Laurie Ouellette
Biographic Data
| ID | 3692884 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laurie Ouellette |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laurie |
| FAMILY NAME | Ouellette |
| SIGNATURE | OUELLETTE L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Minnesota |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 130 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Predators
David Osit’s acclaimed documentary feature Predators (2025) revisits the broadcast television program To Catch a Predator (NBC, 2004–7) and its cultural afterlife to unsettle audiences awash in reality-based “crimesploitation,” which has only proliferated since the televised sting operation aired.1 Part of the Dateline franchise (NBC, 1992–), TCAP partnered with the vigilante group Perverted Justice to expose adult men who engaged in sexually exp…
Showgirl
This article examines the rebranding of Pamela Anderson, who appears in the documentary Pamela, A Love Story (2023) and as an aging Las Vegas showgirl in The Last Showgirl (2024). Ouellette situates the transformation of Anderson’s star image – Playboy pinup to legitimated actress and lifestyle maven – within the remediation of femininity and female empowerment discourse
“Live, Laugh, Luminol”
FQ columnist Laurie Ouellette reports on her visit to CrimeCon, a convention that connects predominantly white female fans with content producers, entrepreneurs, victim advocates, and law enforcers. Unpacking the unsettling amalgamation of everyday violence and trauma, crime-solving, female-centric storytelling, and feminized fan culture on display at the event, she theorizes true crime fandom as an intimate public that the burgeoning true crime …
A Very Special Episode of Expats
FQ columnist Laurie Ouellette examines “Central,” the penultimate episode of Lulu Wang’s Expats, a television adaptation of Janice Y.K. Lee’s bestselling novel The Expatriates, which follows the lives of several privileged American women living in Hong Kong. The feature-length special episode shifts the focus onto two foreign domestic workers who are employed by the show’s wealthy female protagonists. In redirecting attention onto these two femal…
May December and the Remediation of Tabloid Culture
Upon its release last year, Todd Haynes’ May December (2023) received critical acclaim for its adaptation of the real-life scandal involving 34-year-old Mary Kay Letourneau and 12-year-old Vili Fuluaau. The film draws on the events and tabloidization of Letourneau’s predatory affair, critiquing the ways in which popular media creates scandals by “packaging real people as media characters for public consumption.” However, citing the distancing tha…
Carceral Feminism on Repeat
Film Quarterly contributing editor Laurie Ouellette examines the inconsistencies at the core of Law and Order: Special Victim’s Unit status as a feminist phenomenon. Since its debut in 1999, the program has been praised for promoting understandings of rape and domestic violence as introduced by the women’s movement, earning a reputation as a key popular culture home for feminist opinions. In this column, Ouellette examines the elephant in the roo…
Dead Ringers and the Horror of Childbirth on the Small Screen
The streaming series Dead Ringers (Amazon), loosely adapted from David Cronenberg’s 1988 body horror film about twin male gynecologists, viscerally represents the too-often-violent act of childbirth in order to address the crisis of maternal health care in America. As a series for the small screen, it exploits television’s capacities to show and tell as a form of public education, directing our attention to social issues, including the maternal m…
The Video Revolution, according to the Museum of Modern Art
The recent exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Signals: How Video Transformed the World offers a critical look at the medium, spanning from the 1960s to the present. Featuring works from guerilla television collectives like Raindance to contemporary artists like Martine Syms and Tiffany Sia, MoMA’s exhibit employs a more expansive definition of video to include television broadcasting, CCTV, and moving images captured and shared on c…
Aerobics on Tape
Set in the early 1980s in San Diego, California, Physical (Apple TV+, 2021−) dramatizes the emergence of aerobics on videotape, a prescient chapter of media history that promised to transform female viewers into the masters of their bodies, lives, and futures. Although not a feminist critique, the series is an exploration of the vicissitudes of a self-empowerment. As media technology has become more interactive, the message that women can achieve…
This Is a True Story about a True Story
FQ columnist Laurie Ouellette discusses The Real World Homecoming, a reboot of the seminal MTV reality show that incorporates reflexivity’s slipperier ways and shows how intertwined the content industries and ordinary people have become. Homecoming gathers the original Real World cast members, now middle-aged, not to produce a sociological account of lived biography or to examine mediated personhood, but to produce value from a dormant brand
Julia Child in Three Acts
In her inaugural FQ column, Laurie Ouelette examines the recent resurgence of interest in Julia Child, as reflected in the documentary Julia: The Delicious Life of America’s First Food Icon (2021, CNN Films), the prestige dramatic series Julia (2022, HBO Max), and the amateur cooking competition The Julia Child Challenge (2022, Food Network and discovery+). All three productions revisit Child’s public television show The French Chef and its role …
The prison-televisual complex
In 2016, the A&E cable network partnered with the Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, to incarcerate seven volunteers as undercover prisoners for two months. This article takes the reality television franchise 60 Days In as a case study for analyzing the convergence of prison and television, and the rise of what we call the prison-televisual complex in the United States, which denotes the imbrication of the prison system with the televi…
Spark Joy? Compulsory Happiness and the Feminist Politics of Decluttering
This essay analyzes the Marie Kondo brand as a set of neoliberal techniques for managing cultural anxieties around over-consumption, clutter and the family. Drawing from critical discussions of consumer culture and waste, as well as feminist scholarship on compulsory happiness and women's labor in the home, it argues that Marie Kondo's 'joyful' approach to 'tidying up' presents pared-down, curated consumption as a lifestyle choice that depends on…
Special Issue: Media and the Extreme Right
When we were graduate students in the early 1990s, critical media and communication scholars were still coming to terms with the Reagan years. The rise of the Religious Right, the promotion of “family values,” a war on drugs that targeted low-income people of color, the deregulation of industry (including the media industries) and a roll-back of welfare policies in the name of trickle-down economics that widened the gap between the wealthy and th…
Bare enterprise: US television and the business of dispossession (post-crisis, gender and property television)
This essay examines the quotidian forms of dispossession and bare enterprise that emerge when homes and belongings are repossessed and auctioned off for profit while TV cameras roll. Focusing on a spate of recent US reality programs revolving around pawnshops, repossession agents, storage unit auctions and foreclosed home flipping businesses, I chronicle an unabashedly ruthless performance of homo economicus. I link the biopolitics of disposabili…
The Trump Show
Trump is more than a symptom of manipulative infotainment and cultural decline: His political ascendency speaks to reality TV’s long-established role in governing practices
Companion to Reality Television
A Companion to Reality Television
Television
This chapter traces the history of television in the United States in relation to broader societal conditions and changes. Rejecting the assumption that technological advances are inevitable or necessarily progressive, it situates evolving “stages” of television as complex responses to the shifting demands and contradictions of advanced liberal capitalist democracies. Events and ruptures in television's development as a cultural form are discusse…
Branding the Right: The Affective Economy of Sarah Palin
Branding the Right:The Affective Economy of Sarah Palin Laurie Ouellette (bio) In April 2010, Saturday Night Live announced the launch of the Sarah Palin Network. Impersonating the former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, comedian Tina Fey pitched the new television channel as the logical extension of her commentator gig with Fox News and her TLC reality program, Sarah Palin's Alaska. Poking fun at Palin's hokey rig…
Women's Work: Affective labour and convergence culture
This essay raises the possibility that participation in convergence culture may not enhance women's recreational pleasures, much less prepare them for public forms of political activity. Taking the Dr. Phil multimedia self-help franchise as a case study, we argue that women's ‘interactivity’ can be mobilized as a gendered requirement of neoliberal citizenship, that is, an ongoing, mundane regimen of self-empowerment that does not intensify the pl…
Reality TV Gives Back: On the Civic Functions of Reality Entertainment
Reality TV is more than a trivial diversion. Civic aims historically associated with documentaries (particularly citizenship training) have been radically reinterpreted and integrated into current popular reality formats
Makeover television, governmentality and the good citizen
In June 2006, ABC TV encouraged families to ‘get healthy’ in conjunction with its new reality series, Shaq's Big Challenge. Each week, NBA champion Shaquille O'Neal worked with a ‘dream team’ of nu
Viewers Like You: How Public TV Failed the People
How "public" is public television if only a small percentage of the American people tune in on a regular basis? When public television addresses "viewers like you," just who are you? Despite the current of frustration with commercial television that runs through American life, most TV viewers bypass the redemptive "oasis of the wasteland" represented by PBS and turn to the sitcoms, soap operas, music videos, game shows, weekly dramas, and popular…
Victims No More: Postfeminism, Television, and Ally McBeal
2002). Victims No More: Postfeminism, Television, and Ally McBeal. The Communication Review: Vol. 5, No. 4, pp. 315-335
Makeover television, governmentality and the good citizen
In June 2006, ABC TV encouraged families to ‘get healthy’ in conjunction with its new reality series, Shaq's Big Challenge. Each week, NBA champion Shaquille O'Neal worked with a ‘dream team’ of nu
Viewers Like You: How Public TV Failed the People
How "public" is public television if only a small percentage of the American people tune in on a regular basis? When public television addresses "viewers like you," just who are you? Despite the current of frustration with commercial television that runs through American life, most TV viewers bypass the redemptive "oasis of the wasteland" represented by PBS and turn to the sitcoms, soap operas, music videos, game shows, weekly dramas, and popular…
Victims No More: Postfeminism, Television, and Ally McBeal
2002). Victims No More: Postfeminism, Television, and Ally McBeal. The Communication Review: Vol. 5, No. 4, pp. 315-335
The Trump Show
Trump is more than a symptom of manipulative infotainment and cultural decline: His political ascendency speaks to reality TV’s long-established role in governing practices
Special Issue: Media and the Extreme Right
When we were graduate students in the early 1990s, critical media and communication scholars were still coming to terms with the Reagan years. The rise of the Religious Right, the promotion of “family values,” a war on drugs that targeted low-income people of color, the deregulation of industry (including the media industries) and a roll-back of welfare policies in the name of trickle-down economics that widened the gap between the wealthy and th…
Spark Joy? Compulsory Happiness and the Feminist Politics of Decluttering
This essay analyzes the Marie Kondo brand as a set of neoliberal techniques for managing cultural anxieties around over-consumption, clutter and the family. Drawing from critical discussions of consumer culture and waste, as well as feminist scholarship on compulsory happiness and women's labor in the home, it argues that Marie Kondo's 'joyful' approach to 'tidying up' presents pared-down, curated consumption as a lifestyle choice that depends on…
Reality TV Gives Back: On the Civic Functions of Reality Entertainment
Reality TV is more than a trivial diversion. Civic aims historically associated with documentaries (particularly citizenship training) have been radically reinterpreted and integrated into current popular reality formats
The prison-televisual complex
In 2016, the A&E cable network partnered with the Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, to incarcerate seven volunteers as undercover prisoners for two months. This article takes the reality television franchise 60 Days In as a case study for analyzing the convergence of prison and television, and the rise of what we call the prison-televisual complex in the United States, which denotes the imbrication of the prison system with the televi…
Inventing the Cosmo Girl: Class identity and girl-style American dreams
Since the mid-1970s, Helen Gurley Brown has been a cultural icon as well as the editor of the hugely profitable Cosmopolitan magazine. Following a cultural studies approach to media historiography, this article traces Brown's rise to fame and analyzes her early advice to women as a `cultural discourse' that managed some of the social and economic tensions of the early 1960s and early 1970s, while also offering certain women the symbolic material …
Bare enterprise: US television and the business of dispossession (post-crisis, gender and property television)
This essay examines the quotidian forms of dispossession and bare enterprise that emerge when homes and belongings are repossessed and auctioned off for profit while TV cameras roll. Focusing on a spate of recent US reality programs revolving around pawnshops, repossession agents, storage unit auctions and foreclosed home flipping businesses, I chronicle an unabashedly ruthless performance of homo economicus. I link the biopolitics of disposabili…
Moving beyond the “Vast Wasteland”: Cultural Policy and Television in the United States
Dialing for Dollars
This summer Congress passed sweeping deregulatory telecommunications legislation that could shape the content, delivery and definition of for years to come. In mid-June, The Telecommunications Competition and Deregulation Act (S. 652) - a bill spearheaded by Larry Pressler (R-SD) that relaxes long-standing rules on media ownership and cross-ownership and sets the stage for the digital era by allowing the regional Bell telephone companies to opera…
Painting by Numbers
My grandmother was a life-long art collector, although she would never have considered herself anything quite so fancy. Knickknacks, or sometimes just plain stuff, were her names for the hundreds upon hundreds of wall decorations, figurines, photographs and curios that eventually filled every square inch of her tiny apartment. Even more notable than the sheer volume of this display was a seeming obliviousness to accepted understandings of cultura…
Tv Viewing as Good Citizenship? Political Rationality, Enlightened Democracy and PBS
This article draws on theories of political rationality, governmentality and cultural policy as well as historical analysis to examine how a philosophy of ‘enlightened democracy’ informed the historical formation of PBS. I analyse its early campaign to turn TV viewers into active citizens and show how the citizen subjectivities constructed presupposed a set of knowledge-power relations defined and managed by ‘opinion leaders’. Following a cultura…
Inventing the Cosmo Girl: Class identity and girl-style American dreams
Since the mid-1970s, Helen Gurley Brown has been a cultural icon as well as the editor of the hugely profitable Cosmopolitan magazine. Following a cultural studies approach to media historiography, this article traces Brown's rise to fame and analyzes her early advice to women as a `cultural discourse' that managed some of the social and economic tensions of the early 1960s and early 1970s, while also offering certain women the symbolic material …
Moving beyond the “Vast Wasteland”: Cultural Policy and Television in the United States
Viewers Like You: How Public TV Failed the People
How "public" is public television if only a small percentage of the American people tune in on a regular basis? When public television addresses "viewers like you," just who are you? Despite the current of frustration with commercial television that runs through American life, most TV viewers bypass the redemptive "oasis of the wasteland" represented by PBS and turn to the sitcoms, soap operas, music videos, game shows, weekly dramas, and popular…
Victims No More: Postfeminism, Television, and Ally McBeal
2002). Victims No More: Postfeminism, Television, and Ally McBeal. The Communication Review: Vol. 5, No. 4, pp. 315-335
Makeover television, governmentality and the good citizen
In June 2006, ABC TV encouraged families to ‘get healthy’ in conjunction with its new reality series, Shaq's Big Challenge. Each week, NBA champion Shaquille O'Neal worked with a ‘dream team’ of nu
Reality TV Gives Back: On the Civic Functions of Reality Entertainment
Reality TV is more than a trivial diversion. Civic aims historically associated with documentaries (particularly citizenship training) have been radically reinterpreted and integrated into current popular reality formats
Women's Work: Affective labour and convergence culture
This essay raises the possibility that participation in convergence culture may not enhance women's recreational pleasures, much less prepare them for public forms of political activity. Taking the Dr. Phil multimedia self-help franchise as a case study, we argue that women's ‘interactivity’ can be mobilized as a gendered requirement of neoliberal citizenship, that is, an ongoing, mundane regimen of self-empowerment that does not intensify the pl…
Television
This chapter traces the history of television in the United States in relation to broader societal conditions and changes. Rejecting the assumption that technological advances are inevitable or necessarily progressive, it situates evolving “stages” of television as complex responses to the shifting demands and contradictions of advanced liberal capitalist democracies. Events and ruptures in television's development as a cultural form are discusse…
Branding the Right: The Affective Economy of Sarah Palin
Branding the Right:The Affective Economy of Sarah Palin Laurie Ouellette (bio) In April 2010, Saturday Night Live announced the launch of the Sarah Palin Network. Impersonating the former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, comedian Tina Fey pitched the new television channel as the logical extension of her commentator gig with Fox News and her TLC reality program, Sarah Palin's Alaska. Poking fun at Palin's hokey rig…
A Companion to Reality Television
Companion to Reality Television
The Trump Show
Trump is more than a symptom of manipulative infotainment and cultural decline: His political ascendency speaks to reality TV’s long-established role in governing practices
Bare enterprise: US television and the business of dispossession (post-crisis, gender and property television)
This essay examines the quotidian forms of dispossession and bare enterprise that emerge when homes and belongings are repossessed and auctioned off for profit while TV cameras roll. Focusing on a spate of recent US reality programs revolving around pawnshops, repossession agents, storage unit auctions and foreclosed home flipping businesses, I chronicle an unabashedly ruthless performance of homo economicus. I link the biopolitics of disposabili…
Special Issue: Media and the Extreme Right
When we were graduate students in the early 1990s, critical media and communication scholars were still coming to terms with the Reagan years. The rise of the Religious Right, the promotion of “family values,” a war on drugs that targeted low-income people of color, the deregulation of industry (including the media industries) and a roll-back of welfare policies in the name of trickle-down economics that widened the gap between the wealthy and th…
The prison-televisual complex
In 2016, the A&E cable network partnered with the Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, to incarcerate seven volunteers as undercover prisoners for two months. This article takes the reality television franchise 60 Days In as a case study for analyzing the convergence of prison and television, and the rise of what we call the prison-televisual complex in the United States, which denotes the imbrication of the prison system with the televi…
Spark Joy? Compulsory Happiness and the Feminist Politics of Decluttering
This essay analyzes the Marie Kondo brand as a set of neoliberal techniques for managing cultural anxieties around over-consumption, clutter and the family. Drawing from critical discussions of consumer culture and waste, as well as feminist scholarship on compulsory happiness and women's labor in the home, it argues that Marie Kondo's 'joyful' approach to 'tidying up' presents pared-down, curated consumption as a lifestyle choice that depends on…
This Is a True Story about a True Story
FQ columnist Laurie Ouellette discusses The Real World Homecoming, a reboot of the seminal MTV reality show that incorporates reflexivity’s slipperier ways and shows how intertwined the content industries and ordinary people have become. Homecoming gathers the original Real World cast members, now middle-aged, not to produce a sociological account of lived biography or to examine mediated personhood, but to produce value from a dormant brand
Julia Child in Three Acts
In her inaugural FQ column, Laurie Ouelette examines the recent resurgence of interest in Julia Child, as reflected in the documentary Julia: The Delicious Life of America’s First Food Icon (2021, CNN Films), the prestige dramatic series Julia (2022, HBO Max), and the amateur cooking competition The Julia Child Challenge (2022, Food Network and discovery+). All three productions revisit Child’s public television show The French Chef and its role …
Carceral Feminism on Repeat
Film Quarterly contributing editor Laurie Ouellette examines the inconsistencies at the core of Law and Order: Special Victim’s Unit status as a feminist phenomenon. Since its debut in 1999, the program has been praised for promoting understandings of rape and domestic violence as introduced by the women’s movement, earning a reputation as a key popular culture home for feminist opinions. In this column, Ouellette examines the elephant in the roo…
Dead Ringers and the Horror of Childbirth on the Small Screen
The streaming series Dead Ringers (Amazon), loosely adapted from David Cronenberg’s 1988 body horror film about twin male gynecologists, viscerally represents the too-often-violent act of childbirth in order to address the crisis of maternal health care in America. As a series for the small screen, it exploits television’s capacities to show and tell as a form of public education, directing our attention to social issues, including the maternal m…
The Video Revolution, according to the Museum of Modern Art
The recent exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Signals: How Video Transformed the World offers a critical look at the medium, spanning from the 1960s to the present. Featuring works from guerilla television collectives like Raindance to contemporary artists like Martine Syms and Tiffany Sia, MoMA’s exhibit employs a more expansive definition of video to include television broadcasting, CCTV, and moving images captured and shared on c…
Aerobics on Tape
Set in the early 1980s in San Diego, California, Physical (Apple TV+, 2021−) dramatizes the emergence of aerobics on videotape, a prescient chapter of media history that promised to transform female viewers into the masters of their bodies, lives, and futures. Although not a feminist critique, the series is an exploration of the vicissitudes of a self-empowerment. As media technology has become more interactive, the message that women can achieve…
Sociology (20 works) · Art (17 works) · Media studies (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Law (12 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (11 works) · Media Studies and Communication (10 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Art history (7 works)