[csaa-forum] Reminder: Gender Cultures and Reality TV

[Misha Kavka (ARTS FTVM)]

CFP REMINDER: Abstracts due 29 July

Research Symposium:
Gender Cultures and Reality TV

University of Auckland 
Auckland, New Zealand
December 2-3, 2011

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This research symposium is being held in association with the ‘Gender Politics and Reality TV’ conference in Dublin, August 25-27, 2011. Delegates to the Dublin conference are warmly encouraged to attend this symposium.
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Reality TV has gained a global foothold in popular culture, offering to explicate, regulate, and manipulate the social scripts we live by. Of these, no social framework is more central to reality TV than gender, yet sustained scrutiny of reality TV’s relation to gender norms, performances and practices has barely begun. In the last decade, formats such as Wife Swap, Temptation Island, Extreme Makeover, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, There’s Something About Miriam, Supernanny and Bridezillas have placed a spotlight on contemporary gender identities and social relations. These formats, like many others, destabilise gender categories even as they insist upon and often consolidate gender as a structuring logic of real-world social relations. At the same time, reality TV reminds us that gender is neither a singular nor a universal category, as demonstrated by the way in which international reality TV formats adopt local features at each culturally specific site of production. 
The aim of this symposium is to take advantage of our Asia-Pacific location by raising questions about gender and reality TV from a comparative, cross-cultural perspective. We are particularly interested in critical investigations of the intersections between gender, culture and place as engineered by reality television. While papers addressing reality television and gender from an international perspective are most welcome, we hope to maintain a critical focus on cultural specificity and the social geographies of gender, including the expressions and negotiations of indigenous, minoritarian, national and transnational cultures.
We invite papers on any aspect of gender, culture and reality TV, including the following topics:
•	Culturally and/or nationally specific articulations of masculine or feminine identity in Reality TV
•	The reconfiguration of gender-focused international formats within non-Western cultural contexts
•	Gender, Reality TV and transnational flows of capital, culture and consumption
•	Gendered identities within colonial/post-colonial/settlement narratives or histories
•	The place of gender within a multiple modernities approach to Reality TV 
•	Gender, Reality TV and multiculturalism/biculturalism/mixed cultures
•	Intersections of gender, race and/or ethnicity in Reality TV
•	The relations between gender and individualised selfhood on Reality TV
•	Reality TV as a site of gender performance and/or transformation 
•	Family and gender politics within Reality TV
•	Sexual cultures and gender on Reality TV
•	Gender, Reality TV and cultures of fandom and celebrity
•	(Anti) heteronormative practices in reality programming
•	Reality TV, gender and hierarchies of cultural value

Confirmed Speakers: 	Frances Bonner, University of Queensland
Tania Lewis, RMIT
Zala Volcic, University of Queensland
Brenda Weber, Indiana University				
							
Please submit a 300-word abstract & short biographical note to a.west at auckland.ac.nz and m.kavka at auckland.ac.nz by 29 July, 2011. Successful applicants will be notified by 19 August, 2011.