Abstract
Ragan Fox’s Inside Reality TV combines queer theory and spectator commentary with autoethnography to provide a readable and accessible account of his experience as a contestant on the twelfth season of CBS’s version of the reality show Big Brother (2000–present). Fox chronicles his insider-perspective of the show’s casting procedures, soundstage interactions and fan engagement and, in addition, sheds light on the way in which reality television producers work to ‘theatrically render’ (p. 7) identities of racial and sexual minorities.
Fox opens the first chapter, ‘Investigating the Reality TV Paradox’, with a concise critical survey of reality-TV-oriented scholarship, including Rachel Silverman’s The Fantasy of Reality (2015). Fox positions Inside Reality TV as an important and necessary addition to this current body of academic work on the basis of his unprecedented access to the ‘inside’ of reality television production practices, as well as his autoethnographic approach. Drawing on Judith Butler’s (1993) theory of performativity, Fox posits the term ‘produced absence’ to denote situations in which Big Brother’s producers construct representational voids, such as ‘story editors failing to address in-game homophobia and racism and casting producers denying opportunities for a gay showmance’ (p. 8). The rest of the opening chapter consists of a ‘crash course’ in the rules and structure of Big Brother as well its racial and sexual dynamics, before moving into a more generalised discussion that centres predominantly around the performance of identity and the reiterative impact of gay tropes on TV. Finally, Fox turns to the experience and representation of people of colour on reality television, in particular the on-screen representation of the African American television personality and star of Netflix’s reboot of the reality show Queer Eye (2018–present), Karamo Brown.
Fox’s opening section, with its initial discussion of queer theory and identities before a final gesture to racial minorities, structurally foregrounds the rest of the book. Despite positioning ‘race’ as the first signifier in the book’s subtitle, out of five chapters only the fourth, ‘Performatively Spectating Houseguests of Colour’, is explicitly devoted to the representation of raced identities in Big Brother. In the context of Fox’s methodology, this makes sense. As an auto-ethnographic account of his experience and performance of his own sexuality as a White gay man, it follows that the majority of the book centres on his interactions, representation and memories. Subsequent chapters document, roughly chronologically, Fox’s experience as a contestant from initial casting to life after the show, with the text alternating between the subtitles ‘Being There’ and ‘Being Here,’ – a rhetorical device employed by Fox in order to document his experience, and subsequently critically reflect upon, his time before, during and after Big Brother. Fox writes the ‘Being There’ sections like a memoir or a novel in which he is the main character, before using the ‘Being Here’ sections to analyse his experiences, regularly referring to Foucauldian theories of sexuality and surveillance to unpick the choices and actions of the show’s producers and editors. In the book’s closing chapter, ‘Life After Big Brother’, Fox makes a compelling case for referring to Big Brother as one moving part of CBS’s ‘reality television-industrial complex’ (p. 131). Fox’s reworking of the phrase evokes the exploitative connotation of the industrial complex metaphor, which has been used by scholars (such as the Marxist geographer David Harvey) to characterise a range of state apparatus aimed at controlling the population – most prominently the US prison system’s economisation of incarcerated individuals in recent decades. Fox appropriates the term to highlight how CBS executives exploit reality television’s on-screen ‘talent’ (p. 131).
Fox thus provides a comprehensive breakdown of the phenomenon of reality television, specifically the production and viewing practices of Big Brother. What is lacking, however, is an explanation of what specifically he means by ‘race’. In the final section of the first chapter, Fox draws on a number of television articles about television that have documented the representation of race on-screen in recent decades, citing the work of Robin Boylorn (2008) to acknowledge that reality TV has largely ‘reinforced existing racialised mass-mediated caricatures’ (p. 19). But, while Fox draws on Butler’s use of the term ‘performative’ to argue that ‘in today’s mass-mediated environment, people largely learn “appropriate” performances of gender, race, and sexuality through television programs’ (p. 9), there is no explicit engagement with critical race theory or formative intersectional feminist scholarship, such as the seminal writing of Kimberle Crenshaw (1990). Without these critical conversations around raced identities being set alongside Fox’s engagement with Butler’s work, it feels as if discussions of race are sometimes secondary to discussions of queer identities within the text.
Inside Reality TV’s auto-ethnographic methodology is both its strength and its weakness. The foregrounding of this lived experience means that, almost by default, critical discussions of racialised identities and queer identities outside of Fox’s own experience as a cisgender, White, homosexual man sometimes fall by the wayside. But Fox’s ability to combine lived experience with critical theory succeeds in providing a new critical lens for television scholars, particularly undergraduates, to engage with the evergrowing phenomenon of reality television.