Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses how the global genre of reality-TV is adapted in Indian regional language television to target 'housewives' as consumers, and how women's engagement with these programmes relate to the regional social history and local domestic politics of patriarchy and gender subordination.

Paper long abstract:

The global phenomenon of reality-TV has taken India by storm from the early 2000s and developed some distinctive forms, particularly in regional language programmes. In Bengal, a dominant sub-genre of reality-TV involves 'housewives'. In the wake of India's consumer revolution and economic liberalization, women are now targeted as a key constituency of consumers by advertisers and television programme sponsors. Primetime TV serials, designed for women viewers, are now dominated by 'domestic' dramas with women as chief protagonists, while the advent of reality-TV has opened up a vast site to solicit the active participation of 'housewives', whom one advertising professional has termed 'CEOs of the household'. This paper examines Bengali reality-TV shows for 'housewives', and analyses how women's engagement with these programmes as viewers and participants relate to the regional social history and domestic politics of patriarchy and gender subordination. For female participants, the global format of reality-TV has provided a crucial site for the re-signification of local gender relations and the renegotiation of domestic politics. The paper argues that while their familial and maternal role is often reinforced in reality-TV, yet women define new identities and imagine new possibilities of forging self-hood in the interstices of the market-driven media promotion of the 'enterprising housewife', and their self-construction exceeds the meaning and purpose intended by the shows. In this way, the paper queries whether the structural logic of the globalised market undermines women's local, personal experience of emancipation and reconstruction of subjectivity that global market processes unwittingly bring forth.