Psychopolitical Discourse in Reality TV Shows: A Study of Kate Durbin’s E! Entertainment
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36586/jcl.2.2026.0.54.0058Keywords:
Psychopolitics, Reality TV, E! Entertainment, achievement-SubjectsAbstract
Within the rising interest in questioning power dynamics, psychopolitical strategies have been identified as a hallmark of contemporary politics. Apart from traditional coercive power, represented by repression and prohibition, the new power operates through psychological manipulation based on positive stimulation and unlimited compulsion of entertainment and freedom. In a literary response to these power dynamics, the American poet Kate Durbin (1981-) emerged as a distinctive voice to disrupt the entraining programs in general and Reality TV shows in particular. Durbin’s innovative technique foregrounds prose poetry as a conceptual space for reflective thinking to help humans understand their surrounding conditions. She meticulously annotates Reality TV shows aired on the American E! network to unravel their underlying ideologies and media-driven psychopolitics. The present study explores the dynamic interactions between TV shows and psychopolitical discourse presented in Durbin’s E! Entertainment, pertaining to the sharp lens of contemporary psychopolitical theorists, such as Byung Chul Han and Slavoj Žižek. Han aligns the current psychopolitical strategies to neoliberalism with its persistent demands of commodification, self-optimization, and entrepreneurship. He describes people as achievement subjects who devotedly engage in auto-exploitation to maximize profit. The psychological analysis of the achievement subjects employs Žižek’s terms of soft totalitarianism and the commandments to “enjoy.” Examining Durbin’s poetry within these theoretical perspectives, the study concludes that literary engagement with entertaining programs both reveals and resists their seductive and elusive psychopolitical strategies, which contradict freedom and people’s endless doing.
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