Third International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

The reality television (RTV) docu-drama is a form made of other forms; its innovative, generic hybridity directs the viewer to derive a personalized viewing experience. While experience is foregrounded, the form creates and imposes on the viewer’s experience, what I term, affective precisions. This paper is invested in how these precisions arise from the formal specifications of the docu-drama’s hybridity, forging relations with the viewer to erase connection to economic realities of everyday experience. I utilize a visual, affective-based analysis of the docu-drama, “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” to examine how these precisions create an affective jostling in the endless paradox of an authenticity performed and derived from personal feeling and memory, replacing economic realities with the all-important choice of which side to choose. I argue that the docu-drama both mirrors and produces Americans’ political understanding and relationship to class realities. In a political climate that favors an authenticity determined by sidedness and a person’s wealth and status, we must turn our attention to the political potentialities of the RTV docu-drama in response to the class-based rights of the Trump administration.