True Story: What Reality TV Says about Us

by Danielle J. Lindemann

If anyone shows us that gender can be performed, it’s the contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race. They (for the most part) give their testimonials in men’s clothing and then we watch them metamorphose, swiping blush across their faces, donning evening gowns, and strutting confidently in stilettos. Their femininity is more amped up than the typical Bachelor contestant’s, their lashes stretching out longer than Ashley I.’s. But while their performances are extreme, they’re doing what most of us do every day. As the sociologists Candace West and Don Zimmerman have pointed out, we’re all socialized to “do gender” from a young age.2 We may not be on a literal stage getting judged by comedians and reality stars, but we display our maleness or femaleness for an audience of others who have the same understandings of what it means to be a boy or a girl. As RuPaul has exclaimed on the show, “May the best woman win!” From flouncy little girls to aggressive men, reality TV’s larger-than-life characters show us how we’ve all been groomed to meet certain gender expectations. They expose gender as a social construction that is buffered by questionable assumptions about who is naturally suited for what behaviors and what roles. And they teach us that gender works on two levels: it’s something we perform every day, but it’s also a broader system that stretches over all of our lives and fundamentally impacts the way society operates.