The Real World: Austin
Over the Thanksgiving break I spend about 30 minutes watching an old rerun of The Real World: Austin. Their show starts off by an introduction which claims that “this is the true story of seven strangers picked to live in a house and have their lives taped. Find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.” In my personal opinion I thought the show was extremely superficial in regarding to how “real” their lives were suppose to be. The show to me is very phony because a lot of what we see on T.V is edited to make it look like it all happened in a certain timeline. All the houses have cameras everywhere, and there's a clause in the contract of each housemate that says they're not allowed to go places where the cameras are not allowed in. Having cameras everywhere, I would assume that everyone puts on a certain act. Anyway in the show, there was a lot of drama, arguing, fighting, bitching, sex with strangers and drunkness. Throughout the show, the seven people living in the house demonstrates the concept that gender is indeed socially constructed and performed through their behaviors, how they carry themselves, what they wear, how they speak and what they do.
The episode that I watched was basically about one girl by the name of Johanna who is unclear about her love between Wes and a local bartender. On the subject matter of gender performance, Johanna was always emotional and did a lot of crying because she didn’t really know what she wants whereas Wes was always aggressive and acted tough and masculine. This image represents the stereotypes that women are weak and fragile whereas men are strong and stable.
Whenever going out, all the girls (except for one) are dressed in short mini-skirts, revealing tops and in high heels. The girl who didn’t wear such clothing (whose name is Lacey) was obviously the least popular one in the house and she is what I would consider to fall in the category of cultural imperialism. As Iris Marion Young stated in The Scaling of Bodies and the Politics of Identity, “cultural imperialism consists in a group’s being invisible at the same time that it is marked out and stereotyped.” Lacy is consider as deviant or the other just because she isn’t girly and feminine enough and as a result the guy in the house find her to be ugly and unattractive (hence the fact that all the other girls have some sort of relationship/bond with the guys in the house except for her). Regarding to look, The Real World has never hire a girl who is fat for the show and it seems like the show is always trying to add at least one person of color (tokenism) to downplay diversity. All in all, throughout the show it’s evident that the girls act in a different way from the guys. The girl being girlish and the man being manly. This goes to prove that the way people act reinforce their gender status as what it is to be a women or a men and as Tara Kachgal quoted “like talk shows, reality television potentially puts into questions rigid orthodoxies supporting “proper” gender and sexual identities” (The Real World).