Orientalist Representations in Reality TV: A Critical Discourse Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reality TV is an extremely popular TV genre, attracting millions of viewers worldwide. Its immense viewership calls for it to be taken seriously, specifically with respect to its role in exacerbating social inequalities. Previous scholarship has analyzed reality TV shows' representations of race, and audiences' rationale for watching reality TV. What is missing, however, are analyses of the broader ideologies, discourses and power relations encoded into reality TV content and communicated to the viewer through consumption that may influence audience consumption habits. This study employs a multimodal critical discourse analysis to investigate racial and newcomer stereotypes that are reproduced in a case study of two reality TV shows: The Real Housewives of Atlanta and 90 Day Fiancée. The shows reproduce several stereotypes, which I argue perpetuate Orientalist thinking, and reinforce racist and xenophobic ideologies. These negative representations of race and newcomers work to affirm the viewer's sense of moral superiority in comparison to such representations and maintain Western dominance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".