True Story: What Reality TV Says about Us

by Danielle J. Lindemann

What we experience as reality, often, is not universal and static but a shifting amalgam like Countess LuAnn. Who and what get to be seen as legitimate? Who takes a seat within the core of society, and who is confined to the margins? What constitutes an authentic family or a real childhood? Who’s allowed to be mean? How do we think about women and sexuality and racial minorities and wealth and our own bodies and what’s tasteful and what’s not? Reality television teaches us how the categories and meanings we use to organize our worlds are built on unsteady ground. These designations are “real” in the sense that they have significant repercussions—how high we ascend in the educational system, how much we earn, where we live, how healthy we are, how much other people respect us, and when we die. They’re real in terms of how we think about our own identities. But they aren’t “real” in the sense of historically transcendent and immutable. Ultimately, the genre exposes how our “reality” is largely a social reality—something humans created.