A reality TV reunion is a third space: though part of its parent show, it nevertheless exists outside of it to discuss what happened on camera (scripted or not). Cast members can be more self-aware than usual. That is, they talk about what was supposedly real more candidly, though while being less real than being off-camera entirely. We might understand reunions as more “reality” than the regular season of a show, even though they also contribute to advancing a show’s drama. This characterization is due, in part, to reunions’ focus on fan perceptions, discussion of social media feuds, and revelation of new personal details. In the case of Netflix’s Selling Sunset (2019-present), the reunion at the end of season seven is a space where the show’s on-screen drama collides with Instagram “receipts,” a convergence which unsettles the former’s official, scripted façade.
Selling Sunset chronicles the dramas of Los Angeles real estate agents working for The Oppenheim Group, a luxury brokerage led by twins Jason and Brett Oppenheim. The cast members are as follows: Mary, who dislikes confrontation; Chrishell, who arrived at the agency at the beginning of season one, endured a messy public divorce, dated Jason, and married the non-binary Australian musician G Flip; Amanza, who wants the agency to act like a family; Emma, who is Chrishell’s best friend; Chelsea, who had to sell a house to prove herself “worthy” of her spot at the agency and is (not coincidentally) the only Black person on the show; and Nicole, who was added to the main cast in season six but had working relationships with Jason, Brett, Mary, and Amanza preceding her arrival on the show. Notably, in this office, all the agents are women—more precisely, women who could be models—working for Jason and Brett, a dynamic complicated by Jason’s having previously slept with Mary, Nicole, Chrishell, and Amanza at different points in time1 (The Oppenheim Group seems to lack an HR department). Ostensibly, the show is about the trials and tribulations of selling Los Angeles mansions.
However, where the show once featured panoramic shots of LA’s rocky cliffs and sprawling estates, as if the houses themselves were the primary focus, Selling Sunset now devotes greater attention to interpersonal drama among the agents. One storyline follows Chrishell and Nicole’s mutual dislike for each other, which, as we see in season seven’s reunion, is ongoing. At the beginning of the episode, Tan France, the reunion host best known as one of the Fab Five on Queer Eye, refers to a post from Nicole’s Instagram projected for the entire cast to see. On the post, one comment reads “I was hoping the lesbian chick was off in Australia 🇦🇺 this season and not on our screens. Whatever her name is, I forgot. Nicole you look great! 🔥 🔥”2 Nicole only says thank you, choosing to not rebuke the user’s intentional use of “lesbian” as a slur. Social media as archive—Instagram, in this particular case—does the work of exposing reality TV as archive: Instagram is fair game for cast members to reference as evidence, whereas something off camera or offline is difficult to prove. That is, in the past, Chrishell and Nicole’s argument would have left viewers in a “she said, she said” situation
To be clear, Chrishell has not ever publicly labeled her sexuality.3 Her lack of identification with the term “lesbian” makes the Instagram comment’s projection and derogatory remarks even more telling. Merely not being married to a man leads to the default negative assumption that she is a lesbian precisely because it is onto this figure that people can most easily project their bigotry. This assumption at once erases the multiplicities of queer sexualities and transforms Chrishell into a predatory lesbian—two problems that, really, are two sides of the same homophobic coin.
The five minutes of conversation in which cast members discuss the above comment reveal the limits of queer representational politics on reality TV: Chrishell’s courtship with and marriage to a non-binary person is a wrinkle in the show’s otherwise heterosexual and glossy veneer, straining the show’s format. While Chrishell looks largely the same as she always has—though of course her outfits have become more glam—the conversation at the beginning of the reunion demonstrates the extent to which the “reality” of this reality TV show is constructed. Abstractly, cast members may of course have no issues with queer people, but the collision of social media receipts with semi-scripted reality TV reveals that Selling Sunset and queerness may not be as compatible as one assumed. Queerness is no longer a distant concept but a disruption of an otherwise heterosexual space.
In the reunion, we do not witness homophobia the way white liberals might imagine it—i.e. physical violence or commonly known slurs—but rather that particular group’s brand of homophobia: subtle, underhanded, barely implied. This has briefly happened once before. In the reunion episode of season five, Selling Sunset viewers watch former agent Maya Vander express confusion and discomfort when Chrishell says she is attracted to G Flip’s “masculine energy,” demonstrating a lack of understanding of how attraction to masculinity does not causally link to “dating men.”4 Ironically, the strongest retort to the “lesbian chick” comment comes from another person in the Instagram replies: “you definitely know her name for the fact that you know she frequents Australia but you are just childish and also homophobic because if she was just a straight woman, you wouldn’t use ‘lesbian’ as a way to invalidate or make a dig at her in comments . Have a day that you deserve 🙂.”5 Notably, Nicole does not reply to this comment.6 At the reunion, Nicole feigns innocence, asking, “um, and if this is the case, then this is my mistake […] but if saying, you know, ‘a gay man’ or ‘a lesbian woman’ or […] Is that homophobic?”7 she redirects the source of the issue to naming someone’s identity, rather than her complicity. When Nicole asks what is wrong with “lesbian woman,” she deliberately ignores that, here, the use of the word “lesbian” moves beyond descriptive: the tone and the intent becomes homophobic. Suddenly, through deflection, the discussion is not about what Nicole did, but instead her feigned confusion about what may or may not be construed as homophobia. In attempting to debate whether or not “lesbian” is a slur, she tacitly demonstrates that, to her, it is.
While Michael Lovelock argues “reality TV has opened up a space in the mainstream media, in a way rarely seen in other cultural forms, for making legible how queer selves must take shape in a heteronormative world,” I contend that this has not actually happened. It is precisely the highly edited nature of reality TV that permits producers to edit out possible on-camera instances of homophobia.8 Indeed, the luxury real estate scene in Selling Sunset sells heteronormativity: just as Chrishell is the only openly queer cast member, so too do the agents only sell detached homes for families or “bachelor pads” for millionaire men. If, as Martin F. Manalansan writes, archives “are constituted by these atmospheric states of material and affective disarray and the narratives spun from them,” I thus understand Selling Sunset as the first official, authoritative archive that legitimizes and consists of the show itself, and Instagram as an emergent alternative (queer) archive of affective disarray that reveals the limits of representational politics as it pertains to queerness.9 That is, Chrishell might be a queer person “represented” on the show, but her very presence has not lessened Nicole’s homophobia, as we’re taught that representation can do, nor has it led other cast members to understand why their defense of Nicole is also homophobic.
We never really see explicit or implicit homophobic interactions directed at Chrishell or G Flip: this absence signals producers’ understanding that capturing any such moments on camera would be bad for the brand. Now that Pride has gone corporate, queer allyship is profitable.10 Presumably, even a largely straight audience would object to onscreen homophobia in its various manifestations. Jodi Melamed writes that “forms of humanity win their rights, enter into representation, or achieve a voice at the same moment that the normative model captures and incorporates them as […] diversity (neoliberal multiculturalism).”11 Selling Sunset as the “official” archive thus prioritizes queer representation for its own cultural capital; Instagram as archive creates an assemblage to show how such priorities fail. Instagram fills in the gaps, at once augmenting the “real” of reality TV and further undercutting what is discovered to not be “real.” It is also the starting point of a conversation that arguably would have not otherwise happened on-screen, thus catalyzing an “entry” of homophobia into the official archive of Selling Sunset and expanding the prior sanitized, edited limits on “reality.”
Using the archive as a framework therefore reveals reality TV’s limitations. Robert Vosloo notes that “the archive can also be used as a broader metaphor or concept that relates to the body of knowledge produced about the past”—all seven seasons of Selling Sunset act as an enclosed yet porous space containing information about the cast and their lives.12 Netflix’s interface makes this archive easy to access and examine: it does not take a lot of effort to rewatch a specific scene in a specific episode.13 Yet because this archive is created through the decisions of producers, editors, and other crew, certain scenes do not make it into the body of work understood to constitute Selling Sunset. Though Vosloo remarks that the archive is “but always marked by the openness to the future,” Jacques Derrida notes that, at the same time, “[there] is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside” (emphasis in original).14 Instagram illuminates the outside of Selling Sunset’s archival boundaries. Placing Instagram comments—receipts—in conversation with Selling Sunset, by literally being discussed on camera, reveals that “[by] incorporating the knowledge deployed in reference to it, the archive augments itself, engrosses itself, it gains in auctoritas. But in the same stroke it loses the absolute and meta-textual authority it might claim to have.”15 Reality TV is no longer the sole barometer for what “reality” is. By appearing on-screen, Instagram comments enrich the existing Selling Sunset archive. Instagram simultaneously expands through fan and cast activity independent of the show.
The onscreen reveal of the Instagram comments undermines the show’s claim that all is well, that Chrishell’s queerness has been seamlessly accepted. Since “[archivable] meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives,” homophobia is only legible when it appears on Instagram and is immortalized in that alternate archive through the screenshot.16 Homophobia finally becomes intelligible through this process, demonstrating the extent to which “the archive is embedded in a politics of power.”17 The democracy of opinion on Instagram, made powerful by its nature as a virtual public, politicizes even the short comment shown above, because it establishes the previously-unknown limitations of an existing archive. I aim here not to glorify Instagram but rather to show how its revelatory capacity can lead to a discussion of how homophobia can be institutionally sidelined. Making homophobia public demonstrates that mere representation of Chrishell as a queer woman in the archive of Selling Sunset is an incomplete picture, the contours of which create a “narrative of exclusion” politically.18
Let’s turn to the substance of the conversation. Tan mentions an “online spat,” which prompts Nicole to ask: “Are— Are you talking about her […] implying that I’m homophobic in private?”19 This question implies that quietly harboring homophobic beliefs is somehow worse than acting on them. For Nicole, it is difficult to conceive that ignoring a homophobic statement is, in itself, homophobic—that bystanding cannot also be homophobic. She goes on to say that “someone wrote a comment that said something to the effect of, ‘Oh I was hoping that I wouldn’t see that lesbian woman. I hope she was back in Australia and not on our TV screen, um, ‘but nicole you look really great.’ So I said, ‘Thank you.’ Honestly, it’s so ridiculous, I’m like, ‘what am I […] next week, I’ll be a racist animal abuser?’”20 Her explanation understands homophobia as a personality trait or immutable identity, rather than a feeling deliberately enacted in some way: the very inaction she describes, as well as subsequent deflection, serves as the basis for the simultaneous claim that she is not homophobic and that if she is—well, what a crazy accusation! Homophobia is something evil, abstracted, violent, done by other people. Accusing someone of being a homophobe is seen as worse than accusing them of having done something homophobic, collapsing the two characterizations together to minimize what was said in the first place. It is, as she says, “a very dangerous and reckless thing to call someone,” necessitating the ultimate defense: “And she— [Chrishell] doesn’t think I’m homophobic.”21 Here the politics of representation work to minimize what has occurred. Nicole seeks Chrishell’s validation here to neutralize the accusations, ignoring the irony of asking for forgiveness from the sole queer person who was also the original target.
Chelsea’s interjection echoes the Instagram user who replied to the “lesbian chick” comment, documenting the problem in the “official” show archive:
When somebody identifies Chrishell through her sexuality in a derogatory way, and then you comment back to it, you’re basically cosigning that message. I would never respond to anything that— that shows any type of discrimination or prejudice ever. But you saying thank you, and we got so many eyeballs watching us constantly, is basically saying … [claps hands] to your comment. … I would have responded ‘Thank you for your comment towards me, but there will be no type of homophobia or prejudice on my page.’22
Throughout the series, Chelsea remains somewhat of an outsider, both because of her race and her firm boundaries between work and home. Presumably because she is marginalized herself, she is more inclined to defend another marginalized member of the cast. Notably, she also attempts to mobilize Tan, a gay man, to speak out against the homophobia Chrishell experiences. Chelsea’s explanation makes one wonder why this conversation made it onto the show in the first place. Perhaps, cynically, for drama and clicks, since Chrishell and Nicole’s exchange is the latest episode in their long-standing dislike of each other. But we can also read Nicole’s doubling down—“is […] is that someone saying lesbian […] Is that homophobic? I literally am asking that”—as a last-ditch attempt to control what will make it into the show’s archive, an attempt to neutralize and reframe what many others have explained.23 Instagram receipts create a counter-archive, in part because users are not necessarily accountable to anyone. Their motivations, however complicated, cannot be corralled. The intrusion of the Instagram archive yields an exchange like this one:
Chrishell: Listen, if you’re gonna literally go to homophobic people and cheer them on because they hate me for that reason, that is hate, Nicole.
Nicole: That’s not what I was doing. […] I understand how it looks now after—24
The Instagram archive forces the “what it looks like now” discussion. Even though Chrishell does not get the apology she deserves, let alone a comprehensive understanding from cast members about why this incident is indeed homophobic, what happened is at the very least on record for the Netflix audience.25
Is Selling Sunset thus an archive for the viewers? For cast members? Or for producers? Like other reality TV shows, its commitment to “reality” makes it for an audience—at least some of it has to be “real” for the show to be plausible—while its narrowness satisfies producers who may not want to start culture wars. One wonders whether producers and crew did not anticipate Chrishell’s response to the Instagram comments, let alone those of others. It is possible that this incident’s potential for drama outweighed the deeper dynamics at play. Indeed, it is also possible that the Selling Sunset archive may have been compelled to include this conflict in order to control it. Attempting to anticipate an audience’s desires is a tricky thing in the shadow of the Instagram archive, which proliferates as fast as someone can type and post. Its public nature makes it nearly impossible to control who will comment what and when.
Using Instagram comments as receipts creates proof of things that cannot be mentioned on camera, or are cut entirely in post-production. It can allow stars like Chrishell to advocate for themselves more effectively. Formally, social media receipts create an interesting problem for reality TV: social media is a site for disputes, a place where cast members can tell their story or clarify statements. It documents what might not be included or permitted in the official narrative of the reality TV archive. Consequently, it has the ability to change power dynamics between crew and cast, as well as cast and consumer public. Social media, as much as it can help boost the profiles of cast members and affect ratings or views, also presents a problem for the medium, because now that cast members can discuss documented off-camera incidents, the locus of the drama may no longer just be situations manufactured for and on camera, but also those for which cast members can provide receipts. What will this mean for reality TV moving forward? Perhaps shows will be structured differently, or perhaps contracts will be stricter. In any case, the conversation in the reunion for season seven demonstrates a deeper level of “reality” that extends beyond cut scenes or scripting. It has partially undone institutional control over the show, introducing elements hitherto absent from the Selling Sunset archive.
As Manalansan writes, “mess is a way into a queering of the archive that involves not a cleaning up but rather a spoiling and cluttering of the neat normative configurations and patterns that seek to calcify lives and experiences.” We can read Instagram as mess: unscripted, unruly, an archive that users continually expand—a reflection of queerness as mess and disruption. That is, rather than the heteronormative camera of reality TV—which requires that women must conform to the aesthetics of straight femininity, which by and large excludes interactions between two people who are not straight—social media not only can bear witness to queer relationships, but also subvert the editing and framing of reality TV, which is self-referential, a closed loop, scripted. In this case, Instagram illuminates Nicole’s behavior. That one archive of social media undermines that of reality TV not only unsettles the latter as a medium (e.g. tightly controlled, nearly scripted, cut, edited, reshot), but also poses problems for the kinds of drama in which the stars find themselves placed and for what accountability looks like for bad behavior on and off screen. Off-screen lives, comments, and behaviors are now recorded in the public archive of Instagram and are, as Chrishell shows us, fair game to litigate on camera. Even if comments get deleted, screenshots live on and can become public. An otherwise unstable archive appears to be more stable than the archive of reality TV.
In an attempt to restore Selling Sunset’s dramatic but not problematic image, Tan asks Chrishell (with a wink and a nod) whether she has tasted Emma’s empanadas.26 She and Emma chuckle and roll their eyes, until Chrishell says: “Let’s be clear, I have had Emma’s empanadas from the freezer. I have not had Emma’s empanada from the nether regions.”27 As the cast members do not recognize the “lesbian chick” debacle as homophobic, they exhibit further homophobia by entertaining a question presupposing that a queer woman must be sleeping with her female friends. Of course, Tan asks Chrishell this question, not Emma: as the queer woman, it is presumed that Chrishell would be the one to initiate sexual activity, while also implying that queer female sexuality “is simply another form of female ‘homosocial’ bonding.”28 Chrishell becomes hypersexual while her sexuality is erased. Tan’s question is at once dismissive—Adrienne Rich writes that “[if] we think of heterosexuality as the natural emotional and sensual inclination for women, lives such as these are seen as deviant, as pathological, or as emotionally and sensually deprived. Or, in more recent and permissive jargon, they are banalized as ‘life styles’”29—and rooted in an understanding of queer female sexuality as predatory. Lesbian scholars have written of the history of the lesbian, in particular, as predator,30 a figure who hunts down innocent straight women against their will. Asking Chrishell this question thus plays into harmful stereotypes, misunderstanding her sexuality and who she actually is. Here, queerness, femininity, and gender are collapsed into the negative “lesbian,” a historically mistrusted figure evoked to delegitimize Chrishell’s platonic and romantic relationships. The cast members of Selling Sunset, in a way, tell on themselves: assuming that Chrishell wants to sleep with Emma is a projection of common heterosexual understandings of desire for a woman, often seen through a prism of aggression. Lesbians and queer women who also sleep with women must seemingly operate in this same way. Heteronormativity attempts to flatten complex queer female desire and relationships.
Chrishell’s queerness destabilizes the previous airlock of heterosexuality—no one, not even Chrishell herself, saw it coming.31 We can read her queerness as the origin for the Instagram archive’s intrusion. Like other marginalized identities, reality TV does not really know how to deal with gay people—unless it is a show whose theme specifically centers gay identity—especially not shows with largely heterosexual casts working in the overwhelmingly heterosexual industry of LA luxury real estate. Hence we witness cast members poke and prod both Chrishell and Emma over their close friendship, sexually charged banter believed to be progressive rather than reductive or offensive. The filmed interaction among the cast members on the reunion should suggest to viewers and critics that queer representation is at best a false victory, and at worst working against any kind of queer liberatory project. Relentless cultural focus on whether gay people are represented in any medium leaves overlooked questions about whether that representation has changed people’s minds or brought further material security for gay people. I challenge the notion that “including” Chrishell—a beautiful white woman who is of course palatable to a mass (straight) audience—on Selling Sunset has done much to mitigate the homophobia of viewers. It clearly has not done so for people with whom she has filmed the show for years. And if Chrishell is a target of homophobia, what about other queer people who, due to gendered and racialized differences, might be considered less “palatable” by mass audiences?
What we witness, then, is the complication of an institutional, funded archive by another that has democratized the ability to share an opinion. We also witness the limits of “queer representation” when it occurs in a setting it’s not supposed to. The reunion yields twin pyrrhic victories here: Selling Sunset has more drama for next season and it answered some questions for which social media users likely wanted answers. Chrishell knows much more about her cast members and appears vindicated for her hostility to Nicole. Reality TV, as a medium, may find that it can benefit from collision with or absorption of the Instagram archive, even if it means revealing that queer “representation” has done little for Chrishell, and still less for us.
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Endnotes
- Selling Sunset, season 7, episode 12, “The Reunion,” produced by Adam DiVello, aired November 15, 2023, https://www.netflix.com/watch/81727126.
- Tempy246, “Nicole at It Again Showing Why She Shouldn’t Be on the Show.,” Reddit Post, R/SellingSunset, October 5, 2023, www.reddit.com/r/SellingSunset/comments/170p095/nicole_at_it_again_showing_why_she_shouldnt_be_on/.
- Daniel Spielberger, “Chrishell Stause Is Living Her Best Queer Life,” Them, May 18, 2023, https://www.them.us/story/chrishell-stause-selling-sunset-season-6-interview.
- Selling Sunset, season 5, episode 11, “The Reunion,” produced by Adam DiVello, aired May 6, 2022, https://www.netflix.com/watch/81608197.
- Tempy246, “Nicole at It Again Showing Why She Shouldn’t Be on the Show.”
- In fact, the comment thread has since been deleted. See: “Season 7 Is Coming to You November 3rd!! Mark Your Calendars and Get That Popcorn Ready! #sellingsunset #season7 Dress: @lovenookie… | Instagram,” accessed April 30, 2024,https://www.instagram.com/p/CyBYqoDruTw/.
- “The Reunion.” (Season 7, Episode 12, to avoid confusion since both episodes have the same name.)
- Michael Lovelock, Reality TV and Queer Identities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 77.
- Martin F. Manalansan IV, “The ‘Stuff’ of Archives: Mess, Migration, and Queer Lives,” Radical History Review 2014, no. 120 (October 1, 2014): 94–95, https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2703742.
- “Opinion | As More Companies Wade in, It’s Time to Ask: Is Pride for Sale?,” Washington Post, accessed April 23, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/opinions/pride-for-sale/.
- Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism, 1 online resource (xxiv, 274 pages) vols., Difference Incorporated (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 14, http://site.ebrary.com/id/10531203.
- Robert Vosloo, “Archiving Otherwise: Some Remarks on Memory and Historical Responsibility.,” Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae 31, no. 2 (2005): 380.
- C.f. the difficulties one would encounter when trying to do the same thing with traditional cable TV.
- Vosloo, “Archiving Otherwise: Some Remarks on Memory and Historical Responsibility,” 387; Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Religion and Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 11.
- Derrida and Prenowitz, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, 68.
- Derrida and Prenowitz, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, 18.
- Vosloo, “Archiving Otherwise: Some Remarks on Memory and Historical Responsibility,” 390.
- Vosloo, “Archiving Otherwise: Some Remarks on Memory and Historical Responsibility,” 383.
- “The Reunion.” (Season 7, Episode 12.)
- “The Reunion.” (Season 7, Episode 12.)
- “The Reunion.” (Season 7, Episode 12.)
- “The Reunion.” (Season 7, Episode 12.)
- “The Reunion.” (Season 7, Episode 12.)
- “The Reunion.” (Season 7, Episode 12.)
- Later, Jason says “I know she’s not [homophobic]. However, I— I think it’s absolutely inappropriate for her to say ‘thank you’ on […] on what I just saw there. I don’t think that you processed that.” He casts Nicole’s response as a “difficult trait,” as though Nicole’s words are an aberration rather than deliberate. See “The Reunion.” (Season 7, Episode 12.)
- Emma owns an empanada company. See “The Reunion.” (Season 7, Episode 12)
- “The Reunion.” (Season 7, Episode 12)
- Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture, Gender and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 11.
- Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985 (W. W. Norton & Company, 1986), 56.
- Sherrie Inness, The Lesbian Menace (1997), 6, as well as chapter 2, “‘Malevolent, neurotic, and tainted’: The Lesbian Menace in Popular Women’s College Fiction.”
- Charmaine Patterson, “Chrishell Stause ‘Definitely Still Thought [She] Was Straight’ When She Met G Flip, Despite Kissing Friends,” People, February 2, 2023, https://people.com/home/chrishell-stause-definitely-still-thought-i-was-straight-when-she-met-g-flip-despite-kissing-friends/.
Cassandra Luca