Author: Amanda Klein / East Carolina University

This column argues that the aesthetics of The Hills and Jersey Shore condition the viewer’s reception, inviting them to see each program’s performance of class and ethnicity as being tied to specific notions of taste and cultural capital.

In this piece, Amanda Klein explores how Black Swan employs the conventions of art cinema in order to engage the mind, and uses the conventions of horror, melodrama, and pornography to engage the body.

MTV’s Teen Mom deploys a straw man of the “Bad Mother,” akin to the Reagan-era welfare queen, to depict unwed, lower-class teen women in a negative light.