Hunter Hargraves Department of Cinema and Television Arts California State University, Fullerton Over twenty-five years into contemporary reality television’s legacy as a cost-effective and popular genre, the genre has invited a “reckoning” auguring around the relationship to its labor and its fandoms, reaffirming what Eve Sedgwick might have identified as a paranoid reading of the genre that spotlights its reflexivity, negativity, and investment in exposure. This talk tests whether Sedgwick’s counterpoint to the hermeneutics of suspicion—a process of reparative reading—can…