“Literally Love at First Sight”: Women’s Homosociality in the Docusoap

Despite popular understandings of the docusoap genre of reality television being about drama and bad behavior, friendship between women is the organizing logic of these shows’ social worlds, running the spectrum from contentious relationships to close friendships to diegetic expressions of homoerotic attraction. Through the framework of homosociality—which suggests a porous boundary between the platonic and the erotic—I attend to the implications of these polysemous relationships, focusing on the displacement of heterosexual unions to the narrative periphery, the quasi-political ethic of women’s homosociality, and the metaphor of marriage that is frequently used to define women’s friendships in the genre. The constructed social worlds of these highly produced and mediated programs are largely predicated on homosocial arrangements. Ultimately, docusoap homosociality is productively ambiguous, suggesting alternative forms of social organization outside of and beyond the marital home.