Named a Best Nonfiction Book of 2022 by Esquire A sociological study of reality TV that explores its rise as a culture-dominating medium--and what the genre reveals about our attitudes toward race, gender, class, and sexuality. What do we see when we watch reality television? In True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us, the sociologist and TV lover Danielle J. Lindemann takes a long, hard look in the "funhouse mirror" of this genre, from countless rose ceremonies on The Bachelor to the White House and more (so much more!). Beginning with the first episodes of The Real World, reality TV has not only remade our entertainment and cultural landscape--it also uniquely refracts our everyday experiences and social topography. By taking reality TV seriously, we can better understand key institutions (such as families, schools, and prisons) and broad social categories (such as gender, race, class, and sexuality). These shows have the ability to unveil the major circuits of power that organize our lives and the extent to which our own realities are, in fact, socially constructed. Whether we're watching conniving Survivor contestants or three-year-old beauty queens, these "guilty pleasures" underscore how conservative our society remains, and how steadfastly we cling to our notions about what counts as legitimate or "real." At once an entertaining chronicle of reality TV obsession and a pioneering work of sociology, True Story reflects our society back to us: what we see in the looking glass may not always be pretty, but we can't stop watching.

Our lives are full of small tensions, our closest relationships full of struggle: between woman and man, artist and customer, purist and commercialist, professional and client - and between the dominant and the submissive. In "Dominatrix", Danielle J. Lindemann draws on extensive fieldwork and interviews with professional dominatrices in New York City and San Francisco to offer a sophisticated portrait of these unusual specialists, their work, and their clients. Prior research on sex work has focused primarily on prostitutes and most studies of BDSM absorb prodomme/client relationships without exploring the professional aspect that makes them unique. Lindemann satisfies our curiosity about these paid encounters, shining a light on one of the most secretive and least understood of personal relationships and unthreading a heretofore unexamined patch of our social tapestry. Upending the idea that these erotic laborers engage in simple exchanges and revealing the therapeutic and analytic nature of their work, Lindemann makes a major contribution to cultural studies, sociology, and queer studies with her analysis of how gender, power, sexuality, and hierarchy shape all of our social experiences.