Establishing the Facets of Ideal Female Selfhood: Neoliberal Rationality, Popular Culture, and US Reality Television

In this thesis I explore how certain narratives of (female) selfhood have been idealised and taken precedence in contemporary Western popular cultural texts. I argue that specific facets of neoliberal rationality have been central to the ways in which this ideal female self has been valorised and presented as a goal to work towards. For my analyses, I use three case studies from North American reality television, which present, manage, and sell this ‘self’ in different ways. I write extensively on the trajectories of both neoliberalism and selfhood in Western thought, and then in turn how notions of the specifically female self have been reflected in popular culture, focusing on televisual representations in particular. I then use three American reality television shows to elucidate my arguments. These examples, whilst produced in the North American context, have an international reach and will serve as extreme yet apposite case studies for elucidating what I propose as the main components of ideal female selfhood in neoliberal culture: the notion of the self as brand; the spirit of meritocratic competition; and the performance of self-work. Furthermore, I bridge the gap between scholarship of the supposed neoliberalisation of reality TV and audience engagements. To do so, I include both online and offline ethnographic research to explore how some viewers have engaged with the specific romanticisation of neoliberal female selfhood. In this way, I have been able to demonstrate the dissonance between the reality television texts as neoliberal and the audiences’ engagements with such sentiments. The contours of the specific female neoliberal self in popular culture, along with both textual analyses and empirical research of reality TV texts, make this thesis an important contribution to the literature within this field.