A-Infos (en) France, UCL AL #371 - Politics - Loana Petrucciani: Reality TV, Surveillance and Punishment (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

On March 25, the death of Loana Petrucciani was announced in the press. 
While some articles focused on the sexist violence that accompanied her 
public life, few contextualized this violence or offered in-depth 
analyses of the issue. ---- Loana Petrucciani was the first major 
reality TV star, at a time when the format was unprecedented. Watching 
episodes of Loft Story, and in particular the prime-time show of the 
first season[1], reveals the lack of experience with the format at the 
time, even among television professionals: the barely manageable latency 
period when the housemates arrived on set, the chaotic set design by 
Benjamin Castaldi interrupted by the "unpredictable nature of live 
television" that could have been anticipated... All these indicators 
reveal the absence of established practices and the lack of experience 
of an entire society, upon which a television concept was introduced 
without any possibility of anticipating its effects.

The contrast with the professional contestants of today's reality TV 
shows is striking. By participating in the first season of Loft Story, 
they did not benefit from the professional experience of their peers, in 
addition to bearing the brunt of the fledgling productions that, 
moreover, had little interest in ensuring the well-being of the 
participants.

A pervasive voyeurism
In this particularly isolating context, the contestants had to rely 
solely on their existing social and psychological resources to cope with 
the unknown of the "aftermath," which was all the more brutal because 
the closed-off format of the Loft prevented them from adjusting to their 
growing notoriety, thus exacerbating social inequalities to an extreme 
degree.

This context also amplified the sexist mechanisms at work in the staging 
of women's bodies: the presence of cameras throughout the day allows for 
the scrutiny of the slightest deviations from expectations and blurs the 
lines between the private and the public. This blurring of boundaries is 
not specific to reality television: it is part of a broader trend of 
staging intimacy in the media sphere, in programs that blend 
biographical testimony, production team intervention, and the staging of 
psychologists called upon for advice[2], but also in more insidious 
institutional structures that make social assistance conditional on the 
most vulnerable members of society being exposed to their agents. The 
television format is only one aspect of this global voyeurism, which 
normalizes self-presentation for access to support.

The exceptional nature of season 1 of Loft Story lies not in the 
intrusion of cameras into the lives of the participants, but rather, on 
the one hand, in the sheer size of the audience that became participants 
in this process, and on the other hand, in the artificial separation of 
the contestants from their environment, depriving them of any control 
over the narrative of their lives by depriving them of the information 
necessary to tailor their presentation to the public. In conditions that 
have become extremely blurred between intimacy and performance, the 
contestants most accustomed to these intrusions become the most 
vulnerable: those who have been victims of violence in their private 
lives and childhood become prime candidates. This is what fascinated 
viewers about Loana Petrucciani and undoubtedly contributed to her 
victory: she appears human, sensitive, far from the stereotypical image 
of the bimbo expected by television viewers; she touches them with her 
sincerity, and it is this sincerity that seals her fate.

Loana Petrucciani cannot know it, but from the moment she enters the 
competition, she is condemned to endure contradictory demands, even in 
her private life, splashed across the newspapers: she is expected to 
strictly adhere to beauty standards, but she must not exploit them or 
use them for personal gain; She is meant to be the object of fantasies, 
detached from reality, but when the public learns that she has entrusted 
her daughter to care, she is accused of being a bad mother. She is asked 
to expose her life, but with each appearance, her palpable distress and 
the poverty from which she has never escaped are met, at best, with 
pity, and at worst, with contempt and mockery. While after leaving Loft 
Story, Jean-Edouard fades into obscurity, and Steevy becomes Steevy 
Boulay and appears as a commentator, Loana Petrucciani remains Loana, 
infantilized and scorned, punished for not being able to publicly 
conform to one of the two stereotypical tropes of femininity: nurturing 
or being the object of fantasies.

Establish and exploit the norm
From the very beginning of the show, Loana Petrucciani's image has been 
relentlessly exploited and commented upon: her distress and poor health 
are met with disgust and raise questions; the media's trial of her 
abandonment of her daughter is endlessly repeated; and her visible 
exhaustion, in the face of the mistreatment and trauma she publicly 
endures, is condemned. Her suicide attempts are treated as tragedies and 
the ultimate proof of her instability, never as the only escape left to 
someone deprived of her life for decades. Her attempts to limit the 
sharing of her private life after the show ended, to protect her medical 
information, and her repeated refusals to capitalize on her image, 
interspersed with attempts to publicly testify about her life, are 
interpreted as further proof of her instability, never as attempts to 
regain control of her public image in a context that completely 
dispossessed her in her absence. Her coming out as bisexual is an 
excellent example: the announcement of her attraction to women, followed 
by her relationship with a woman, without explicitly stating this sexual 
orientation, and at a time when her body seemed too far removed from 
societal beauty standards, prevented media attention from a male 
gaze[3]that would have turned her back into an object of fantasy. By 
coming out under these circumstances, Loana Petrucciani made it very 
difficult to monetize her sexual orientation; she is therefore rendered 
invisible in almost all articles following her death, including those 
from activist circles.

Loana Petrucciani's story reveals much about the workings of the culture 
industry, highlighting its dual function: reinforcing oppressive norms 
while simultaneously exploiting them, finding in them the primary source 
of its profits. An industry that, like others, exploits to the point of 
death, and that continues to normalize the punishment of the most 
oppressed classes, still perceived as transgressive in the face of 
contradictory injunctions that leave them no escape.

Marco Pagot

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[1]Available on YouTube.

[2]Dominique Mehl, *La télévision de l'intimité*, Paris, Seuil, 1996.

[3]The male gaze is a concept designating the cisheterosexual male 
perspective imposed in the dominant culture.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Loana-Petrucciani-Telerealite-surveiller-et-punir
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