In the most recent episode of The Bachelor, Season 21 Episode 6, Nick takes the remaining contestants to St. Thomas. At the beginning of the show it seems like all of the women are pretty much the same. There is minimal diversity, but it’s challenging to recognize any differences among the women because they all […]

I watched episode 40 of season 18 of Big Brother. This was my first time watching the show, but I have heard discussions of it that led me to believe it would be drama filled which I thought could be interesting for this intersectional analysis. I picked a random episode from the most recent season, […]

I recently watched one of the last episodes of The Bachelor, in which Nick, the lead, took Rachel out on a date. As a viewer, Rachel stands out among the other candidates. She is incredibly mature, intelligent, and has depth. Rachel is also one of the only black contestants on the show. Last night, it […]

RuPaul’s Drag Race simultaneously can challenge the binary and reinforce it. The cast consists of almost entirely gay men and gender queer people. Despite the homogeny of sexual identities on the show, the spectrum of privilege is broad. Not only do racial identities vary, but also class identities, histories of addiction, and fitness levels divide […]

I originally chose to look at RuPaul’s Drag Race because it’s my favorite reality TV show, but upon a closer look, the show highlights several different intersections between race, gender, and sexuality in both positive and negative ways. To start with the positives, Drag Race showcases almost exclusively gay men who bend ideals of gender […]

  Between racial slurs and obvious discrimination to saying Atheists are nothing more than devil worshipers, in The Real World, season 31, Jenna causes a lot of controversy throughout the season based on the things that come out of her mouth. One episode in particular raised quite a stir on social media. In episode 4 […]

I just watched Season 32, Episode 1 of the Real World. I was particularly struck by the emphasis on certain heteronormative traditions. In one scene, the characters (contestants?) play a game of truth or dare, and one of the males has to bite the lip of the person across from him — it just so […]

In Episode 5 of Cycle 4 of America’s Next Top Model the ladies are asked to model for the classic “Got Milk?” campaign. In an attempt to make the ad campaign more “diverse looking” each girl was portrayed as a race other than their own. Many of the “white” women were made up to portray […]