2017.
Celebrity is a cultural construct that tends to hide the complex labor processes that make it possible. This dissertation unpacks how celebrity status is the product of a great deal of seldom recognized work and calls attention to the hidden infrastructures that support the production, maintenance, and promotion of celebrity on reality television. Given particular forms of temporality involved in both television programming cycles and celebrity itself, this dissertation details how the management of time serves as a defining aspect of contemporary media branding.

Dissertation (Ph.D.) — Claremont Graduate University, 2020.
This dissertation investigates the ways that ideology is dispensed through popular media to drive the commodification of the self. These ideologies are reinforced in the televisual texts examined in this research with the use of self-reflexivity and metacommentary. The use of these tactics creates an onscreen illusion of transparency to co-opt the viewer with the suggestion of authenticity, familiarity, and openness to inscribe the televisual and its visual codes with meaning to perpetuate messages that support consumerism, hegemony, and power.

Dissertation (Ph.D.) — Rutgers School of Graduate Studies, 2018.
In the wake of the Great Recession (2007-2009), a subgenre of reality television (RTV) surfaced that focused on buying and selling old and used things, largely antiques and collectibles, at auctions, pawn shops, flea markets and other secondary market sites. This subgenre, which I have termed Trash and Treasure TV, included programs such as American Pickers (2010- present), Storage Wars (2010-present) and Flea Market Flip (2012-present), and emerged at the exact moment when people needed to cope with the consequences of the financial downturn. Following media theorists Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, Trash and Treasure TV is positioned here as a technique of governmentality that provided viewers with “how-to guides” for learning to participate in the secondary market.