Reality television as a gendered moral laboratory: Mediated moral judgment and the symbolic reproduction of gender norms

Abstract

Reality television has become an increasingly important arena through which audiences publicly negotiate questions of intimacy, fidelity, and gender. While previous research has examined how dating reality programs represent gender and sexuality, less attention has been devoted to the interpretative processes through which audiences employ mediated narratives when constructing moral judgments. Addressing this gap, the present study investigates how young Romanian adults use the dating reality program Insula Iubirii as a symbolic resource for evaluating infidelity and negotiating gender norms. Drawing on ten semi-structured interviews with Romanian participants aged 18–35, the study adopts an interpretivist qualitative design and employs reflexive thematic analysis to examine how audiences transform mediated narratives into everyday moral evaluations. The findings identify three interconnected analytical levels. First, participants rely on distinct gendered moral logics, interpreting male infidelity primarily as behaviour and female infidelity more frequently as evidence of moral character. Second, these asymmetrical evaluations are sustained through gendered moral vocabularies that assign different forms of responsibility and legitimacy to comparable acts of betrayal. Third, participants use Insula Iubirii as a shared moral script through which broader questions of trust, fidelity, and gender are discussed. Building on these findings, the article proposes the concept of the gendered moral laboratory, conceptualizing reality television as a symbolic media environment in which audiences construct mediated moral judgments. The framework explains how shared moral scripts, mediated moral judgment, and gendered moral logics interact in the symbolic reproduction (and occasional contestation) of gender norms. The study contributes to research on gender, media sociology, and mediated morality while extending debates on dating reality television to the underexplored Romanian context.