Reality TV and Queer Identities: Sexuality, Authenticity, Celebrity by Michael Lovelock (review)

Reality television's genesis as a commercial force took place at the turn of the century. In subsequent years, media and cultural studies scholars have produced a rich body of work concerning this cultural form. In recent years, RuPaul's Drag Race has significantly grown its audience and cultural reach, and Bravo's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy has been revived and retooled for Netflix. These developments, among others, have positioned inquiry into the relationship between queerness and reality television as a fruitful endeavor. It is against this backdrop that Michael Lovelock's monograph, Reality TV and Queer Identities: Sexuality, Authenticity, Celebrity, has emerged.

Lovelock, following David M. Halperin, takes "queer" to mean that which is opposed to dominant norms, and heteronormativity in particular. He uses the term interchangeably with sexual minority and LGBTQ, and although he acknowledges that "vectors such as race and class" lead to "divergent experiences of oppression" for queer people, he nonetheless emphasizes what he labels the "ultimately shared position" that queer individuals occupy relative to heteronormativity (27). It is from this perspective that Lovelock enters the conversation on reality television's representations of queerness. However, as the introductory chapter makes clear, he does not seek to interrogate the accuracy of such representations. Instead, Lovelock views reality television's representations as constitutive of how "non-heterosexual and gender non-conforming identities have come to be understood within contemporary cultural life" (4).

In the opening chapter, Lovelock introduces the concept of "compulsory authenticity" (4), the guiding analytic and a primary contribution of his work. He develops this concept in service of his argument that reality television propagates the notion that all individuals possess an authentic self that they must cultivate, and that this notion has been instrumental in shaping how queer individuals are "made sense of in contemporary Anglo-American popular thought" (8). In particular, Lovelock's study regards reality television in the UK and the United States, and he refers to a range of shows that includes talent programs like American Idol and The X Factor, intimate stranger programs like Big Brother and The Real World, docusoaps like The Hills, and more.

Though Lovelock does not explicitly justify his focus on these nations, his decision reflects the tendency of television studies to privilege British and US programming.¹ Although media exports from the UK and the United States possess undeniable global importance and have long been implicated in discussions of media imperialism, it is important to note that reality television programs are often widely adapted to audiences in different nations and, in the process, "indigenized to suit" them.² Thus, although Lovelock's work cannot speak to the discursive significance of reality programming on a global scale, it does point toward possibilities for studies that trace how discourses of compulsory authenticity are disseminated, modified, omitted, or contested in various adaptations of these powerful nations' programs.

In his second chapter, Lovelock theorizes that reality programming in general has fundamentally reimagined the broadcast audience. Whereas traditional broadcasting, he argues, conceived of audiences as heteronormative nuclear families, reality television producers understand audiences as a collection of atomistic, unique individuals (39). Through a detailed historical analysis, Lovelock demonstrates that reality television crafted a "mode of address" that did not assume a heteronormative family structure but was instead was characterized by an "investment in the power and value of authenticity" and thus included individuals who fell outside of heteronormativity (51).

Moving into the third chapter, Lovelock seeks to demonstrate how, in his words, "being openly queer has become consolidated as a mode of being authentic" (66). It is important to note that reality television is shown to often reveal how heteronormativity works to impede self-expression and create environments wherein queer individuals can only express their authentic selves in "partial" processes of "selective intimacies, quarantined confessions and calculated revelations and withholdings" (70). In reality television's landscape, heteronormativity becomes fraught because it prevents individuals from true self...