Laura Grindstaff

Research Interests

• Culture: cultural studies, popular culture, film and television, gender/race/class
• Feminist Studies: gender, sexuality, race/class, media and popular culture

Current Research Projects

Laura Grindstaff came to UC Davis 12 years ago from the University of Pennsylvania. She teaches in the areas of popular culture, cultural sociology, gender and society, and field methods. Her research focuses broadly on American popular culture and its role in constructing gender, race, and class relations. Her first book, The Money Shot, is an ethnographic account of daytime television talkshows. Based on interviews and participant observation behind-the-scenes, it explores how the production process works to transform the private experiences of "ordinary"people into extraordinary public performances, and what these performances tell us about class inequality in the US. Currently she is currently writing a second book, on cheerleading in American culture. In this book, she uses cheerleading as a vehicle to examine how and why young people embrace particular cultural scripts regarding gender and sexuality, why they participate in cheerleading when other sports are open to them, and current tensions between the "feminine" realm of cheerleading and the "masculine" realm of sport. Dr. Grindstaff is also publishing a series of articles on reality television, focusing on the constituency most neglected in current studies of reality tv: character-participants. Drawing on in-depth interviews, she explores why people desire television exposure, the contradictions between expectation and reality that participants experience, and the larger sociological implications of the rise of ordinary celebrity. She argues that reality programs, like daytime talk shows before them, are a form of self-service media, and that such media point to an important transformation in public discourse; specifically, they indicate a movement away from the concept of public sphere per se toward more a dramaturgical notion of public stage.

Selected Publications

• “From Jerry Springer to Jersey Shore: The Cultural Politics of Class in/on US Reality Programming,” in Beverly Skeggs and Helen Wood (eds.), Real Class: Ordinary People and Reality Television Across National Spaces. British Film Institute. Forthcoming Spring 2012.
• “Hegemonic Masculinity on the Sidelines of Sport,” with Emily West. Sociology Compass (2011) 1-23. DOI: 0.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00409.x (Online ISSN: 1751-9020).

• Hall, John, Laura Grindstaff, and Ming-Cheng Lo (eds). 2010. Handbook of Cultural Sociology. Routledge International Handbook Series. London/New York: Routledge.
• Grindstaff, Laura and Emily West. 2010. "Hands on Hips, Smiles on Lips! Gender, Race, and the Performance of 'Spirit' in Cheerleading," Text & Performance Quarterly 30 (2): 143-162.
• Grindstaff, Laura. 2009. "Self-Serve Celebrity: The Production of Ordinariness and the Ordinariness of Production in Reality Television." Pp. 72-86 in Vicki Mayer, Amanda Lotz, and John Thornton Caldwell (eds.) Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries. London/New York: Routledge.
• Grindstaff, Laura and Joseph Turow. 2006. "Video Cultures: Television Sociology in the 'New TV' Age," Annual Review of Sociology 32: 103-125.
• Grindstaff, Laura and Emily West. 2006. "Cheerleading and the Gendered Politics of Sport," Social Problems 54 (4): 500-518.
• Grindstaff, Laura. 2002. The Money Shot: Trash, Class, and the Making of TV Talk Shows. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.