Inside Reality TV

Producing Race, Gender, and Sexuality on "Big Brother"

Ragan Fox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351660136
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television History & Criticism

In the summer of 2010, Ragan Fox was one of twelve people selected to participate in the twelfth season of CBS's reality program Big Brother. Offering a rare, autobiographical, and behind-the-scenes peek behind Big Brother 's theatrical curtain, Fox provides a scholarly account of the show's casting procedures, secret soundstage interactions, and viewer involvement, while investigating how the program's producers, fans, and players theatrically render identities of racial and sexual minorities. Using autoethnography, textual analysis, and spectator commentary as research, Inside Reality TV reflects on and critiques how identity is constructed on reality television, and the various ways in which people from historically oppressed groups are depicted in mass media.

1
Investigating the Reality TV Paradox

In the summer of 2010, I competed in the twelfth season of CBS’s reality show Big Brother. New friends and professional colleagues sometimes ask what motivated me to be on a reality show. “A college professor isn’t the type of person I picture on those programs,” they sometimes say. I admittedly sacrificed my scholarly ethos when I hopped onto a ten-foot-tall, slippery hot dog to win power in the house. Telling a fellow houseguest that she resembled a “red-feathered parrot from hell” certainly did not help my case for tenure.

The full and suffocating weight of the “Why participate?” question felt its heaviest the morning after Season 12’s finale. My department chair Amy called with an ominous message the night after the season ended and CBS released me back to the wild. She instructed me not to return to teaching until I met with the university’s high-level administration and attorneys. Beads of sweat tangoed from my armpits to the bony ends of my pelvis. Was I going to be fired? The show primarily takes place over summer vacation, so it was not like I dropped the ball on my work obligations. Before I moved into the house, I painstakingly worked with my department chair to prepare online lessons for fall class days I might miss, should I make it into latter weeks of the game. What could this meeting be about?

I had heard horror stories about so-called super fans of the program trying to get houseguests fired from their jobs. The show’s 24-hour Internet feed provides opportunities for viewers to capture, isolate, and edit particularly unflattering moments and electronically send the audio and visual material, without context, to employers. Before moving into the house, I learned that a few overzealous audience members worked to have Season 6 winner Maggie Ausburn fired from her nursing job after she allegedly admitted to unsavory aspects of her past. Imagine being recorded around the clock. Nearly every word you utter is transcribed by a viewer and then posted to one of the many fan websites dedicated to Big Brother. Any dark or funny tale you tell can be ripped from its larger narrative and used as ammunition against you. This is a nightmare scenario for a queer academic with an acerbic, often inappropriate sense of humor. Would I be the next Maggie?

After listening to Amy’s message, I spent a panicked-filled day preparing to convene with university administrators. I brainstormed questions they might pose and rehearsed answers. “Rehearse” carries the unflattering connotation of a ruse, as if my responses were an insincere performance designed to retain my academic post. I felt like the flawed protagonist of Gillian Flynn’s novel-turned-movie Gone Girl, wherein a man self-consciously and uncomfortably performs the role of a husband who did not kill his wife. The character narrates how performing innocence feels inauthentic even though he is innocent of the crime.

As a performance studies scholar, I am intimately familiar with performance’s deleterious associations. U.S. history is rooted in an anti-performance bias. In the late nineteenth century, Victorian Americans believed prostitutes and depraved men occupied U.S. playhouses. Members of high society condemned “the stage’s use of illusionistic devices such as scenery, makeup, and costuming, all of which aimed at seducing the unwary away from reality into a false world of fantasy.”¹ I use terms like “rehearse,” “audience,” and “performer” throughout this book in a culturally reflexive manner. I work against Puritanical traditions that view performance as immoral, unethical, and false. This project is in part a dance through murky territory that blurs lines between manipulating self-presentation and simply being.

“It’s show time,” I thought, as I sat in a musty university conference room across from six men in suits. A bald guy at the end of the table pulled a Dictaphone from his briefcase, pressed a button, and explained that our discussion would be recorded. Why would he have to record our conversation? Blood rushed to my face. The fast-paced, percussion-beat of my breath dizzied me. “We just have to know,” one of the guys mumbled, “Why’d you do it?”

I explained that I study the ways in which gay identity is performed on stage, in mass media, and in everyday life situations. Big Brother provided a unique opportunity for me to position myself inside television’s apparatus of production. I got a chance to be Toto from The Wizard of Oz. This was my chance to draw back reality TV’s curtain and see how the wizard creates television magic. Involvement in the show seemed an ideal trajectory of my research agenda. “Think of all the articles about the experience I’ll be able to write,” I argued. “Who knows? I might even author a book about what it’s like to be an academic insider inside reality TV.”

Naïve when I signed up for the show, I earnestly believed that the university would hold viewing parties, where students and colleagues cheered me on as I competed for the half-million-dollar grand prize. It was not until I was sitting in a conference room with lawyers and administrators that I realized how much I put on the professional line when I agreed to be a houseguest. “Holy shit,” I thought. “I might lose my job.” If I had waited one more year, I would have at least been somewhat protected by academic tenure. But no, I had to be the bonehead who went on a reality show one year before he was awarded job security. Spoiler alert: University administrators docked my pay for the work days I missed and chastised me for not going through the appropriate administrative channels to “ok” my participation on a reality TV show; but they did not fire me.

The Ins(iders) and Out(siders) of Reality TV

Inside Reality TV offers a rare, autoethnographic, and behind-the-scenes account of my experiences on and off the set of CBS’s Big Brother. Operating as a reality TV insider and gay academic, I reflect on the show’s casting procedures, my interactions with producers, and viewer feedback. Borrowing from Media Studies critic John Corner, I investigate how

Big Brother operates its claims to the real within a fully managed artificiality, in which almost everything that might be deemed to be true about what people do and say is necessarily and obviously predicated on the larger contrivance of them being there in front of the camera in the first place.²

Positioned inside television’s representational machine, I investigate how the program’s producers, fans, and players theatrically render contestants from historically marginalized groups.

In the context of reality television, sexual minorities and people of color are often reduced to stereotypes. Emphasis on character production challenges a common misconception about reality TV, namely that reality TV contestants are not actors because they “play” themselves. Inside Reality TV examines how reality TV producers, participants, and fans tokenize people from marginalized groups via racist, homophobic, and sexist tropes of representation. I utilize two primary research methods: autoethnography and textual analysis. I turn to autoethnography to theorize my experiences on the set of Big Brother. Other research methods would not provide immediate, ongoing, and in situ access to the Big Brother house, nor would CBS likely permit non-affiliated investigators to enter the show’s immediate contexts, like the program’s soundstage, casting interviews, and sequester house.

Second, I use spectator commentary to triangulate my autoethnographic observations and theorize how some audience members interpret gay contestants and houseguests of color. I call this method of Media Studies inquiry performative spectatorship, which is a concept I elaborate on in future chapters. Textual analysis of fan discourse illustrates how race, gender, and sexuality are interpreted and discussed by the show’s viewers. The methodological act of comparing my story to viewer response helps me establish a dialogic relationship between my self-conscious enactments of identity and audience-oriented readings of other marginalized people. The book works like a mosaic in which my personal reflections, the CBS edit of the program, viewer feedback, and media theory comprise a bigger tale about how identity may be constructed on a reality show and understood by viewers. On a broader level, I build upon research that critiques the various ways in which people from historically oppressed groups are depicted in mass media.

Many reality TV–oriented texts, like Andrejevic’s Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched and Biressi and Nunn’s Reality TV: Realism and Revelation, detail the genre’s history and development. In Reality TV: Audiences and Factual Entertainment, Annette Hill considers how reality programming exemplifies Erving Goffman’s notion of everyday life performance. Grounding reality TV in performance theory is crucial given the genre’s theatricality and meticulous production. Other authors opt for a more precise focus by examining gender and race on particular reality TV programs. Rachel Dubrofsky’s The Surveillance of Women on Reality Television investigates ABC’s The Bachelor and The Bachelorette and exposes strategies TV producers utilize to theatrically render gender and race. Rachel Silverman’s anthology The Fantasy of Reality similarly concentrates on representations of race, gender, and sexuality on Bravo’s The Real Housewives franchise. Like Dubrofsky, the authors featured in Silverman’s collection do not have backstage access to the shows they critique. My opening chapter in The Fantasy of Reality demonstrates the limitations of this mode of critical inquiry. As an audience member, I am restricted in what I can say about The Real Housewives. Most viewers are not privy to conversations that take place when cameras stop rolling, nor do they witness producers prompt the cast to act a certain way, such as the time a Big Brother field producer requested that I deliver a bigger, more “Ragan” response to a controversial revelation. Inside Reality TV extends book-length intellectual considerations of reality TV offered by Andrejevic, Hill, Biressi and Nunn, Silverman and Dubrofsky by examining the concomitant relationship between Big Brother’s process of production and the final product that airs on CBS.

Big Brother is Watching and Watching Big Brother

Big Brother is one of network television’s two longest-running primetime reality programs. Premiering three months after ratings juggernaut, Survivor, Big Brother failed to match its sister program’s popularity. Media scholar Derek Foster attributes Survivor’s success to its competitive, win-at-all-costs format. He suggests that the program’s “Outwit, Outplay, Outlast” credo serves as a “microcosm of American values.”³ Survivor divides its cast into two tribes and forces contestants to vote one another out of the game. “Just as in real life,” Foster observes, “carefully chosen alliances and strategic friendships could bring success on Survivor. The brand of reality depicted on Survivor reinforced the widespread notion that self-interest ultimately trumps self-reliance.”⁴

Big Brother, with all its Orwellian undertones, focused more on the voyeuristic aspects of reality television and downplayed competition in its premiere season. Fifty-two cameras and 95 microphones recorded ten strangers living in the Big Brother house. Each week, houseguests voted on two roommates for possible banishment, who then had their fate put in the audience’s hands. A telephoned-in audience vote determined which of the two nominated players would be the week’s evictee.

Week by week, viewers eliminated one player from the game until only two contestants remained: a 21-year-old, muscled leg-amputee named Eddie McGee and a 23-year-old former Gap model named Josh Souza. McGee and Souza embodied the very sort of elusive demographic CBS hoped to entice. Performing young, White masculini...