Reality Television's Construction of Ordinary People: Class-Based and Nonelitist Articulations of Ordinary People and Their Discursive Affordances
Abstract
This chapter focuses on the concept of ordinary people itself, and analyzes its discursive construction. It aims to (re)validate the signifying power of concepts such as ordinary people and acknowledge the discursive affordances they have.
The chapter argues that there are two main contemporary and fairly stable meanings of ordinary people, namely ordinary people defined as lower class and as nonelite. Apart from investigating the nature of the articulations of ordinary people in reality television, the chapter also poses the question of how the articulation of the concept of ordinary people contributes to a set of power struggles that are focused on the (de)validation of ordinary people as relevant societal actors.
The discursive playing ground of ordinary people becomes rather small if we see how their identity is emptied through one set of relationist processes and how their identity is negatively connotated through another set of relationist processes.