Sorglig television: affekter, omdömen och känsloarbete

Abstract

Many of the existing debates about Reality TV overlook some of the obvious ways in which questions of intimacy are implicated in gender relations. In this article we want to open up a debate about how Reality TV’s creation of mediated intimacy induces a type of emotional labour through the performance of femininity. The realm of intimacy is one that has traditionally been associated with the feminine private sphere, but various commentators have marked out how public worlds, institutions and market forces have marshalled the intimate terrain into public spaces, using it to reinforce arguments of ‘normalcy’. We want to assess whether the blurring of the public/private distinction can offer a straightforward route to viewing pleasure through locating some of our findings from the 40 women that we interviewed about their own lives and the place of Reality TV within their broader life experiences. What we see on Reality TV is a visualisation of different performatives and demands. The distance between the practice of the viewer and the performer is minimised because both are subject to the requirements of feminine performances, particularly at the level of caring. The emotional labour of empathy is also bound up within moral judgements of value, especially visible in the use of the word ‘sad’. The ambiguity over ‘sad’ draws the female viewers of our study into an immanent emotional labour relationship at the same time as offering a space to critique.