One Fan’s Shame: On Living With Loving Below Deck

Abstract

Shame is an existentially threatening emotion that challenges extant theories of television reception and fandom. As a feminist and a fan of Bravo’s occu-soap Below Deck, I felt ashamed when I belatedly recognized its narrative investment in sexual assault and workplace injury. Like many other reality TV series, the Below Deck franchise trains its spectator to anticipate and revel in scenes of sexual misconduct and hostile or otherwise unsafe work environments. Reality television scholars have attended to the transitive properties of diegetic shame, but this essay focuses on the understudied phenomenon of fannish shame, of how the media we love can reconfigure our self-perception. It draws on queer theories of shame to consider how feeling ashamed informs our labor as fans and critics.