Friday, May 20 and Monday, May 23: “This American Wife” Screening and Talkback

Please join us for a viewing of “This American Wife” on Friday, May 20 at 5:00 pm in the Logan Center Screening Room; a reception will follow. Registration for the screening is required, and you can register at the following link.

Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley, the creators of “This American Wife,” will also join us for a virtual talkback on Monday, May 23 at 5:00 pm over Zoom; the link to register for the talkback is available here.


“This American Wife” is a multi-camera internet play about Bravo’s The Real Housewives written and performed by Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley and featuring Jakeem Dante Powell. The New York Times describes it as “a half-confessional, half-delusional treatise on gay men’s worship of TV’s ‘Real Housewives’ franchise” and provides the following summary:

“This American Wife” follows autofictional versions of Breslin, Foley and Powell as they arrive at a glamorous McMansion and recount their relationships to reality television and the impulse to humiliate oneself for attention. Fused with a litany of the Housewives’ actual phrases, the three performers detail personal, often traumatic, facts about themselves, echoing the franchise’s televised oversharing. And as their competing narratives become increasingly revealing and damaging, the show becomes a semi-improvised, high-concept dialectic on identity and “realness.”

You can read more about the show here.

Thursday, May 12: Wendy Osefo in conversation with Lauren Michele Jackson

 
Please join us on Thursday, May 12 at 5 – 6:30pm CDT for a conversation between Wendy Osefo (Assistant Professor of Education at Johns Hopkins University and star of Bravo TV’s The Real Housewives of Potomac) and Lauren Michele Jackson (Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University) on navigating the worlds of academia and pop culture.
 

This is a hybrid event. To reserve an in-person ticket, please register hereSeating at this event is extremely limited and registration is required to attend in person. If you can no longer attend, please cancel your registration so a spot can be released to those on the wait list. To attend virtually, please also register at the link above.


An award-winning researcher, Dr. Wendy Osefo is a Nigerian-American television personality and progressive political commentator. She has been interviewed by and frequently provides commentary for CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, and TV-One to name a few. She is a Contributor to The Hill, the Founder and CEO of the 1954 Equity Project, and is an Assistant Professor at The Johns Hopkins University. Most recently, Dr. Osefo joined the cast of the hit Bravo TV show Real Housewives of Potomac.

Dr. Lauren Michele Jackson is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of the essay collection White Negroes and is currently working on a second book, with Amistad Press. She is part of New America’s 2022 class of National Fellows.

Wednesday, April 13: Amanda Ann Klein on “The Real World Homecoming, Generational Reckoning, and the Rebooting of Reality TV’s Past”

Please join us Wednesday, April 13 at 5 – 6:30pm CDT for a virtual talk by Amanda Ann Klein (Associate Professor of Film Studies, East Carolina University), titled “The Real World Homecoming, Generational Reckoning, and the Rebooting of Reality TV’s Past.” You can register here and additional information is included below.

Title: The Real World Homecoming, Generational Reckoning, and the Rebooting of Reality TV’s Past.”

Description: When The Real World premiered on MTV in 1992, it promised viewers a rare opportunity to see American youth grapple with questions of racial, gendered, and sexual identity and difference that contemporary adults were also struggling to articulate. As some of the first reality TV participants, The Real World’s young, Gen X cast was unaware that their alternately immature and volatile conversations about hot-button social issues would become iconic, endlessly replayed, and revisited for decades, first on MTV, and later, on the internet. However, the 2021/22 Homecoming seasons of The Real World, airing on Paramount+, brought the original casts of Season 1 (New York) and Season 2 (Los Angeles) back together, this time as middle-aged adults. Homecoming provided a platform for Gen X to “re-do” these important debates from the past and reckon with their own youthful misunderstandings of identity politics. Although Gen X remains an absent presence in today’s generational discourses so focused on the tensions between Boomers and Millennials and Zoomers, The Real World Homecoming asks what happens when Gen Xers re-enter the reality TV spotlight for an opportunity to reboot the past.

Bio: Amanda Ann Klein is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the English Department at East Carolina University. She is the author of American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, & Defining Subcultures (University of Texas Press, 2011), Millennials Killed the Video Star: MTV’s Transition to Reality Programming (Duke University Press, 2021) and co-editor of Multiplicities: Cycles, Sequels, Remakes and Reboots in Film & Television (University of Texas Press, 2016). Her scholarship has also appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Jump Cut, Film Criticism, Flow, Antenna, Salon, The Atlantic, Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and The New Yorker.

Wednesday, March 30: Racquel Gates on “Aesthetics, Identity, and Legibility in Reality TV”

Please join us Wednesday, March 30, 5:00 – 6:30 PM for a virtual lecture by Racquel Gates (Associate Professor of Film and Media at Columbia University), titled “From Handheld to HD: Aesthetics, Identity, and Legibility in Reality TV.” The link to register can be found here, and additional information is included below.


Title: From Handheld to HD: Aesthetics, Identity, and Legibility in Reality TV

Description: Discussion of reality television has largely focused on narrative and characters. Particularly in matters of race, gender, and class, an emphasis on storylines – what happens and how – has seemingly made the most sense. While narrative analyses (including discussions about stereotypes and character tropes and how they function) are undoubtedly important, questions about style, form, and major historical developments have been underexplored when it comes to the “trashy” genre of reality television. In this talk, Gates examines shows like Mob Wives, Love & Hip Hop, and others to argue that an emphasis on style provides new insights into how race, gender, and sexuality function on reality tv, and in film and media more broadly.

Bio: RacquelGates is an Associate Professor of Film and Media at Columbia University. Her research focuses on blackness and popular culture, with special attention to discourses of taste and quality. She is the author of Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Duke, 2018), and is currently working on her second book, titled Hollywood Style and the Invention of Blackness. In 2020, she was named an Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

This event series is co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality Studies; the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture; the Department of Cinema and Media Studies; the Department of English; the Franke Institute for the Humanities; and the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture.

Friday, February 18

Please join the “Getting Real” working group for a Zoom discussion with the team behind Beverly Hill, on Friday, February 18, 4:30 – 6:00 PM.

We are delighted to welcome the team behind the puppet comedy series Beverly Hill. Beverly Hill, created by Marissa Fenley (UChicago, PhD Candidate in English and TAPS) and Madeline Mahrer (playwright and screenwriter, MFA, UCLA), explores the dynamics of rich housewifery by forcing it to adjust to a post-capitalist world. The team will be sharing their process and current stage of development with our working group; you can find more information on their project below. We look forward to discussing wigs, identity, and rich-bitch puppets with you all!


BEVERLY HILL

Wealthy White Women seem to be everywhere in popular culture from Desperate Housewives, to Big Little Lies, to the 10-years-and-running Real Housewives franchise. But what would happen to these monied women if they lost all means of currency? Our puppet comedy series, Beverly Hill, explores the dynamics of rich housewifery by forcing it to adjust to a post-capitalist world. This half hour pilot episode, which gestures towards a longer series, takes place after a global economic revolution and follows six formerly rich bitches—each represented by a 15” rod puppet— as they struggle to maintain their sense of self in a world that has left them behind. The six housewives now live together in a mansion on Beverly Hill, the last hill left standing in the one-time playground of the rich and famous. For the housewives, Beverly Hill is a safe haven from the revolutionaries who brought about the end of capitalism and their own personal apocalypse. To the rest of the world, Beverly Hill is a trash heap, and its mysterious mansion dwellers, delusional shut-ins who refuse to acclimate to a new world order without wealth gaps.

As we follow our six squaterettes—occupying a luxury home is a right and a privilege—throughout the episode, we learn about how they have managed to reconstruct modes of capital accumulation amongst themselves, a patriarchal hierarchy to which they subject themselves and each other in order to preserve the symbolic order of wifeliness, and fictional genealogies of Whiteness past, those storied lineages that whisper hereditary promises of restoring the housewives to their conditional roles of power. The show explores numerous inconsistencies built into the women’s identities, now exposed by the absence of an externally maintained system of wealth.

Friday, January 21

Tamra Judge Meme: That's My Opinion! - The Hollywood Gossip
Please join the “Getting Real” working group for a Zoom discussion
FRIDAY, January 21 at 4:30-6pm.
 
 
For this meeting, we ask that participants bring a clip/image/meme/article that speaks to what they find most fascinating/exciting/pleasurable about watching reality TV. We will think together about what creates this fascination: for example, the formal features of a scene and how it is shot, the memefication of an iconic line, the phenomenon of a cast reunion or cast trip, the gossip blogs, the podcasts, etc. There is no prior reading for this meeting. Just bring yourself and your enthusiasm for reality TV!

Wednesday, November 10

Please join the Getting Real working group Wednesday, November 10 (6:00 – 7:30 PM) for a Zoom discussion. We ask that participants read the below materials in advance; they will be circulated to our listserv and are also available on the website with password.

  • Racquel Gates, “Embracing the Ratchet: Reality Television and Strategic Negativity,” Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Duke, 2018)
  • Amanda Ann Klein, “‘If You Don’t Tan, You’re Pale’: The Regional and Ethnic Other on MTV,” Millennials Killed the Video Star (Duke, 2021)

We also include the following as (optional) recommended viewing:

  • Jersey Shore, Season 1, Episode 1 (“A New Family”)
  • Jersey Shore, Season 1, Episode 6 (“Boardwalk Blowups”)
  • Jersey Shore, Season 2, Episode 5 (“The Letter”)
  • Real Housewives of Atlanta, Season 5, Episode 21 (“Reunion Part 1”)
  • Real Housewives of Atlanta, Season 5, Episode 22 (“Reunion Part 2”)
  • Real Housewives of Atlanta, Season 5, Episode 23 (“Reunion Part 3”)

Episodes are available on Hulu, Peacock, and mtv.com.