If This Is a "Real" Housewife, Who Are All These Women Around Me?: An Examination of The Real Housewives of Atlanta and the Persistence of Historically Stereotypical Images of Black Women in Popular Reality Television

Stereotypical images of blacks have persisted throughout multiple forms of media for decades, with one of the most recent arenas being reality television programming. This study examines the Bravo Television network series The Real Housewives of Atlanta to consider the impact of reality television on the image of black women in America today. This increasingly popular show is the most viewed in The Real Housewives franchise, and demonstrates that black women in America do not embody any one historical or contemporary stereotype of black women in particular, but rather are a compilation of these stereotypes depending on the situation at hand.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Sociology

Department dc:contributor.department

Sociology

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Bunai, Dominique Christabel

Chairs dc:contributor.committeechair

• Graves, Ellington T.
• Harrison, Anthony Kwame

Committee member dc:contributor.committeemember

• Brunn, Rachelle J.

• black women
• stereotypes
• reality TV
• Real Housewives

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:2747

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/49683