Representing Our Culture – The Show or its Different Audiences?
When taking a look at the myriad of different criticisms, praises, fan sites, different angles on news stories, and educated opinions and analyses of American Idol, it is basically impossible to come up with a consistent image of how American culture understands this reality show. All of the issues I have discussed in this blog can be viewed in several different ways, depending on the context of the reader or analyzer. However, this inconsistency in audience understandings may actually shed light on the overall diversity of the American Idol audience, since different contexts frequently produce conflicting understandings of the same topic.
One American Idol topic that generated multiple conflicting understandings is the Antonella Barba scandal, with the racy photos of her that popped up all over the internet. Many of the more religious portions of the country saw this scandal as an outrage, and demanded that she be kicked off the show. More liberal groups saw no reason why Barba’s flaunting of her sexuality was any problem, especially women who were tired of the Madonna/whore dichotomy. Producers of American Idol, on the other hand, saw this simply as yet another publicity opportunity, and allowed speculations to flood the internet while Barba was forbidden to talk to reporters and either confirm or deny the authenticity of the pictures.
Another topic that generated different audience interpretations was the issue of Sanjaya’s prolonged presence on American Idol. While some people believed that he honestly had the “X-factor” to win American Idol, others believed that it was either the votes of protestors from Votefortheworst.com, or even the force of reverse racism acting due to his Indian descent.
These, along with many other conflicting views of American Idol itself, are often the product of context. For example, sometimes race or gender effects the way a viewer interprets American Idol, especially the judges’ comments. Many women, especially depending on their own self image, find some of the comments made about the female contestants’ outfits and appearances very offensive. Some African Americans identify with Randy Jackson’s diction and terminology (e.g., “dawg”), while others find it offensive and stereotypical.
Many American Idol viewers also tend to judge the show based on the individual contestants’ choices and the judges’ comments, while failing to look at these choices and responses as products of a patriarchal society. As Allan Johnson has stated, they are “stuck in a model of social life that views everything as beginning and ending with individuals. Looking at things in this way, we tend to think that if evil exists in the world, it's only because there are evil people who have entered into an evil conspiracy” (91). That is why this blog chose to explore American Idol as a manifestation of the social system of institutions such as the family, religion, and the economy. “Patriarchy is a kind of society organized around certain kinds of social relationships and ideas,” and as individuals who are able to see how powerful this system is in the way it is perpetuated through our #1 shows, we can chose to participate in it or work toward changing it (Johnson 93).
What is frightening about shows like American Idol is that other countries may look to these shows about so-called “reality” for a representation of the United States as a whole. For instance, people who have viewed this blog from other countries did so after searching for “American Idol US culture representation.” These readers may believe that our entire culture can be encompassed by a #1 hit reality show, when the truth is that our culture is elucidated more through the media and public reactions to shows such as American Idol. The conflicting understandings expressed in these sources can help someone analyzing culture through the show to see just how diverse our culture can be.
Work Cited
Johnson, Allan G. “Patriarchy, the System: An It, Not a He, a Them, or an Us.” Reconstructing Gender: A Multicultural Anthology. Ed. Estelle Disch. McGraw-Hill: New York, 2006. 91-99.
is Benardo’s openly gay sexuality, which follows the media’s tendency to “ignore sexual orientation as a defining aspect of identity” (Raymond, __). Kaplan goes to great lengths to construct Benardo’s identity through his past job as a telephone psychic, his eccentric taste in clothing (including a “chinchilla scarf and a blue T-shirt emblazoned with his name”), his self-proclaimed “entertaining” and “not shy” personality, his Bronx origins, and his survival of two suicide bombings in Israel. Why, then, should his sexuality be ignored?
