Written by Tom
Following on from Week One and Week Two, here’s a series of pieces looking at the third week of Love Island, the infamous ITV2 Reality Show.
A Note on Love Island and Heteronormativity
written in relation to episodes thirteen and fourteen
Before we get around to starting this post, we should probably take some time to discuss some of the more problematic elements of Love Island that lie at the show’s very core. While writing these posts, I’ve been very aware that the show itself is very white and very straight. I’ve never mentioned it before because it just hasn’t come up. The whole conceit of this post series has been seeing what happens if you take Love Island very seriously as a self-contained text, treating it as a drama series which works to a very idiosyncratic set of aesthetic standards. (You’ll recognise this as the technique behind my Zac Synder DC Film reviews taken one step further.) The problem with this approach is that there’s a lot of issues with Love Island which you never get around to talking about because the show itself doesn’t find them to be a problem. I can talk forever about Hayley falling through a gap in the format or Eyal being an asshole because the show is directly concerned with these things and presents them to the audience for discussion. The relative lack of diversity in Love Island is never commented on by the show itself, probably because I imagine the producers are mostly straight white people who can’t see how undiverse it is. At the very least, when it does come up, the show very quickly goes to lengths to gloss over it, which in turn leaves me with very few opportunities to critique it. The thing is, it is an actual problem. (more…)
FNORD 