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“I Live A Model Life, Now I’M Ready To Be A Top Wife”: Stereotypical Representations Of Black Women In Reality Television, Joy C. Enyinnaya

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Stereotypical representations of Black women have endured throughout various forms of media for decades, with one of the most recent platforms being reality television programming. The theory of encoding and decoding posit dominant stereotypes are key in television encoding. Using critical discourse analysis, this paper demonstrates that the dominant ideologies in the eleventh season of The Real Housewives of Atlanta are social class norms and negative depictions of Black women. I present evidence that RHOA continues to reinforce upper-class ideologies while perpetuating the Jezebel, Sapphire and the Strong Black woman stereotypes. I also identify a correlation with the strong Black …