Queer(ing) reality television : authenticity, embodiment, and transmedia circulation

At first glance, the meeting of queer theory and reality television may appear an unlikely partnership. After all, television has historically been cast as the most ordinary and commonplace of media forms, while queerness is defined against these same norms. Beyond long-standing criticisms of its limited LGBTQIA+ representation, reality TV has been dismissed as inherently normative: too commercial, derivative, or morally suspect to challenge cultural convention. Disputing this perceived incompatibility, my thesis argues that reality television holds significant value for queer theory. Rather than assessing programmes through the binary of “good” versus “bad” representation, I explore how reality TV’s formal and affective modes of representation can themselves be read as queer. Across these analyses, the thesis interrogates how reality television’s formal hybridity makes visible the contradictions through which queerness is produced and understood. Its cyclical rituals of confession and performance expose the unstable foundations on which notions of “queer authenticity” are constructed; its choreographies of the body reveal how queer embodiment is disciplined yet continually exceeds containment; and its transmedia networks extend and disrupt televisual boundaries, reconfiguring queer visibility through digital curation and fan participation. Taken together, I argue these intersecting logics position reality television not as antithetical to queerness but as one of its most generative cultural forms — a shifting terrain through which the meanings of gender and sexuality are continually performed, contested, and reimagined.