The unremitting explosion of reality television across the schedules has become a sustainable global phenomenon generating considerable popular and political fervour.

This book addresses the impact of this endless opening out of intimacy as an entertainment trend that erodes the traditional boundaries between spectator and performer demanding new tools for capturing television's relationships with audiences. Rather than asking how the reality television genre is interpreted as 'text' or representation the authors investigate the politics of viewer encounters as interventions, evocations, and more generally mediated social relations.

Introduction: Reacting to Reality Television 1. From Representation to Intervention 2. Public Intimacy, Performance and the Value of Personhood 3. Textual Intimacies 4. Reacting to Reality Television: Methodology 5. Affect and Ambiguity, Not Governmentality 6. From Affect to Authority: The Making of the Moral Person 7. The Productive Person: Recognizing Labour and Value 8. Conclusion: Intimacy, Ideology, Value and Politics

Helen Wood is Reader in Media and Communication, in the Department of Media, Film and Journalism at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.

Beverley Skeggs is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She held the Kerstin Hesselgren Professor in Gender Studies at Stockholm University and is an Academician of the Academy of the Learned Societies for the Social Sciences, UK. She has worked in the areas of Women's Studies and Cultural Studies as well as Sociology.