Body Politics and Intersectional Representations of Women in Finnish Reality-Television Series Iholla

This paper studies representations of women and women’s bodies in multi-dimensional intersections. An intersectional approach analyzes the complexity produced by different social categories. The differences are manifested in the human body, and by studying the representations of bodies the social construction of the categories can be examined. The paper approaches the politics of body and representations through an empirical study of a Finnish television series. ‘On the skin’ (Iholla) reality-TV portrays a young woman with a conservative religious background as she struggles with her identity and the different expectations and norms of religious community and secular society. In the TV-show, the cultural conventions related to gender, the female body, and religiosity are made visible – as are the practices of exclusion and inclusion leading to multi-dimensional inequalities. Reality-TV allows emphasizing, re-interpreting, and deconstructing established understandings of these categories. The show can also be seen as producing models for new types of political agency for women.