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Reality Rehearsed: Makeovers, Masculinity, and Marketable Identities in Reality TV

From Queer Eye to Flavor of Love, reality TV is more than just guilty pleasure—it’s a tightly controlled stage where gender, race, and class are performed, judged, and transformed for mass consumption. Shows that claim to reveal “authentic” identity often do the opposite: they construct legible, marketable versions of personhood, edited to reflect mainstream ideals of desirability and value.

The works of Steven Cohan, Renee M. Sgroi, and Rachel Dubrofsky & Antoine Hardy each interrogate these dynamics, exploring how reality TV acts as a disciplinary machine, reshaping masculinity, class, and race through the lens of postfeminist, neoliberal aesthetics. These texts help us understand reality television not just as spectacle—but as a cultural script for acceptable identity.

Queer Eye and the Reinvention of Hetero-Masculinity

In “Queer Eye for the Straight Guise,” Steven Cohan analyzes how the Fab Five perform queerness in a way that rehabilitates straight men. But this isn’t queerness as rebellion—it’s queerness as labor, carefully packaged to serve and soften masculinity.

Cohan shows how the show operates under the logic of camp and postfeminism, presenting queer men as harmless experts whose emotional intelligence and aesthetic vision help straight men “upgrade” themselves—not challenge patriarchy. The makeover isn’t radical; it’s restorative, reinforcing dominant gender roles under the guise of progress.

This reading connects back to earlier discussions of Beckham as “safe queerness” (Rahman), where queer aesthetics are embraced only when they reinforce rather than disrupt heterosexual power structures. It also parallels Banet-Weiser’s critique of empowerment through branding—the Fab Five don’t challenge masculinity; they rebrand it.

Classed Femininity and the Fantasy of Deserved Wealth

Renee M. Sgroi’s analysis of Joe Millionaire focuses on how femininity is evaluated through class performance. The show’s central gimmick—a working-class man posing as a millionaire—sets up a morality play where the women’s reactions “reveal” their true character.

Sgroi argues that Joe Millionaire reinforces postfeminist neoliberal values, positioning the ideal woman as one who is emotionally genuine, modest, and uninterested in material gain. Women who express ambition or financial desire are cast as “gold diggers,” while those who are “authentic” are rewarded.

This structure reduces women to caricatures of class-coded behavior, echoing the dynamics in The Bachelor, where white, middle-class femininity is often idealized. Sgroi’s analysis invites us to question the illusion of choice in reality TV—are women really free to perform femininity, or are they just choosing from a set of pre-approved scripts?

Racial Scripts of Love and Legibility

Dubrofsky and Hardy’s piece, “Performing Race in Flavor of Love and The Bachelor,” critiques the racial politics of dating shows, revealing how desirability is structured through whiteness. While Flavor of Love features a predominantly Black cast and leans into hyperperformance, The Bachelor presents white, heterosexual, upper-middle-class courtship as the default love story.

The authors argue that Flavor of Love engages in spectacularized racial performance, reinforcing stereotypes through editing, casting, and narrative framing. Black femininity is often portrayed as aggressive, vulgar, or comedic, while The Bachelor rewards demure, passive, white femininity.

Their critique builds on intersectional frameworks (Crenshaw) and aligns with Tuchman’s concept of symbolic annihilation—where marginalized identities are either misrepresented or omitted entirely. What becomes clear is that reality TV’s representation of romance is never neutral—it is a racialized, gendered fantasy, built for the gaze of mainstream white audiences.

Connecting the Spectacle: Gender, Labor, and Legibility

Across these readings, we see a recurring theme: identity is only valued when it can be packaged for consumption.

Queer men can be emotional—but only if they’re helping straight men look good.

Women can seek love—but only if their femininity conforms to class and race expectations.

Black participants can compete—but only if their performance entertains rather than confronts dominant norms.

Just like in The Sopranos or WWF Wrestling (Nochimson, Jenkins), these shows mask melodrama as authenticity, relying on genre conventions to discipline deviance and maintain hegemonic order—even while pretending to celebrate diversity.

Final Thoughts: Reality TV as a Mirror (and a Mask)

Reality TV might be unscripted—but it’s never unstructured. It teaches us how to see and be seen, how to desire, and how to behave. The problem isn’t that it’s fake. The problem is that its reality is selective—carefully edited to reflect what culture already deems acceptable.

So we must ask:

What identities are legible within these formats, and who gets left out of the narrative?

How are class, race, and gender made visible only through performance?

Is transformation in reality TV truly transformative—or just a means of reinforcing existing power structures under new aesthetics?

In the end, the real "makeover" isn’t the hair, the house, or the boyfriend—it’s the audience’s understanding of what identity is allowed to be.

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Bodies in Motion: Wrestling, Gangsters, and the Gendered Spectacle of Violence

From the over-the-top theatrics of professional wrestling to the gritty moral ambiguity of The Sopranos, media narratives about men often revolve around bodies in conflict—bleeding, bruised, brooding. Yet beneath the surface of flying fists and furrowed brows lies something more intricate: melodrama, performance, and the fragile construction of masculinity.

Through the writings of Henry Jenkins III, Martha P. Nochimson, and Linda Williams, we can trace how genre and excess are used to both affirm and destabilize gender norms, especially around masculinity. These authors challenge us to reconsider violence not just as spectacle, but as emotional labor, identity maintenance, and in some cases, a form of melancholic masculinity performance.

Wrestling with Feelings: Masculine Melodrama in the WWF

In “Never Trust a Snake,” Henry Jenkins reframes professional wrestling not as brainless aggression, but as a form of masculine melodrama. Drawing on the traditions of soap operas and serial storytelling, Jenkins argues that wrestling narrativizes male emotion—betrayal, loyalty, vengeance, pride—through exaggerated physicality and hyperbolic storytelling.

What’s significant here is that these emotions, typically coded as “feminine” in media, are recontextualized through violence. In wrestling, it’s permissible—expected even—for men to cry, scream, and cling to each other’s bodies, so long as it’s within the framework of combat. Jenkins calls this a form of male intimacy that bypasses the discomfort of vulnerability by reframing it through action.

This echoes earlier discussions about emotional visibility in diva worship (Farmer), where feeling becomes both aesthetic and political, though in this case, feeling is regulated through acceptable gender performances like rage or revenge.

Gangsters and the Crisis of Cool: Rereading The Sopranos

Martha P. Nochimson brings a fresh feminist lens to the gangster genre in her reading of The Sopranos. She argues that the show, and especially Tony Soprano, marks a departure from the mythic, untouchable gangster of cinema’s past. Instead of stoic power, Tony is neurotic, vulnerable, emotionally erratic, and haunted by his own collapsing identity.

Nochimson critiques the genre’s masculine codes—its reverence for stoicism, dominance, and control—and suggests that The Sopranos both challenges and indulges these tropes. The series invites viewers to sympathize with Tony’s psychological unraveling while still staging him as a violent patriarch.

Here, the gangster figure becomes a melodramatic site of crisis, not unlike Jenkins’ wrestlers. But where wrestling performs melodrama through bodily expression, The Sopranos layers it with therapy sessions, surreal dream sequences, and familial dysfunction—recasting mafia masculinity as theatrical, emotional, and deeply unstable.

Film Bodies and the Excess of Gendered Genres

Linda Williams’ seminal essay, “Film Bodies,” pushes this conversation further by situating wrestling, gangster narratives, horror, porn, and melodrama within the realm of “body genres.” For Williams, these genres elicit physical reactions—tears, arousal, fear, adrenaline—not just from the characters but from the audience itself.

Importantly, Williams argues that gender is written through excess. Melodrama is excessive feeling; horror is excessive pain; porn is excessive pleasure. These genres highlight the body’s inability to contain its responses, and in doing so, expose how media disciplines or liberates the performance of gender.

Applying Williams to Jenkins and Nochimson clarifies how emotional excess is both punished and fetishized in masculine genres. Wrestlers cry through blood; Tony Soprano cries in his therapist’s office; both are given license to feel—but only under specific narrative terms that maintain patriarchal power while appearing to unravel it.

Across the Ring: Making the Connections

We’ve seen this pattern elsewhere:

In Disclosure, trans visibility is allowed only through palatable narratives of trauma or transition.

In Pariah, masculinity is a site of both rebellion and repression, particularly within Black familial structures.

In Ingrid Goes West, the commodification of identity performance is gendered and raced, with white womanhood framed as the default for branding success.

Similarly, in wrestling and gangster narratives, white, cis male bodies become acceptable vessels for melodramatic excess, while still reinforcing hegemonic masculinity. They are allowed to feel—but only within the genre’s limits.

Final Thoughts: Violence, Vulnerability, and the Mask of Masculinity

These texts invite us to reframe masculinity not as a stable identity, but as a performance marked by anxiety, contradiction, and spectacle. Violence becomes the language through which men are allowed to be emotional—yet the cost is often their own humanity, intimacy, and capacity for change.

So, we must ask:

Why is male vulnerability only accepted when paired with violence?

What does it say about our cultural imagination that Tony Soprano’s pain feels revolutionary, but Black or queer expressions of feeling are still coded as deviant or niche?

Are genre conventions evolving, or simply reshuffling the same performances in new packaging?

In the end, wrestling and gangster narratives may claim to expose masculine crisis—but they rarely dismantle the ring or walk away from the family business. They just put on a new mask, and the show goes on.

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Fame, Femininity, and the Queer Spectacle: Reimagining Celebrity Identification

In today’s culture of curated visibility and manufactured intimacy, celebrity isn’t just about who’s famous—it’s about who gets to be seen, desired, and identified with. The readings by Momin Rahman, Jackie Stacey, and Imogen Tyler & Bruce Bennett interrogate how celebrity culture performs gender, sexuality, and class in ways that are often contradictory, yet deeply revealing. Whether it’s David Beckham embodying metrosexual queerness, working-class femininity being aestheticized and mocked, or female fans engaging in complex identificatory practices, these scholars push us to ask:

Who do we love when we love a celebrity—and what does that love say about who we are allowed to be?

Beckham as Queer Icon: The Safe Spectacle of the Metrosexual Man

Momin Rahman’s “Is Straight the New Queer?” explores David Beckham’s public persona as a mediated site of gender fluidity, particularly how his fashion choices, emotional openness, and aesthetics destabilize traditional masculinity—without ever truly threatening heterosexual norms.

Beckham becomes a symbol of safe queerness: a straight man who performs softness, self-care, and even flirtation with camp aesthetics, but remains comfortably within the framework of heteronormativity and capitalism.

Rahman argues this represents a “dialectic of celebrity”: the simultaneous opening and containment of queerness. Beckham’s brand makes queerness consumable—allowing the public to engage in queer aesthetics without confronting the realities of queer lives or politics.

This echoes past discussions of post-feminist branding (Banet-Weiser) and self-performance (Gill), where identity is marketed rather than mobilized, curated rather than radical.

Femininity and the Labor of Fandom

Jackie Stacey’s work on female spectatorship and star-audience relations offers a lens to view how women engage emotionally and intellectually with stars—particularly female ones. She categorizes this through three modes of identification:

Heroine Worship: Idealizing the star as an aspirational figure.

Fascination with Glamour: Engaging with the spectacle of beauty and style.

Nostalgic Recall: Personal, emotional connections to past viewings or moments.

Stacey’s framework helps us understand fan love as a form of labor and meaning-making, especially for marginalized identities. Rather than passive consumption, fandom becomes a site of emotional production, where viewers craft identity through reflection and desire.

This resonates with earlier diva worship readings (Farmer, Kuhn), where affect and glamour provide queer and feminist spectators with a language of resistance—however complicated by media structures that still commodify these attachments.

The ‘Celebrity Chav’: Gender, Class, and Disdain in Fame

Tyler and Bennett’s exploration of the “celebrity chav” critiques how working-class femininity—often embodied in figures like Jade Goody—is fetishized, mocked, and framed through moral panic. The “chav” is both hypervisible and socially devalued, constructed as a figure of vulgarity, failure, and excessive femininity.

This article invites a broader critique of celebrity culture as a classed spectacle, where the working class is either excluded or caricatured, and where feminine performance is punished unless aligned with middle- or upper-class respectability.

It also complicates Stacey’s identification modes—while glamour may offer escape or aspiration, it often reinforces hierarchies of taste, class, and whiteness. The “wrong kind” of femininity, though equally performative and curated, is rejected—not for being unreal, but for being too real, too loud, too unrefined.

This connects back to previous discussions of intersectionality and media policing: working-class, feminine-coded bodies are subject to symbolic annihilation or hypervisibility without dignity (Tuchman, Crenshaw).

Connecting Across the Readings: Identity, Desire, and Discipline

Taken together, these texts reveal celebrity culture as a stage for social anxiety and aspiration. Beckham is adored for queering masculinity, but only because he never actually steps out of bounds. Female fans are allowed to desire glamor, but only if their attachments are tasteful and restrained. Working-class femininity becomes spectacle, not celebration.

Each case demonstrates that celebrity visibility is not neutral—it is shaped by who the media chooses to elevate, mock, or silence.

Much like the curated performances of self in Ingrid Goes West, or the contested identity spaces of fan culture, celebrity identification is a mirror: we see who we are, but also who we’re allowed to be.

Final Thoughts: Loving Stars in a World That Doesn’t Love Us Back

The readings challenge us to reconsider what’s really happening when we “relate” to a celebrity. Is it solidarity, aspiration, projection—or survival?

And more importantly:

Whose emotions are validated in public spaces?

Whose bodies and identities are celebrated—and whose are commodified, ridiculed, or erased?

Can identification ever be radical under systems that regulate who gets to shine?

Celebrity may be illusion, but the feelings it evokes—and the systems it reveals—are very real.

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Sublime Excess: Queer Feelings, Diva Worship, and the Politics of Emotional Visibility

From soap operas to stage lights, there is something undeniably magnetic about the diva—that figure of extravagant emotion, vocal power, and unapologetic presence. For queer audiences, the diva is more than just a performer; she is a repository for feeling, fantasy, and resistance. Through works like Brett Farmer’s “The Fabulous Sublimity of Gay Diva Worship”, Annette Kuhn’s writing on melodrama and soap opera, “Don’t Be Quiet, Start a Riot”, and Zarah Leander’s sentimental legacy, we begin to see how queer identification and emotional labor are intimately tied to media consumption.

But beyond camp or spectacle, diva worship becomes a lens through which we can understand queer longing, cultural exclusion, and the politics of representation. So, how does the diva—and her melodrama—challenge heteronormative emotional codes? And what does it mean for queer audiences to find themselves through excess?

Feeling Excessively: Diva Worship and Queer Emotional Labor

Brett Farmer argues that gay diva worship is not simply about idolization—it’s a deeply affective, political act. Divas like Whitney, Mariah, Judy, or Beyoncé are not just symbols of power but emotional conduits through which queer people process desire, pain, and survival. The diva’s voice, Farmer suggests, carries an affective surplus, one that transcends narrative structure and registers directly in the body.

This idea ties to Kuhn’s discussion of the melodramatic mode, where emotion overwhelms the frame. Often dismissed as “women’s genres,” melodramas and soap operas have historically served as sites of emotional excess and domestic disruption, giving voice to feelings that polite society seeks to suppress. For queer viewers—particularly those excluded from dominant emotional narratives—this space of “too much” becomes one of recognition.

When Zarah Leander sang with aching sentimentality, her voice became a vehicle for queer melancholia, a term José Esteban Muñoz might frame as the residue of unfulfilled desires within heteronormative culture. The performance wasn’t just dramatic—it was a site for queer identification, a place to feel publicly what must often be hidden privately.

Spectacle and Riot: The Politics of Being Seen (and Heard)

“Don’t Be Quiet, Start a Riot” expands this emotional visibility into a political register. The documentary follows queer performers and activists using drag, song, and protest art to disrupt systems of oppression. Like the diva, these performers don’t just ask to be seen—they demand to be felt. Their performances become acts of reclamation, where excess is not a flaw, but a form of resistance against structures that label queer expression as too loud, too soft, too much.

Here, Kuhn’s work on soap opera becomes especially relevant. She discusses how melodrama creates emotional communities, where women—and by extension queer audiences—are allowed to feel together, even in exaggerated form. When queer performers adopt the diva persona or melodramatic tone, they are reclaiming a cultural lineage of emotional truth-telling, turning what’s often dismissed as overacting into a weapon of protest.

This ties back to Farmer’s idea of the “sublime”—a moment that overwhelms logic, that transcends structure. For queer audiences, this sublimity becomes a form of survival, a way to exist beyond normative scripts that deny or flatten queer feeling.

Connecting the Dots: Feeling Queer Across Genres

The threads across these texts echo what we’ve seen in prior readings—particularly in Gill’s and Banet-Weiser’s work on media performance and post-feminist visibility, as well as Tuchman’s concept of symbolic annihilation. While Banet-Weiser critiques self-branding in platforms like YouTube, the diva flips that model—her performance isn’t sanitized or “relatable,” but excessive, stylized, and emotionally raw. She doesn’t invite the viewer into the ordinary; she offers escape, fantasy, and catharsis.

Unlike the “post-feminist self” who markets her empowerment, the diva doesn’t ask for market approval—she asserts dominance through performance. Yet, her visibility still operates within media structures that often limit or commodify her power. For instance, Whitney Houston’s legacy was often reframed through narratives of tragedy and addiction, diminishing her sublimity into a cautionary tale.

Similarly, the queer audience’s identification with the diva can be empowering—but we must ask: how much of that space is controlled by us, and how much is dictated by what media allows us to feel?

Final Thoughts: Feeling Our Way to Freedom

Diva worship, melodrama, queer protest art—they all remind us that feeling can be radical. For those excluded from traditional power structures, emotion becomes a form of rebellion, a way of being in the world that refuses to be quiet, polite, or palatable.

But even as we find liberation in performance, we must also remain critical:

Who gets to be a diva, and who gets labeled “too much”?

How do media industries commodify queer emotion for mainstream consumption?

Is there space for queer feeling that isn’t tied to tragedy, pain, or spectacular survival?

As we continue analyzing representation, let’s not only look at who is visible, but how they are allowed to feel, and what those feelings do to challenge or uphold the systems we’re trying to resist.

Because sometimes, the loudest truths come not through facts—but through a note held too long, a tear dropped too dramatically, or a riot started in lipstick and heels.

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Gaming, Gender, and the Digital Playground: Who Gets to Play?

Gaming has long been framed as a male-dominated space, but what happens when marginalized identities enter the scene? Scholars like Jo Bryce & Jason Rutter, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, and Pam Royse et al. examine how gender operates in gaming culture, from the gatekeeping of girl gamers to the subversive potential of gender-bending avatars. Their work reveals a fundamental tension: while digital spaces offer room for gender exploration, they also reinforce real-world hierarchies.

Bryce and Rutter analyze the gendered struggles of girl gamers, showing how visibility does not necessarily translate into belonging. Women in gaming spaces are often caught in a double bind: their presence is hyper-visible yet marginalized, making them targets for harassment, infantilization, or forced “casual gamer” status. The industry’s attempts to include women—such as through “girl-friendly” marketing—often reaffirm stereotypes rather than dismantle them.

Royse et al. extend this argument by examining how gaming technologies encourage women to engage in “safe” digital spaces, steering them toward casual, socially acceptable forms of play rather than competitive, high-skill gaming. Their work highlights how technological design itself can reinforce gendered expectations, shaping how women interact with digital worlds.

MacCallum-Stewart examines gender performance in online gaming, particularly the phenomenon of male players adopting female avatars. While this may seem like a challenge to traditional gender norms, she argues that gender-bending in gaming is rarely radical—instead, it often operates within established power structures. Players use female avatars for strategic advantages (e.g., more gifts, different interactions) or as playful aesthetic choices, rather than engaging in actual identity subversion.

This connects to broader discussions of digital identity performance, such as Van Doorn’s argument that the internet allows for fluid gender experimentation while simultaneously commodifying and constraining identity through algorithmic and market-driven forces. Just as social media compels users to curate an appealing self-brand, online gaming spaces encourage identity play but within predefined cultural scripts.

Rather than simply asking whether gaming is becoming more inclusive, we should question who controls the rules of play. The industry itself remains overwhelmingly male-dominated, with game development, esports, and gaming journalism often reflecting deeply entrenched gender hierarchies.

This calls into question the effectiveness of increased female and non-binary representation in games—if the larger gaming ecosystem remains structured around male-coded narratives and market interests, is representation alone enough to shift power dynamics? Or does it simply offer a new form of visibility without real agency?

Gaming is both a space of resistance and reinforcement. While online worlds allow for experimentation, identity play, and feminist interventions, they remain shaped by the same structures that govern real-world gender politics.

So, is true gender fluidity possible in gaming, or do these spaces only simulate freedom within pre-existing constraints? And as girl gamers gain visibility, do they actually gain power, or are they just being absorbed into an industry that remains fundamentally exclusionary?

The real question isn’t just who gets to play—but who gets to change the game.

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Bodies, Texts, and Clicks: How the Internet Shapes Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Discourse.

The internet isn’t just a platform—it’s a stage. A place where gender and sexuality aren’t simply expressed, but performed, scrutinized, and redefined. Whether through fan culture, digital self-presentation, or feminist discourse, our identities are constantly mediated through screens, clicks, and algorithms.

The works of Niels van Doorn, Sally Wyatt & Liesbet van Zoonen, Sharon Cumberland, and Sarah Summers all examine how the digital sphere reshapes our understanding of gender, desire, and feminism. More importantly, they push us to ask:

Who controls the narratives we see online? And how do marginalized identities navigate these spaces?

To answer that, we need to break down three key ideas: self-presentation, fan culture as resistance, and the digital battleground of feminism.

Van Doorn, Wyatt, and Van Zoonen argue that the internet has transformed gender from a fixed identity into an ongoing performance. Unlike the physical world, where gender is constrained by biology, social roles, and institutions, digital spaces allow people to curate and negotiate their identities in real time.

However, this doesn’t mean online spaces are liberating. Instead, they come with new forms of self-surveillance, social policing, and market-driven pressures:

Hypervisibility & Hyper-Scrutiny: Social media demands constant self-presentation, which often means adhering to dominant gender expectations rather than subverting them.

The Illusion of Choice: While online platforms allow for gender fluidity and exploration, they also reinforce capitalist and heteronormative structures, where self-worth is tied to visibility and engagement.

Performance vs. Reality: The way gender is performed online often reflects cultural fantasies rather than real lived experiences, meaning queer and non-normative identities are still framed within limiting narratives.

Sharon Cumberland’s work on fan culture and cyberspace reveals how women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and marginalized communities use fandom to challenge and rewrite dominant narratives.

Fan Fiction as a Site of Resistance: By reimagining characters, relationships, and storylines, fan creators push back against mainstream media’s heteronormative and patriarchal structures.

The Politics of Representation: Fan fiction often introduces queer readings of characters, filling the representational gaps left by Hollywood and mainstream publishing.

Desire Without Judgment: Online spaces allow women and queer individuals to explore their sexuality without the social policing that often accompanies mainstream discussions of desire.

However, as Sarah Summers’ work on Twilight fandom shows, fan culture is also a contested space—particularly when it intersects with feminism.

Summers’ analysis of feminism within the Twilight fandom highlights a critical tension:

The Twilight Debate: Critics argue that Twilight promotes toxic gender roles, with Bella Swan’s passivity and Edward Cullen’s possessiveness reinforcing patriarchal norms.

Feminism vs. Choice: Many Twilight fans reject this critique, arguing that women should be able to enjoy traditional romance narratives without being policed by feminism.

Gatekeeping & Online Feminism: This debate exposes the fragmentation of digital feminism, where different groups fight over what counts as “real” feminist engagement.

This connects back to Van Doorn’s argument about digital performance—not just in terms of gender, but in terms of feminist identity itself. Online, feminism is not a fixed ideology but a constantly evolving discourse, shaped by debates, backlash, and shifting cultural trends.

So, what do these readings tell us about gender, sexuality, and feminism in the digital age?

The Internet is a Double-Edged Sword: While digital spaces allow for identity exploration and community-building, they also reinforce surveillance, capitalist commodification, and gendered policing.

Fan Culture is Both Liberating and Restrictive: It gives people a space to rewrite dominant narratives, but it still operates within hegemonic structures that limit representation.

Feminism Online is a Battleground: As Summers’ work shows, feminist discourse is constantly being negotiated, gatekept, and redefined, revealing the complexities of online activism. The answers aren’t simple, but one thing is clear: if we don’t control our own narratives, someone else will.

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Hollywood loves a good queer story—just as long as it’s palatable, marketable, and doesn’t disrupt the status quo. But what happens when queer lives, particularly those of Black lesbians and gender non-conforming people, are erased from the archives altogether? This is the reality that The Watermelon Woman (1996) confronts head-on, and it’s the same reality dissected in Ann M. Ciasullo’s “Making Her (In)Visible” and Brenda Cooper’s “Boys Don’t Cry and Female Masculinity”. These works expose the patterns of erasure, distortion, and selective visibility in media, where some queer identities are uplifted (often for profit) while others are buried.

In The Watermelon Woman, Cheryl’s search for Fae Richards—the fictional Black lesbian actress erased from cinematic history—isn’t just about one woman. It’s about the systematic way Black queer figures are written out of history. This ties directly into Ciasullo’s critique of 1990s media, where lesbianism was either: Made invisible (erased, ignored, or omitted). Made hyper-visible through a male gaze (fetishized, commodified, or sanitized)

Think of all the 90s and early 2000s movies where lesbian identity was either a plot twist, a phase, or an experiment for the pleasure of straight men. Even today, femme queerness is often celebrated in a way that butch, gender non-conforming, or trans-masculinity is not. Ciasullo notes how mainstream media tolerates queerness, but only when it doesn’t disrupt heterosexual norms.

This is exactly what Cheryl resists in The Watermelon Woman. She demands space for Black queer women in history and refuses to accept a version of cinema where they don’t exist. The archive didn’t just forget Fae Richards—it actively erased her. And this is bigger than just one character.

While Ciasullo critiques the selective visibility of lesbians in media, Cooper’s work on Boys Don’t Cry digs deeper into how gender presentation affects which stories are told. Masculine-presenting women and trans men, she argues, challenge heteronormativity in ways that make them targets of both violence and erasure.

This connects directly to The Watermelon Woman through Cheryl’s journey of self-discovery. Her relationship with Diana—an upper-class white woman—highlights the racial and class dynamics that shape queer visibility. While Diana, as a femme white lesbian, fits into the "acceptable" mold, Cheryl’s identity as a Black queer woman documenting erased history makes her presence disruptive.

Both The Watermelon Woman and Boys Don’t Cry expose the cultural punishment for transgressing gender norms. Cheryl fights to rewrite a history that tried to erase her, while Brandon Teena’s story ends in tragedy—a violent reminder of what happens when society refuses to accept non-normative identities.

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Social media isn't just a tool anymore—it’s a whole economy. Your identity? Marketable. Your lifestyle? A brand. And your value? Determined by clicks, likes, and engagement. If that sounds exhausting, that's because it is. Ingrid Goes West(2017) captures the dark truth of this digital hustle, where self-worth and visibility become one and the same. But this isn’t just a cautionary tale—it’s a reflection of how post-feminist media culture has turned identity into a product, where empowerment and self-surveillance are two sides of the same coin.

Back in the day, branding was for businesses. Now, it’s for everyone. As Sarah Banet-Weiser breaks down in her analysis of YouTube and self-branding, platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube don’t just encourage self-expression; they demand it—packaged, polished, and algorithm-approved.

This is exactly what Ingrid Goes West puts on blast. Ingrid, played by Aubrey Plaza, is a lonely woman who becomesobsessed with influencer Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen), whose Instagram aesthetic is peak LA cool-girl energy: avocado toast, boho-chic hats, staged "candid" moments. Taylor isn’t just a person—she’s a brand. And Ingrid? She wants in.

Rosalind Gill’s take on post-feminist media culture is exactly what’s at play here. Post-feminism sells the idea that women are empowered, independent, and in control—but only if they package that empowerment in the right way.

Taylor represents this contradiction perfectly. She presents herself as a free spirit, but her whole life is carefully curated, shaped by sponsorships and consumer trends. She embodies the cool, effortless version of empowerment, one that’s white, wealthy, and perfectly staged for the feed.

Ingrid’s desperation mirrors what Banet-Weiser calls the “feedback loop” of self-branding. On social media, you’re only as relevant as your engagement. The validation isn’t internal—it’s external, determined by likes, shares, and comments.

The movie’s climax proves this point. When Ingrid’s carefully constructed identity crumbles and she’s left exposed, her final act of desperation—a filmed suicide attempt—becomes the viral moment that finally gives her the attention she craves.

And just like that, she wins.

Her “authentic pain” gets her likes. Followers flood in. The algorithm rewards her vulnerability, turning her tragedy into content. The irony is loud: even failure can be profitable in the influencer economy.

The reality is, that social media isn’t going anywhere. Self-branding is part of the game now, whether you’re an entrepreneur, artist, or just trying to get a job. But Ingrid Goes West reminds us that the price of constant self-curation is mental exhaustion, isolation, and a warped sense of self.

Maybe the real flex is knowing when to log off.

Or at least, knowing that your worth isn’t measured by followers.

But hey—if you liked this post, don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe! lol.

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Masculinity can be seen as a performance—it’s said to be fragile, restrictive, and constantly reinforced by media. Films like Pariah (2011) and Disclosure (2020) pull back the curtain on how masculinity shapes—and often damages—our understanding of gender and identity. When paired with the works of Frank Krutnik, Annabelle Mooney, and Karen Lee Ashcroft & Lisa A. Flores, these films reveal how masculinity dominates media narratives while silencing those who live outside its norms.

In “In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, and Masculinity,” Frank Krutnik explains how film noir exposes the crisis of masculinity. Noir protagonists are caught between societal expectations and inner struggles, revealing the cracks in traditional male roles. In Pariah, Alike’s father, Arthur, reflects on this crisis. As a police officer, he performs authority and control, but his inability to accept Alike’s queerness exposes his own insecurities. Similarly, Disclosure shows how media forces trans men to overperform masculinity to “prove” their validity, perpetuating the same instability Krutnik outlines.

Annabelle Mooney’s “Boys Will Be Boys” critiques media for equating masculinity with dominance and sexual entitlement. Men’s magazines, like mainstream media, push a “boys will be boys” mentality that normalizes toxic masculinity. Pariah confronts this by centering Alike, a Black queer teenager, whose existence directly challenges these norms. Her father’s discomfort and her mother’s rigid expectations show how deeply ingrained these ideals are. Meanwhile, Disclosure critiques how media narratives treat trans women as threats to cis masculinity, exposing how rigid gender norms harm everyone who doesn’t conform.

Finally, Ashcroft and Flores’ “Slaves with White Collars” explains how masculinity is tied to control in professional spaces. Men are expected to exude authority, suppress vulnerability, and maintain power at all costs. This dynamic plays out in Pariah through Arthur’s inability to reconcile his role as a patriarch with his daughter’s defiance of heteronormativity. In Disclosure, trans individuals disrupt this performance entirely, challenging the binary foundations that masculinity relies on to stay intact.

Pariah and Disclosure are connected by one truth: masculinity, as media defines it, is too fragile to hold. These films push us to reimagine gender beyond rigid performances, making space for identities that media often erases. The question is, will we demand stories that reflect this complexity? It will be interesting to see how this unfolds in the now and the future. Ultimately, Pariah and Disclosure show that liberation begins with dismantling harmful narratives. By embracing authenticity and rejecting rigid ideals, we can create media that uplifts and reflects the full spectrum of human identity.

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The documentary The Gender Code dives deep into how society views gender and sexuality, especially the struggles faced by people in the LGBTQIA+ community. Directed by Luka Keating in 2019, this film highlights the marginalization of people who don’t fit the so-called "norm." It breaks down the gender and sexuality spectrum, calling out the pressures to conform. Keating, an Irish filmmaker who identifies as gender feminine, spent six years digging into this subject. This documentary connects with some academic texts in feminist and media studies: Gaye Tuchman’s "The Symbolic Annihilation of Women by the Mass Media," Julie D'Acci's "Defining Women: Television and the Case of Cagney & Lacey," Janice A. Radway's Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, and Laura Mulvey’s "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema."

Representation and Marginalization

These readings and the documentary all zero in on the same problem: how marginalized groups get erased or boxed in by stereotypes. Tuchman’s idea of "symbolic annihilation" hits home here. She calls out how the media either ignores women or stuffs them into outdated roles, keeping the status quo intact. The Gender Code shines a light on the same issue for the LGBTQIA+ community, showing how mainstream narratives often sideline or stereotype them. The message? If you’re not represented, society acts like you don’t exist. 

Challenging Norms and Stereotypes

Julie D’Acci’s take on Cagney & Lacey is all about breaking molds. Women detectives on TV? That was a big deal, but it didn’t come without a fight. Same with The Gender Code — it’s about LGBTQIA+ individuals stepping up and saying, "We’re here, and we’re not fitting into your little boxes." Both highlight that challenging norms take real representation, not just tokenism. 

The Power of the Gaze

Laura Mulvey’s "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" breaks down how media caters to the male gaze, turning women into objects for male pleasure. The Gender Code flips the script, showing how LGBTQIA+ identities are often framed as "other" — exoticized, misunderstood, or just straight-up invisible. Both works demand a shift in how stories are told, with more authenticity and less bias. 

Media as a Mirror and Shaper of Society

Janice Radway’s study of romance novels shows how media reflects and shapes what society expects of people, especially women. The same applies to The Gender Code, which calls out how heteronormative portrayals in media reinforce outdated views of gender and sexuality. It’s like a loop: society influences media, and media feeds those ideas right back to society. Breaking that cycle is key.