Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy

Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy shifts current discussions of media and reality from the informative to the affective, from knowledge to feelings. In reality television, Misha Kavka argues, everyday ‘reality’ is the ground for an experience of immediacy, or televisual intimacy, that is self-evidently mediated and performed. The book explores this paradox by conceptualising the relation between affect and media. For Kavka, affect matters because the feelings generated across the screen are real in a material way. Investigating such concepts as publicity and privacy in reality TV families, performance technologies in Big Brother, arranged marriages in romance reality TV, and gender, race and sexuality in Survivor and Project Runway, she argues that affect is the core reality of a public sphere that is reconfigured by its viewing patterns. Renewing attention to the complexities of affective intimacies, this book offers the rich realities of feeling as a critical alternative to traditional communication models.

MISHA KAVKA teaches in the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is the co-editor of two books, Feminist Consequences (2001) and Gothic NZ: The Darker Side of Kiwi Culture (2006), and has published numerous articles on reality television, gothic film and feminist theory.