Have you ever heard the term 'digital blackface'? The Real Housewives franchise has spawned a million gifs and opinions; all asking if this is how 'we'' should be represented- and what these shows mean for the community. For REFERENTIAL Episode 3 we’re examining that statement through a discussion of Bravo's Black led Real Housewives franchise (with some thoughts on the other casts sprinkled in). Do these shows reduce Black women to something problematic for mass entertainment? Or is it us who do that work because of our own hang ups?

Useful Quotes

Victoria Hurst: “Much as Eve has come to stand for the essential nature of all women, women on reality television also serve as the ultimate representations of feminine roles within American culture. It is not that Eve is no longer a force of her own within current understandings of gender, because she is still very much a presence, but as the media spectacle subsumes the role of more traditional forms of myth, its representations start to incorporate those traditional understandings and spin them to viewers in new ways. TRH franchise presents a fresh version of the Eve myth in that it depends on the assumption that the average female viewer, like Eve, is reaching for something that is either unattainable or deceptive in its destructive consequences, something beyond the restriction of the maternal body. However, the show also serves to confirm, like Eve’s story, that in reaching for the mythical perfection offered, women will inevitably fall short and will need to recognize their original place as social subordinates, retreating to the eternal feminine as their only true option.” 

Nicole B. Cox: “Achieving membership in the capitalist class is not good enough, as that membership is constantly tested and must constantly be proven in order to stay in good standing.”

Nicole B. Cox: “TRHW ideologically reinforces a class-based society as it makes clear that certain individuals should not be mistaken as members of the capitalist class. There are “true” members of the capitalist class and those who pretend.”

Dan Udy: “A continuity of cast members between seasons charts their development from ‘normal’ women to public figures, and in doing so the show produces a self-reflexive documentation of the perks and pitfalls of RealityTV fame ... After encountering their mediated representations the women react to their appearance on screen and in print, and as viewers we witness the trajectory of this peculiar phenomenon. By allowing the process of celebrification to feature within its tightly-edited narratives The Real Housewives maintains a precarious link between Reality and reality that carves its own space within a crowded genre whilst simultaneously undermining its numerous, and necessary, fictions.”

Alison Brzencheck & Mari Castañeda: “Mediated self performance --- a term used to note the presence of “ordinary” people performing as themselves --- offers a unique viewing experience due to the way this logic of immediacy functions as a space of identification and recognition in which the line between performing and viewing merge on a public stage” 

Alison Brzencheck & Mari Castañeda: “More specifically, Zarin referred to the Atlanta cast as a combination of female socialites and the Bad Girls Club, and she argued that this combination created a “twisted-bad-girls with cash” version of TRH (Huguenin 2009). Zarin’s effort to distinguish between TRH-AT and Bad Girls Club on the one hand, and the rest of TRH franchise on the other, has important significance given that the casts from the texts she is denigrating are primarily comprised of women of color.”