CHAPTER SIXTEEN AND THE WINNER IS … AUTHENTICITY WORK AND GENDER IN REALITY TV LIESBET VAN ZOONEN AND MERVI PANTTI The popularity of many different kinds of reality television has been identified as rooted in audiences’ pleasure in distinguishing the real from the fake, and the authentic from the performance. In one of the first audience studies about Big Brother, German scholar Lothar Mikos and his colleagues (2000, 171-172) found that “what is real and what is staged produced much of the talk about the program” (translation by the authors). Similarly, the study of British reality audiences led Annette Hill (2005, 78) to conclude “whether people are authentic or not in the way they handle themselves in the Big Brother house, or on holiday in Ibiza is a matter for audiences to debate and critically examine on an everyday basis.” Liesbet van Zoonen and Minna Aslama (2006, 92) conclude on the basis of a systematic review of audience studies about Big Brother that “the performance of self … is also crucial to understanding Big Brother’s audience appeal, especially in the form of assessing authenticity and realness.” Many cultural theorists writing about reality television have articulated the audience search for authenticity to postmodern culture that no longer provides collectively anchored guidelines for individual fulfillment and the “good” life. Audiences, at loss about their everyday lives and identities in postmodernity, would find the necessary examples to explore and to negotiate in reality television (cf. van Zoonen 2001). The reception of reality television, therefore, always contains an element of moral reflection and judgment, implicit in some reality genres, explicit in others, for instance those about good parenting (e.g. McIIveny 2008; Krijnen 2008). Although academic reflection and research on reality television has proliferated into an amount and diversity similar to that of reality television