Universalizing and monitoring through The Real World
The Media that I would like to analyze, dissect and ultimately digest is The Real World, specifically The Real World Season 21, episode 9. Through popular media, text and culture our present day society is privileged to visually witness monitoring and universalizing specific gender, race and roles of sexual orientation. To monitor a specific piece of text or media according to (Brown, Spring 2011) would be setting “heterosexuality as the norm (i.e. straight unless say otherwise)”, while a universal perspective on sexuality would be placing all forms of sexuality a continuum, giving them all equal leverage , giving no one form of sexuality superiority over another. I chose to use this season and episode of The Real World because the show itself was originally created to depict controversial issues such as substance abuse, prejudice and sexuality. Yet with a label of diversity tagged on the show, the producers still seemed to cast the same 7-8 (types) of personalities. The cast is usually made up of predominately white house members who were heterosexual, while every now and again throwing in a gay or lesbian minority. Yet it wasn’t until 21 years of airing did the show truly open up the floods gates of diversity by casting their first transgendered housemate by the name Katelynn Cusanelli . The definition of transgendered according to (Brown, spring 2011) is presenting a gender that is different form one’s biological sex. Being a MTF (male to female) transgendered person Katelynn was able to give understanding to millions of viewers of what it meant to be transgendered and how her personal struggle affected her and her roommates.
On this episode Katelynn has already disclosed to a couple of close housemates that she was born male , but now feeling comfortable and safe in her surroundings she decides that she will “come out” to the rest of the house. With the whole idea of “coming out” , it sets a monitoring tone that heterosexuality is the norm, and that if you are anything different then you must go through such procedures to inform others of your non-heterosexuality. For Katelynn being transgendered is an issue of gender presentation and not necessarily sexuality, and this issue is presented when she attends a transgendered banquet. The show not only monitors sexual orientation through Katelynn but also through directing and advertising Katelynn is set apart from her roommates. She is continually excluded from what is considered the “norm” through her confessionals and individual camera time. Camera angles, accompanied by music shed’s a light on Katelynn that derives her to be this being that is almost “unreal” and fictional, almost like a side show.
Yet with all the constraints of monitoring on discourses of sexuality the episode gives life the term queer theory; a field of inquiry that’s asks us to universalize categories of sexual identity to in order to think in which sexuality identity is fluid, changing and complex (Brown, spring 2011). Using the definition given by (Lull, 61) “hegemony is the power or dominate that once special groups holds over another”. While living in a hegemonic world we assume that because Katelynn now identifies as being female, then she must follow the “rules and regulations” that we have set on female sexual orientation, in other words we assume that Katelynn will follow heterosexual norms. She is slammed with questions and speculations from housemates as to what her sexual orientation and how she identifies herself; as if this is what compiles Katelynn as a person and the understanding of her sexuality let us a full understanding as to who she is a s human being.
While the episode takes on both stance of monitoring and universalizing this enables the “transgeneration” to be acceptably viewed and publicly spoken of. The media must draw from both sexual discourses in order to make transgender legible to a TV audience (Brown, spring 2011) In conclusion we must ask ourselves do we universalize to strip away labels and make the un-normal … “normal”? Or do we set ourselves in a cycle to reconstruct terms and definitions, so that the un-normal is normal setting invisible guidelines for monitoring. Have shows like “The Real World” redefined sexuality norms for our society or just empowered the idea that heterosexuality is the dominate and “correct” way to be?
Works Cited
Brown, Adriane. "Refiguring Gender on the Small Screen.” Women’s Studies 230 Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Popular Culture. 09 May 2011.
Lull, James. "Hegemony." Media, Communication, Culture: A Global Approach. New York and Chichester, UK: Columbia University Press, 1995. Print.
