Events

Hunter Hargraves
Department of Cinema and Television Arts
California State University, Fullerton

Over twenty-five years into contemporary reality television’s legacy as a cost-effective and popular genre, the genre has invited a “reckoning” auguring around the relationship to its labor and its fandoms, reaffirming what Eve Sedgwick might have identified as a paranoid reading of the genre that spotlights its reflexivity, negativity, and investment in exposure. This talk tests whether Sedgwick’s counterpoint to the hermeneutics of suspicion—a process of reparative reading—can be applied to reality TV in its moment of reckoning, focusing on what I call the genre’s “polyamorous perversity.” Weaving together industrial accounts and analyses of reality ecosystems with close readings of reality dating series that feature either explicitly non-monogamous relationships or that indirectly encourage them, I ask how reality television demands that its participants and audiences invest in multiple romantic and social relationships to guarantee their success within neoliberal economies of celebrification.

Hunter Hargraves is Associate Professor of Cinema and Television Arts at California State University, Fullerton. He is the author of Uncomfortable Television (Duke UP, 2023), the editor of a special issue of Television & New Media on “Pandemic TV” (2024), and the author of several articles and book chapters on television and popular culture, affect, and representation.