Contestants on ABC’s notorious reality dating show The Bachelor (and its spinoff The Bachelorette) frequently accuse their fellow competitors of not being there “for the right reasons”. The right reason, often implicitly stated, is generally expressed as the desire to find true love with the eligible suitor, while the wrong reasons then include most any other motivation and particularly those driven by the desire to acquire a measure of celebrity. A few channels over, contestants on CBS’s summer surveillance hit Big Brother use different language but hurl similar accusations that houseguests who are only there in hopes of becoming famous do not “deserve” the half-million dollar prize. Year after year, contestants and fans alike discuss which houseguests do and do not “deserve” the prize, with financial need often playing into the discussion (Griffen-Foley, 2004).
While both shows are masterfully edited to underplay the irony of reality television stars disparaging each other for engaging in self-promotion (Skeggs, 2009), there are similarities but also noted distinctions in the way the contestants communicate and perform these roles and identities across The Bachelor/ette and Big Brother. This paper uses thematic and discourse analysis to critically investigate the role of class in the performance and identity management of contestants. Both official content and paratextual content, including audience engagement, is examined in order to build on Grindstaff’s (2011) notion of ordinary celebrity and to interrogate class portrayals and reactionary attitudes among reality television stars and fans. As the analysis is intersectional, this research also draws from previous examinations of race, gender, and sexuality in reality television but focuses on the particular framing of class discourse (Tyler & Bennett, 2010).
Griffen-Foley, B. (2004). From Tit-Bits to Big Brother: A century of audience participation in the media. Media, Culture & Society, 26(4), 533-548.
Grindstaff, L. (2011). Just be yourself–Only more so: Ordinary celebrity in the era of self-service television. The Politics of Reality Television: Global Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 44-57.
Skeggs, B. (2009). The moral economy of person production: the class relations of self‐performance on ‘reality’television. The Sociological Review,57(4), 626-644.
Tyler, I., & Bennett, B. (2010). ‘Celebrity chav’: Fame, femininity and social class. European journal of cultural studies, 13(3), 375-393.
About the presenterCandice D. Roberts
Candice is Associate Professor of Communication and Director of the LGBTQ+ Center at St. John’s University.
They hold a PhD in Communication, Culture & Media from Drexel University and designed a transnational network ethnography of the CouchSurfing community and its function as a hybrid collective. More broadly their work examines cultural narrative and identity in popular media, and they are particularly interested in archetypes, consumer behavior, and sociality around themes of class, sexuality and space/place.