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.

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.

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.

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.