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If makeover television shows are as oppressive as feminist critiques argue, why do so many people watch and enjoy them? Drawing on data collected from transcripts of five different reality television shows airing from 2002 to 2008, we demonstrate that makeover shows construct an intertwined relationship between participants' gender performances and their ability to achieve self-actualization. All five programs employ a script that progresses through an accusation that a contestant is not taking care of herself or himself, an expensive correction to her or his gender performance, a moment of revelation in which he or she embraces a new self, and a "big reveal" of that new self to family and friends. In contrast to previous studies, which focused on the detrimental effects of sexualizing bodies to achieve self-esteem, we find that the transformation of gender performances on makeover shows is in fact a transformation of self. This process, which we call gender-actualization, naturalizes gendered beauty myths by linking them to contestants' abilities to successfully render their "true inner gender" with the help of expensive garments, products, and procedures. In that sense contestants are encouraged to "own" their inner selves in order to achieve self-confidence. Thus, the rhetoric of gender-actualization ultimately helps construct gender as an immutable inner quality which serves as the foundation for gender oppression and simultaneously masks the intent of makeover shows to fuel fashion markets. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black homophobia is well-documented in both popular and academic literature, but existing explanations locate homophobia within individual psyches and fail to account for the broader structural context of race and homophobia. Thus, they leave unanswered an important question: why is it not the case that familiarity with oppression generates support for gay and lesbian acceptance and legal rights among Blacks? In this paper, we endeavor to offer a structural explanation for the racial gap in opinions regarding homosexuality and same-sex marriage. Using data from the General Social Survey, we evaluate three propositions explaining Black homophobia: that it stems from traditional gender beliefs among Blacks, that it stems from conservative religious beliefs among Blacks, and that it stems from political ownership of "civil rights" and competition for limited political resources. We find that evidence that competition for political recognition and resources offers a better explanation of Black attitudes toward homosexuality than do attitudes about gender or church memberships, suggesting that Blacks are rational social actors who, given limited political resources, adopt homophobic attitudes as an instrumental action designed to secure resources for their own group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonly held that public opinion in the United States is organized (and possibly polarized) along a continuum of ideological positions ranging from extreme conservatism to extreme liberalism (DiMaggio, Evans, Bryson 1996; Robinson 1996). Periodic alignments notwithstanding (Brooks and Manza 1993, 1997), there have been heated debates over the extent to which polarization actually occurs. Analyses of the 2008 presidential election, conversely, focused more on identity politics than liberal-conservative belief systems, evidencing a marked decline in the discourse concerning the kind of polarization that purportedly left the 2000 presidential election in the lurch. A major difficulty with the identity-based theory of voting is the implicit assumption that white male voters use the ideological spectrum to make distinctions between white male candidates (more or less imperfectly), while the introduction of a non-white and/or non-masculine identity elicits identity-based selections. To the contrary, we argue that researchers inaccurately pit ideology against identity. The set of questions that scholars commonly use to describe "liberal" and "conservative" ideologies, are specific to white masculinity. Our analysis demonstrates that the effect is generated by including questions that tap beliefs about race and gender together with questions that do not trigger identity-based responses. We suggest a method of predicting voter behavior that is sensitized to the relationship between ideology and identity but does not conflate the two. In so doing, we find Dubois' (1903, 1920) framework of "double-consciousness" particularly useful in combating unacknowledged assumptions regarding the intersection of gender, race, and public opinion research. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]