ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that flaunting gender on WAGS entails mobilising discourses of neoliberal individualisation and postfeminist notions of choice and self-empowerment. The cast members in WAGS engage in various types of gender work, including the aesthetic labour involved in keeping up appearances in the elite world of sports celebrity; the work of finding, keeping and marrying a professional athlete; and the efforts involved in self-branding as style and fashion experts and feminine role models. The chapter analyses two contemporary television depictions of sporting culture: NBC’s Friday Night Lights, the serial drama about high school gridiron football culture in Texas, and E!’s reality docusoap WAGS, which follows the everyday trials and scandals of the wives and girlfriends of professional athletes. Despite NBC’s celebration of E. Taylor as the comeback of the traditional broadcast television hero, his characterisation was also rearticulated within critical rhetoric to emphasise the show’s ‘quality’.
