Transgender idol: Queer subjectivities and Australian reality TV

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna McIntyre
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
The United States ◽  
Reality Tv ◽  
Normative Framework ◽  
Cross Pollination ◽  
Tv Shows ◽  
Tv Show

Transgender is a marginalised category to which reality TV has given visibility, yet it is usually overlooked in observations regarding the minority groups that have gained mainstream representation through these programmes. Popular Australian reality TV shows have provided a unique space for the constructive representation of certain queer subjectivities. The Australian reality TV contestants in question present gendering that embraces ambiguity, that is, they demonstrate the deliberate disruption and blurring of gender/sex category divisions. This article examines the ways in which Australian reality TV’s representations of transgender contestants remain robustly queer while also being negotiated and made palatable for ‘family’ television audiences. It asserts the reality TV shows that feature transgender performance orchestrate a balance between queer expression and its containment. This article also takes as a case study a particularly successful Australian transgender reality TV contestant, Courtney Act. It argues Act’s representation of queerness was ‘managed’ within the normative framework of mainstream television yet she is still significantly troubled by gender binaries during her time on Australian screen. In 2014, she appeared as a contestant on the United States’ queer-themed reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race and again proved to be a reality TV success. This transnational intersection of transgender performance signalled the productive possibilities of international cross-pollination in regard to affirmative reality TV representations of marginalised subjectivities. At the same time, however, it also revealed the localised nature of reality TV, even in those shows with an international queer appeal.

The Post-Soviet Diaspora on Transnational Reality TV

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Sadowski-Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
The United States ◽  
Reality Tv ◽  
1.5 Generation ◽  
Tv Show ◽  
Diasporic Identities ◽  
Russian Identity

This chapter examines Lifetime’s short-lived Russian Dolls and ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, a widely watched US reality TV show. Both shows exemplify the emergence of narratives that associate the post-Soviet diaspora with idealized accounts of turn of the twentieth century European immigrant adaptation and upward mobility. While they focus on 1.5 generation immigrant participants, many of whom likely came to the United States as religious refugees, the two shows consistently represent their emerging collective “Russian” identity as just another ethnicized version of pan-European whiteness. Post-Soviet migrant cast members are portrayed as following in the footsteps of idealized and homogenized early European migrants, and they are set in firm opposition to Latina/os. The chapter also examines media commentary surrounding the two shows, interviews with participants, their social media posts, and their participation in a Ukrainian TV show where their identity is differently constructed to highlight migrants’ engagement with growing anti-immigration sentiment and their efforts to establish new collective transnational and diasporic identities, which are not represented on DWTS and Russian Dolls.

Gendered differences in emigration and mobility perspectives among European researchers working abroad

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Scheibelhofer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Strategy ◽  
The Future ◽  
Highly Skilled

This paper focuses on gendered mobilities of highly skilled researchers working abroad. It is based on an empirical qualitative study that explored the mobility aspirations of Austrian scientists who were working in the United States at the time they were interviewed. Supported by a case study, the paper demonstrates how a qualitative research strategy including graphic drawings sketched by the interviewed persons can help us gain a better understanding of the gendered importance of social relations for the future mobility aspirations of scientists working abroad.

‘A Routh O’ Auld Nick-Nackets’ – the antiquarian collection of John Rae

2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Representative Case ◽  
National Museums ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The University

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.

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