ABSTRACT
In July 2024, as we came to the end of preparation of the manuscript that would become this book, the British television show Love Island concluded its 11th season. We found ourselves noting, with some surprise, just how rapidly the landscape of popular culture can change. When we began working on the research that this book represents Love Island had launched its fourth season and, with a record viewership of over 4 million, the show became a pillar of ITV’s weekly programming. By this point, the show is now a multichannel, multiplatform entertainment attracting legions of fans who follow it via social media networks as the show moved from languishing at the margins of mid-week reality TV to its current status as a mainstay of the popular schedules. The show’s formula nonetheless remains a relatively simple one; a group of exceptionally attractive young men and women are brought to a luxurious villa in Majorca, spending long sun-drenched days in swimwear in order to ‘couple up’ and thereby find love by night. In almost every regard Love Island’s premise and its gender and sexual politics are entirely socially conservative. Contestants are ostensibly cast based on their good looks and a narrow definition of good looks at that. The show enforces heteronormative conventions on housemates and they, in turn, perform largely stereotypical models of behaviour. It is therefore easy for cultural commentators to dismiss Love Island (which is hardly unique in any case) as superficial and retrograde, however, amid this conservatism we think it’s possible to diagnose a shifting cultural and sexual context that informs the research in this book. On one hand, the pervasiveness of gender binaries, stereotypical behaviours and attitudes they reproduce is evident. The ways masculinity and femininity (mutually exclusive categories out of necessity in this context) are constructed/constituted/enacted in the show often suggest that communication between men and women inevitably fails. Indeed, the discourses of Love Island suggest that this is not just inevitable but also entirely necessary as the binaristic model of gender that the show presents demands conflict, misunderstanding and failure of communication. The narrative here being that women try to decipher male actions symptomatically whereas by contrast the young men are either mystified or, more often, disinterested by the discussions of motive and implications that women engage in at length. This of course reproduces exhausted stereotypes of women as scheming gossips and men as unthinking dupes drawn into the machinations of the female contestants, driven by their libidos. Within this reactionary narrative though, the show seems to reveal a more surprising and unexpected aspect of young male homosocial bonding in the 21st century, illustrating cultural shifts in the ways young men are physically demonstrative and affectionate in single-sex settings, seemingly at ease with admiring each other’s bodies. Indeed, while contestants of both sexes are routinely screened in states of undress it is undeniable that the primary, indeed the insistent focus of attention of the producers of Love Island is the presentation of the bodies of the male contestants as sexual spectacle. Whereas in the 21st century it has become progressively problematic to present female bodies as objects of sexual pleasure, by contrast male bodies seem if not freed of the associations of objectification (a vexed and politicised term), then still available as a focus of erotic investment.
