Consuming the Fractured Female: Lessons from MTV's The Real World

Abstract

Using MTV's popular long-running program The Real World as a case study, this essay examines the interrelationship of the construction and consumption of bodies in an increasingly surveillance-based, commercial, hybrid media culture. This article is part of a larger project that employed a multi-method approach grounded in feminism combining textual data from The Real World with interviews with producers and female fans of The Real World. The author investigates how Real World viewers make sense of the series' claims to the real, using the body as the site of cultural production. Two key frames of bodies on The Real World are identified: the troubled body and the heteronormative body. The analysis is situated among studies of media realism to interrogate the context in which real women today are recreated as the “fractured female” in popular culture. The author argues that scholars should continue in a move toward interdisciplinary approaches that link the cultural with the capital and offers the body as a major site of cultural production and reception.

Notes

1. The second phase of the study consisted of individual interviews over the course of a 3-day visit in June 2006 with four top executives at Bunim/Murray Productions, the company that produces The Real World, including co-creator and executive producer, Jon Murray, and the vice presidents of casting, stories, and editing. See Appendix C for the flexible interview guide. Responses were transcribed, read through four times, and grouped by themes per Glaser's constant comparative method, which I then analyzed using the rhetorical methods of corporeal feminism. The third phase was the completion of a textual analysis of the 25 episodes of the Key West season, which aired from February to August 2006. Like the interview portion of the study, I utilized Glaser's constant comparative method to tease out themes through multiple viewings.

2. Although responses were collected in individual face-to-face interviews, responses are grouped thematically to build a conversation about themes specific to the body and to contribute to my argument.

3. Paula was the only roommate to have her own episodes. Svetlana came in second with 12 narratives.

4. The larger study examined race in addition to gender, but this essay has been limited to the sexed, gendered body for space limitations.

Juarez, V. (2002, July 25). “Real” life. Newsweek web exclusive. Retrieved February 14, 2007.