ABSTRACT
In the late 1990s I spent several years doing participant-observation on two nationally televised daytime talk shows; besides working as a production assistant behind the scenes, I conducted more than eighty interviews with both producers and the “ordinary” people who appeared on the shows as guests. I was interested in the process by which people who are not professional experts or celebrities are brought into televisual discourse: what strategies are deployed to “produce” them, why they participate, and what the terms of their participation reveal about relations of inequality-particularly class inequality-in the United States.1 Currently I am researching a new project on reality television, the centerpiece of which is the MTV series Sorority Life. MTV filmed its debut season of the show at UC Davis, where I teach. Consequently, I have been able to interview a dozen of the young women involved in the filming, including those who played starring roles, with an eye to some of the same concerns about representation and inequality addressed in my earlier work.
